Technical Review: Examining Goliath’s Early Warning System for Citrix, VMware, & RDS

Technical Review: Examining Goliath’s Early Warning System for Citrix, VMware, & RDS

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Technical Review: Examining Goliath’s Early Warning System for Citrix, VMware, & RDS

The Goliath Application Availability Monitor is an industry-first software that provides organizations of all sizes with an early warning system, alerting IT administrators of access and performance issues with business-critical applications before their end users ever attempt to logon.

IT professionals everywhere can now receive customizable alert notifications and warnings to exact failure points in the workflow for desktop virtualization platforms like Citrix, VMware or RDS. To proactively monitor the availability of Citrix XenApp & Xen Desktop, VMware Horizon View, and Microsoft RDS effectively, the Application Availability Monitor must confirm that the applications will be available and that the entire delivery infrastructure and workflow are executing properly. This is all made possible by the Goliath Virtual User – a small-footprint technology that automates the process of logging on to Citrix/VMware Horizon/RDS to confirm application availability, and that the workflow is operating properly. The Goliath Virtual User is deployed on-premises or remotely (wherever end users are located), automatically logs on like a real user to confirm applications will launch and is configured exactly like a real user with the same permissions within Active Directory.

Below is a depiction of the Goliath Virtual User in action – automatically initiating a connection to the application and in doing so confirming that the entire application delivery infrastructure and workflow are working properly to launch applications:

confirm the application delivery infrastructure

Screenshot Analysis

When each phase of the logon process for Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, VMware Horizon View or Microsoft RDS is executed by the Application Availability Monitor, a screenshot is taken to provide visual evidence and objective proof of logon success or logon failure. This allows IT administrators to see the potential impact that typically elusive items like disclaimers, error messages, secondary authentication, and multiple launch sequences may have on the outcomes of the logon process. This provides objective evidence of the root cause of the logon issue that can be shared with management, vendors, and counterparts to end finger pointing and put permanent fix actions in place.

As illustrated below, you can quickly drill down to investigate failures right from the application availability dashboard by clicking on the magnifying glass. In just three steps, you can then see where the logon issues occurred during the logon process and what the issue was:

screenshot analytics

  1. In this case, failure occurred at the launch stage (marked by the ‘1’)
  2. The screenshot (2) proves that the application failed to launch and shows the root cause of the Citrix workflow and application launch failure as being the result of a licensing problem
  3. By navigating to the “Details” or “Analytics” section (3), we can see that the launch failed at the point of verifying that Internet Explorer launched

Scheduling and Automation

Unlike other technologies, the Goliath Application Availability Monitor has built-in logon scheduling functionality. This provides an easy to use, templated approach to constructing launch sequences. This gets you scheduled in minutes – not hours – without the need for custom scripting or recording sequences. The Application Availability Monitor can be scheduled to run automatically and continuously across multiple applications, determining logon performance across different locations and/or different types of users as needed. For example, it can run throughout the day so your IT staff will know immediately if/where there is a problem and at which stage of the process the problem is occurring. Launches can be scheduled to execute, for example, before Doctors or Nurses start their shift so that healthcare IT can be alerted to issues before these end users feel the impact of an application/desktop performance issue.

Below is an example of the scheduling display showing the ease of setup and the frequency of launches throughout the day:

scheduling

scheduling #2

Alerting

Alert notifications can be sent immediately if a validation of the workflow fails by email, SNMP, SYSLOG, or to the customer’s ticketing or enterprise monitoring solution. This allows critical uptime and availability information to be delivered prior to end users knowing there is a problem.

Below is an example of the alert notification feature within the scheduling display:

early warning system altering

Deployment

The Application Availability Monitor can be deployed however you desire. You can deploy it on-premises or in the cloud to identify individual, site or geographic application availability issues. Because the logon attempts can be scheduled and remotely deployed, it can be strategically positioned at the location users sign in from to provide visual proof regarding logon success, logon failure or logon slowness from the user’s unique access location. This way, IT admins can diagnose whether issues are location specific or global in nature, providing the help desk with relevant data regarding availability and performance.

