How We Did IT

Law Firm Reduces Citrix Support Tickets by 60%

“We reduced Citrix ticket escalations by 60%”

– Pete Chim, Systems Engineer

Infrastructure

Citrix XenApp

Challenge

A national law firm has attorneys and staff attempting to access Citrix delivered applications from all over the world. Because they use various methods to connect to the internet, the connection quality is variable and Citrix monitoring and troubleshooting tools are essential. The firm has users connecting from remote offices, homes, hotels, and even airplanes, which can result in connection and latency issues. This leads to an increase in the number of end users contacting the help desk for advice on improving the quality of service, even when the cause was a low-quality hotel or airline network.

The majority of these Citrix tickets were escalated to their Citrix Architects, who are responsible for deploying Citrix but continually were being pulled to respond to end user tickets as the help desk didn’t have the knowledge or tools to resolve end user complaints related to “Citrix is Slow” complaints. In addition, they did not have the objective evidence in the form of reports or documentation to prove root cause of the problem to those end users.

Solution

The IT team needed a Citrix End User Experience Monitoring & Troubleshooting solution that would allow them to do two things:

1. Offer them granular visibility root cause of slowness when using Citrix and Citrix delivered applications.
2. Provide the help desk with an easy to use troubleshooting tool that would empower non-Citrix experts to troubleshoot and potentially resolve end user performance issues. And, if the issue could not be resolved because it was solely related to end user behavior talk to the end user provide documentation to prove root cause was either a result of their actions or their connection into Citrix.

As a Citrix Platinum customer, this law firm did have Citrix Director deployed in their Citrix XenApp environment. As with most free utilities, these are designed to provide some metrics but it didn’t offer the broad and deep visibility necessary to anticipate, troubleshoot and document Citrix end user experience issues. Citrix Director, beyond being inadequate from a Citrix monitoring and troubleshooting perspective, was too confusing to be useful to the help desk staff.

After looking at several Citrix monitoring and troubleshooting vendors, the firm decided to do a proof of concept with Goliath Technologies. They discovered that Goliath gave—in real-time—very deep and complete visibility into the Citrix end user experience. Of particular value was its ability to quickly identify the root cause of a remote user’s issue—whether it is the connection, stage of the logon sequence, or another program competing for network resources, such as YouTube, Netflix, or a gaming site. With Goliath’s Citrix monitoring and troubleshooting solution, they can see, in real time, if a user’s slow connection is due to internet network quality or a competing program as seen below.

Results

Armed with Goliath’s Citrix monitoring and troubleshooting solution, the IT team was poised to integrate it into their internal processes so they could improve the end user experience through faster response times, improved communication, and an empowered help desk. Pete Chim, Systems Engineer, put a checklist in their ServiceNow knowledge base so the help desk staff could use Goliath’s Citrix monitoring and troubleshooting to conduct a series of checks against this knowledge base when a ticket was opened from an end user complaining about Citrix slowness or disconnects. Now, the help desk staff resolves issues more easily on their own, which has reduced the need to escalate to Citrix engineers by an estimated 60%.