The Business Challenge: Migrating from Citrix XenApp 6.5 to XenDesktop 7.9 Platinum
Migrating from one Citrix version to another is complicated enough, but Ballard Spahr also has attorneys and other users who require access to applications from all over the world. They connect from remote offices, homes, hotels, even airplanes. Because they use various methods to connect to the internet, the connection quality is also variable.
The IT team wanted to achieve two things to assist in a smooth transition to Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 Platinum:
- Knowing that end user experience issues can cause delays in adoption, they wanted a proactive monitoring and troubleshooting product that would help them anticipate issues and resolve them quickly
- They need to be able to track adoption to Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 Platinum
The Solution: As a Citrix Platinum customer, Ballard Spahr has access to the free utilities available to Citrix Platinum customers. In fact, they had Citrix Director and Citrix Insight Center installed, but found that these utilities, while helpful, are not designed for enterprise monitoring, management and troubleshooting the Citrix environment. They didn’t provide the visibility into Citrix, end user experience, and the supporting infrastructure. In addition, there was no capability to manage end user experience or gauge the adoption rates of end users.
The Ballard Spahr IT Team selected Goliath Technologies because of its capability to preemptively alert on, and resolve, issues that might negatively affect end users and slow adoption. This is accomplished through advanced threshold-based alerting (See Image Below), which will notify IT, in real time, if a condition exists that may cause an end user connection issue, logon slowness or session latency. In addition, Goliath had out-of-the-box reports—called “End User Connection” reports—which can be run on a scheduled basis to show the frequency and length of user sessions. This gave the IT team the ability to see how often users were logging on to the Citrix 7.9 environment versus the 6.5 environment, thereby gauging adoption.
The Outcome: The IT team at Ballard Spahr now has a proactive monitoring and management tool for their Citrix XenApp 6.5 environment, and new Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 deployment that is being utilized to reduce end user experience issues that might slow adoption of Citrix XenDesktop 7.9. In addition, they have daily reporting that keeps them abreast of adoption rates of the new Citrix deployment.