This is an illustration of how a deployment is configured for ten remote locations that logon daily to centralized applications hosted in the internal cloud.

proactive deployment architecture for application availability monitor

Remediation

There is also an integrated remediation engine within the Goliath Application Availability Monitor. The remediation engine is customizable; however, it comes with a large number of prebuilt rules geared toward quick, automated resolution and prevention of further issues or complications. For example, a XenApp server could be set into maintenance mode to prevent future failed logon attempts, or key dependencies on role servers could be checked to automate the investigation process.

Below is a screenshot of the remediation feature within the scheduling display:

remediation

Integration with Goliath Performance Monitoring

The Goliath Application Availability Monitor is also fully integrated into the Goliath Performance Monitor. As a result, IT professionals not only can identify application availability issues but also the root cause. Other technologies called “logon simulators” may be able to simply ‘identify’ a logon failure, but without full integration into an enterprise monitoring product, there is no way of identifying why a performance issue occurred. If applications are being monitored individually, they are being gauged separately and may look fine. It is only when executing the fully integrated launch process by multiple users – including remote access, application/desktop availability and the delivery infrastructure – that you not only trigger issues but see contextual, objective evidence of where the root cause of these issues is actually sourced.

Summary

Goliath’s Application Availability Monitor is the only solution available today that proactively gauges logon performance by exercising the entire delivery infrastructure in concert exactly as an end user does. The Goliath Virtual User can do this over the same network using the same profile permissions/setup as the actual end user. The result is an advanced warning system that accurately reports issues, empowering administrators to identify and resolve end user experience issues related to logon initiation and logon duration before productivity is hindered.

The technology can deliver these capabilities through proactive, real-time threshold-based alerts, the live dashboard, detailed drill-downs/screenshots for logon process analysis and rich historical reporting.

Those features, combined with a fast and simple process for deployment, configuration and operation allow organizations to preemptively identify issues before users are impacted. It also enables them to identify where the issue is occurring, pinpoint the root cause and collaborate toward resolution faster than ever before.

Want to see a personalized demo or access a 30-day free trial of
the Goliath Application Availability Monitor? Contact us today!

techinfo@goliathtechnologies.com  |  (855) 465-4284

Separate Troubleshooting Products from Monitoring Utilities

Separate Troubleshooting Products from Monitoring Utilities

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Selecting a Citrix Monitoring Vendor? After doing that often over the last 15 years I Developed These “Litmus Test” Questions To Help

If you have a Citrix environment there will come a time when you have to troubleshoot an issue or two– an obvious understatement. As an IT Administrator and Consultant, I often found my monitoring solution would give me performance metrics but wouldn’t help me troubleshoot the root cause of a performance issue because they just didn’t get enough detail and couldn’t deliver it in a way that allowed me to avoid an issue or objectively prove root cause. Frustrated, I thought of all the missing data, blind spots and failure points and developed a series of 26 questions that would determine, before I purchased a solution, if the vendor could get the specific details and render them in such a way that I would be able to isolate root cause and resolve the issues I had experienced. In other words, IF the vendor WOULD be able to troubleshoot an issue when the time came.

Every monitoring vendor says that they can monitor everything—HDX, Logon Process, End User Experience—but the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details. So, I tell the vendor to put aside the marketing feature presentation and just tell me if they can do the following 26 things. It is in a Yes/No answer form because I want problems avoided or fixed. No credit for “partial” SLA’s in IT.    

Vendor Scorecard: Citrix Troubleshooting XenApp 6.5 – XenDesktop 7.x

Check the Box if This Capability Exists in the Product
Download the Questions Here

Anticipate

  • 1) Can you schedule to automatically confirm Citrix and application availability in production from each and every location users are signing in from before they arrive or attempt to logon without manual management or intervention? Can you do this from all locations simultaneously from a central console?

  • 2) Is there a way to identify an availability issue by site, geography or individual user via live dashboard?

  • 3) Is the tool intelligent enough to identify client-side alerts such as licensing errors, gateway configuration problems, and other endpoint failures that will lead to false positives if not identified?

  • 4) Can you trigger alerts based on thresholds, events, and failures, and then execute automated remediation actions to resolve those problems?

  • 5) Does the solution allow for dynamic grouping and policy assignment to ensure that proactive rules are assigned accordingly upon migration (i.e. hybrid cloud)?

  • 6) Can the solution allow me to know when a system level issue will have an upstream impact on user experience from a single dynamic screen?

  • 7) Can the technology monitor and alert on file level changes, including file/folder growth, cut/copy/paste actions and specific file edits?

Troubleshoot

  • 8) Does the technology have the ability to gather data and analytics from the entire stack so an administrator can determine an end user’s experience and trace that back to the underlying infrastructure element impacting it?

  • 9) Can you see your entire Citrix environment in one graphical view that shows the dependencies and relationship between Citrix & supporting IT elements, so at a glance you can easily identify the location or IT element that is experiencing a performance issue?

  • 10) Can you isolate as the root cause of a logon duration issue and identify root cause regardless of where it manifests from? Some example of this include, Citrix Receiver startup on the endpoint, waiting for session host readiness, policy execution of the specific policy, DNS resolution during the ICA/HDX connection creation, or any of the other 33+ stages?

  • 11) Can you drill into session logon to know how long the domain controller takes to obtain GPOs and determine if they are applicable?

  • 12) Can you troubleshoot the root cause of random consistent slowness and isolate it as an unreliable Wi-Fi connection or available connection speed to the endpoint for Citrix?

  • 13) When troubleshooting can the technology correlate slow ICA Round Trip Time directly to storage performance on a specific datastore, or hypervisor host CPU Ready issues that the session host resides on?

  • 14) Can you analyze and compare logon, connection, and session performance for both on premise and/or cloud workloads to identify and troubleshoot end user experience issues?

  • 15) Does the solution support rapid deployment for environments where cloud bursting is leveraged for temporarily increasing available compute resources?

  • 16) Can the technology provide visibility into ICA Round Trip Time, ICA Latency, Network Latency and session bandwidth available? Can it help to identify the root cause of session slowness as either the network connection, the underlying systems infrastructure performance, or application performance?

  • 17) Does the technology provide me with visibility into user activity via ICA channels and application usage statistics? For example, does it allow me to correlate high Thinwire bandwidth utilization directly to the user watching YouTube from Chrome in session?

  • 18) Can performance counter data from monitored resources be graphically presented, historically trended and analyzed for root cause analyses of performance related issues?

  • 19) Can your solution generate a report of all user’s sessions from the last 6 months? Can it identify if the sessions were active vs idle?

  • 20) Does the technology allow for the visibility to troubelshoot down to the endpoint? This includes performance monitoring, alerting and event log analysis.

  • 21) Can you furnish me with at least two references that will speak to how they used your product to isolate root cause and troubleshoot issues or avoid them completely?

Resolve

  • 22) Can you generate reports to prove that an issue is an infrastructure, resource, or Citrix issue?

  • 23) Can you generate root cause reports that show faults or errors causing application failures, print driver problems, user GPO faults, and configuration problems such that strategic, targeted remediation activities can be initiated?

  • 24) Does the solution provide a comprehensive log (syslog and event log) correlation engine for parsing and analyzing log data to find root-cause?

  • 25) Can you put alert resolution instructions or knowledge base in the product so that level 1 support, when an alert is triggered, can resolve issues usually solved by level 3?

  • 26) Can you implement self-healing, auto remediation actions without customization? Such as restarting a service, killing a process, running a script or application?

Total Score         /26         Vendor Name:

Using these questions and this overall “paper evaluation” process allowed me to make the best recommendations for my clients during my time as a Citrix consultant. The reason for this is that the key is to ensure that vendors are questioned deeply about the way the product will assist in troubleshooting and resolving Citrix end user experience and/or performance issues. This is especially true today as there are a multitude of products on the market with the ability to address XenApp and XenDesktop monitoring requirements.

I know the reference question is old school but I would really suggest you speak with customers who used a vendor’s technology to troubleshoot an issue. As a matter of fact the more references the better, and three is generally the magic number. When you talk to the reference, find out what their specific issue was and how they used the product to determine root cause. Also ask about the support they received with deploying and using the product. Quality of support is as important as functionality in the grand scheme of things. The technical people you work with should be experts in the product and the platforms that you are using the product to monitor.

N-Able Replacement: CPU Inc. Selects Goliath to replace N-able

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N-Able Replacement: CPU Inc. Selects Goliath to replace N-able

Citrix Performance Monitoring to Support Monitoring as a Service Key in Decision

Philadelphia, PA May 12, 2012 – CPU Inc, a service provider and full service computer consulting and services firm, announced today that they have selected Goliath Technologies as their sole solution to monitor and manage their internal, hosted and remote customer environments having previously used N-able.

“We used N-able for several years, but as our business grew and our market evolved so did our needs for monitoring tools, especially Citrix performance monitoring, to support our clients’ ever changing, complex infrastructures,” said Frank Jones, President of CPU. “We needed a product that offered the ability to monitor, analyze and report on the performance of Citrix XenServer, XenApp and XenDesktop at remote customer sites. We evaluated SolarWinds, Nimsoft, GFI, Kaseya, Remote Assist, PacketTrap, eG Innovations and attempted to work with N-able. Our extensive search led us to Goliath Technologies. Their product manages the required virtual server, application, and desktop elements, but the way it is architected to accomplish these elements separated them from other offerings. Their Intelligent Agent, for instance, will save hours of setup time because of automated deployment.  It also provides extensive data collection and reporting, remediation, and log management, all essential to meeting our SLA’s.”

Goliath Technologies offers one of the only comprehensive infrastructure and Citrix performance monitoring solutions in the market today that is architected for use by Cloud Providers. This multi-tenant technology allows an administrator to monitor the entire physical and virtual infrastructure from a single console. This complete and unified view accelerates root cause analysis and remediation. The cost and ease of use make it especially attractive to Cloud Providers that are under pressure to balance margins with SLA’s.

“We are quite pleased that the team from CPU has chosen Goliath Technologies as the sole provider of performance monitoring, analysis and reporting for their virtual server and Citrix desktop environments,” said Thomas Charlton, Chairman and CEO of Goliath Technologies.  “While many companies have re-cast their products as solutions designed for Service Providers, the functionality they offer doesn’t reflect an understanding of the unique challenges faced by the vendors in this rapidly growing market sector. Before anyone had coined the phrase Cloud Computing, our earliest customers were Service Providers who had to manage remote environments, meet stringent SLA’s and manage sometimes narrow profit margins. They drove our product requirements, so now we have a technology that is designed to overcome their specific technical challenges and support their unique business model. The fact that CPU and other service providers are selecting our product further validates the investment we have made in the technology.”

About Goliath Technologies

Goliath Technologies is focused on systems management software for IT organizations that address the evolving challenges of managing physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. These hybrid environments require solutions that are scalable, cost effective and easy to use. Many legacy technologies are difficult to deploy and expensive to maintain and, as a result, are not well suited for this new paradigm. Inexpensive or free technologies, though easy to deploy and use, lack enterprise functionality and scalability. Both are slow to add features that are required to support physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. At Goliath, we provide products that fill this gap with the right combination of scalability and functionality at a reasonable cost that embrace the complexities of virtualization and cloud computing. Headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, our software is used by customers worldwide including ADP, ING Direct, MindShift, Thomson Reuters and Shell. Learn more today at https://goliathtechnologies.com/

About CPU Inc

CPU Inc. is a progressive technology and services provider with two divisions. CPU’s information systems and services division provides information systems, hardware, software, technology products and services. A current, leading edge technology that they offer their clients is server virtualization and storage area networks. This technology provides businesses greater computing power with a smaller hardware footprint and access to larger amounts of data with the capability for off-site storage and disaster recovery. CPU participates in the partner programs of many leading vendors including Microsoft, Lenovo, HP, Citrix, VMware, StoneFly, Barracuda, Sage, Trend Micro, SonicWALL, and Goliath Technologies.

CPU also provides full service professional payroll processing including direct deposit and total tax service processing. Headquartered in Cape Girardeau, MO; CPU has been serving businesses of all sizes since 1978.  http://www.c-p-u.com

About the Author: 

The team members collaborated to bring together this blog post by calling on their past Customer Experiences and Expert Knowledge of Citrix Troubleshooting. Beyond writing technical documents this team supports Goliath Customers and provides product feature and function guidance to development.

Nimsoft Replacement: Cloud Provider Replaces Nimsoft

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Nimsoft Replacement: Cloud Provider Replaces Nimsoft

PTI Commercial Sites Remote Management Capability as Key

Philadelphia PA November 27, 2012 – Perpetual Technologies Incorporated, provider of remote and on premises mission-critical database management and consulting services, announced today that they have selected Goliath Technologies MonitorIT to manage their customer environments.

“As a service provider we have SLA’s with our customers that require us to manage and monitor the performance of their infrastructure, applications and data bases with great efficiency. To deliver on our commitments we have to rely on tools to support our processes. We used a legacy product from a Global IT software management company for a number of years and it proved to be less than adequate for our needs in terms of both product functionality and related support” said Angie Gleim, Vice President of Business Operations for PTI Commercial.  “The issues surrounding this technology became critical enough in our commercial business that we decided to move away from this product six months prior to the end of our contract. We used Goliath’s product in a small virtual server environment, but decided to expand their footprint and replace the legacy product for the entire IT infrastructure because of the ease of use, functionality that covers both physical and virtual environments, as well as the newly enhanced remote site management capability. Finally, we have found their support to be competent and responsive which is critical to our success.”

Goliath Technologies offers one of the only comprehensive infrastructure monitoring solutions in the market today that is able to be used by Cloud Providers. This multi-tenant technology allows an administrator to monitor the entire physical and virtual infrastructure from a single console. This complete and unified view accelerates root cause analysis and remediation. The cost and ease of use make it especially attractive to Cloud Providers that are under pressure to balance margins with SLA’s.

“The issue that PTI faced with Nimsoft is not uncommon. Software companies with legacy solutions find it increasingly difficult to compete in the service provider market,” said Thomas Charlton, Chairman and CEO of Goliath Technologies. “Our product, architected specifically for the challenges that IT Administrators face in managing hybrid, virtual, physical and cloud environments delivers cross platform functionality with no programming necessary and at a much lower cost. All of this compliments the business model and technical requirements of service providers.”

About Goliath Technologies

Goliath Technologies is focused on systems management software for IT organizations that address the evolving challenges of managing physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. These hybrid environments require solutions that are scalable, cost effective and easy to use. Many legacy technologies are difficult to deploy and expensive to maintain and, as a result, are not well suited for this new paradigm. Inexpensive or free technologies, though easy to deploy and use, lack enterprise functionality and scalability. Both are slow to add features that are required to support physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. At Goliath, we provide products that fill this gap with the right combination of scalability and functionality at a reasonable cost that embrace the complexities of virtualization and cloud computing. Headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, our software is used by customers worldwide including ADP, ING Direct, MindShift, Thomson Reuters and Shell. Learn more today at https://goliathtechnologies.com/

About Perpetual Technologies Inc.

Perpetual Technologies, Inc. (PTI) is a veteran-owned small business founded in 1997 and headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana that provides clients with service-driven Information Technology and database management consulting services. With a base in the Midwest and focus on remote services, PTI’s highly competitive rates allow them to compete on a local and national level. Their subject matter experts have extensive experience with all major database products, with a specialty focus on Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.  PTI’s team of certified professionals also provides software integration services, business intelligence, custom application development, database design, capacity planning, performance tuning, and disaster recovery planning.  In addition, PTI now offers services and facilities for hosting, virtualization, and MS Exchange.  The company’s focus is on building relationships to understand a client’s needs, gaining confidence and trust, and developing a long-term partnership to deliver solutions that maximize business performance while staying dedicated to a client’s best interest. Please visit PTI on the web at www.PTI.net

Eginnovations Replacement: AI Virtualization replaces EG

Eginnovations Replacement: AI Virtualisation replaces EG

Beaconsfield, UK – July 18, 2011

AI Virtualisation, a specialist IT Distributor focused on providing Award Winning, Best of Breed, Enterprise Class Management, Security and Performance Solutions for Virtual Environments, announced today that they selected Goliath Technologies’ MonitorIT (MIT) product to replace EG Innovations Monitoring.  AI Virtualisation previously distributed the EG Innovations monitoring solution to help customers gain visibility into their virtual infrastructure.

“We realized that our customers and resellers wanted a product to monitor virtual environments that was easier to use and more cost effective than what we were previously offering with EG Innovations. We did an exhaustive market analysis, looking at many products from SolarWinds, Veeam, Vkernel and Nagios on the low end as well as enterprise products like HP and Goliath Technologies,” said, Andy Irving, Managing Director at AI Virtualisation. He continued, “This wasn’t a difficult decision. Most companies don’t really understand virtualization and it shows in the technology offering. They were merely network centric products designed for physical environments, with the exception of Veeam. Though Veeam is designed to monitor virtual machines they are limited to hypervisor metrics for VMware environments only and this creates “blind spots” and “false positives.” Goliath Technologies’ MonitorIT product offers an easy to use and comprehensive approach to monitoring virtual environments by collecting metrics from Citrix XenServer or VMware hypervisor, directly from the virtual machines and has the capability to monitor the physical environment. This deep diagnostic data can be viewed through the MIT console or by leveraging the plug-in to Citrix XenCenter or VMware vCenter. All this at a lower price which is key in the current economic climate.”

Goliath Technologies offers one of the only comprehensive virtual monitoring solutions in the market today. Offering the flexibility of an agent or agentless approach, MIT allows the user to collect deep diagnostic data about the applications that run on the virtual machines and those physical elements that can  impact the virtual environment. Products that are limited to hypervisor metrics only simply don’t have this capability.

“We are pleased to be selected in such a competitive evaluation. Their conclusion and comments are reflective, in many respects, of the feedback we receive from the larger market. The approach that AI Virtualisation takes in the international marketplace will make them a very productive partner and we are looking forward to supporting their efforts as we continue to expand internationally,” said Mike Lenzner, Director of Sales at Goliath Technologies.

ABOUT GOLIATH TECHNOLOGIES

Goliath Technologies is focused on systems management software for IT organizations that address the evolving challenges of managing physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. These hybrid environments require solutions that are scalable, cost effective and easy to use. Many legacy technologies are difficult to deploy and expensive to maintain and, as a result, are not well suited for this new paradigm. Inexpensive or free technologies, though easy to deploy and use, lack enterprise functionality and scalability. Both are slow to add features that are required to support physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. At Goliath, we provide products that fill this gap with the right combination of scalability and functionality at a reasonable cost that embrace the complexities of virtualization and cloud computing. Headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, our software is used by customers worldwide including ADP, ING Direct, Mindshift, Thomson Reuters and Shell. Global customers join our online user community to share information, solve technical challenges and contribute to our ongoing product development initiatives. Learn more today at https://goliathtechnologies.com