Authored by Citrix CTP Benjamin Crill

Experience monitoring is a powerful tool and an advantage to any administrator.  However, even with the tooling, sometimes the view isn’t always complete.  Most monitoring tools focus only on the resources being accessed.  Some bring in additional information about the hosting and networking those resources are on.  But in any EUC solution, the device that is accessing is integral to the end-user experience.

The types of devices being used continue to evolve.  Given cost concerns, security concerns, and supply chain concerns, many organizations are looking to deploy ChromeOS devices.  The ease of deployment and low cost make them a compelling solution.  The drawback to them is around device management.  What makes them easy to deploy also makes them a challenge to support post-deployment in an enterprise.  Endpoint monitoring typically involves some agent-based deployment reporting to a central server, which is not an option with ChromeOS.  A lack of visibility into the endpoint and its impact to end user productivity is a big risk for an enterprise to take.  Because the Chrome device will be the newest change to the end user, it is the most likely to be the focal point of any complaints.  It’s human nature to assume those problems result from the new change, but often that isn’t the case.

Top 4 Best Practices to Migrating to Azure Virtual Desktop

This blog was originally posted by Microsoft MVP Theresa Miller to her blog, 24×7 IT Connection.

Organizations are migrating their desktops to the cloud as a long-term future state and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is a common implementation choice. Technology migrations can be complex to plan and execute on. Today let’s look more closely at some common AVD use case scenarios and then dive into the top 4 best practices for a successful migration to AVD.

Why Migrate to Azure Virtual Desktop?

In my experience, organizational onboarding and desktop deployment is a process that requires a lot of planning and work.  Also, the employee onboarding and offboarding process is more frequent in certain verticals such as in the education system where students attending changes often.  Flexibility of desktop deployment can be key and is a critical consideration for moving to virtualized desktops in the cloud.

Additionally, deploying to any cloud can be cost effective if planned properly.  It can also simplify scaling of infrastructure-based resources to the desktop providing enterprises the deployment flexibility often-times needed, and Azure Virtual Desktop is a common choice for enterprises.

Migrating to Azure Virtual Desktop Best Practices

If you are considering or already committed to migrating your desktops to Azure Virtual Desktop, it’s important to have the best practices to your migration top of mind.  With that, let’s look at my top 4 best practice for your migration to AVD.

1. 1. Put together a plan: Migrating desktops to Azure should be done with a plan. Have a list of all of the important action items that you need to accomplish leading up to migration. This should include desktop configurations, resource allocation and cost planning, proper monitoring, backup and recovery planning, how to actually migrate, testing strategies and more. Migrating your desktops whether you deploy 1 or 10,000 will require planning.  The plan size may vary but make sure you have one.
   2. Include Business Users from the Beginning: In order for your deployment to be successful it’s important to work with a team that includes a subset of key business users.  They know the applications that need to run on your virtual desktops the best, and have a firsthand experience with workflows, peripherals and application performance needs.  Business users can also be critical to final validation of the desktop configuration.  If you want a successful project business users must be involved, because they are your key stakeholders.
   3. Test and monitor everything: Every step of your technology journey in the process should include monitoring and testing.  In fact, it would be prudent to have several phases of testing.  There could be challenges during the migration journey that could be impacted with a change as small a windows update.  Monitoring can help identify which change has the impact, and your consistent testing done in phases will ensure migration success.
   4. Migrate and finalize testing: Once you have your migration tools ready, tested, and migration is underway; it’s important to test again after migration.  Testing is strongly encouraged once again, because in my experiences something as small as an update can impede a migration process and cause failures. Testing after migration, closes the loop and ensures your users’ desktops will be available to the business users when they need them.

Concluding Thoughts

Why Quick Troubleshooting and Self-Healing Automation are Essential in a Citrix Environment

This blog originally posted by Citrix CTP Chris Twiest to his blog, Workspace Guru.

Citrix environments can be highly complex with multiple back-end components like Storefront, Netscalers, Delivery Controllers, FAS, License servers, Cloud Connectors, and databases. And the front end can be equally complex with VDA’s running in different parts of the world and the cloud and on-premises hybrid. With all this complexity, it’s essential to have the correct troubleshooting, monitoring, and self-healing automation tools. This blog will look at the Goliath Technologies monitoring tools to help quick troubleshooting, monitoring, and self-healing automation.

The slogan of Citrix is, of course, to work everywhere and from any device. This made Citrix solutions a great match during the pandemic. People could stay safe and work from home without missing a beat. Now that the pandemic is mostly over, most people still want to work (part-time) from home. This is still possible, but we see one issue often coming back to the IT helpdesk; this issue is, of course, latency. When users experience latency issues, their session feels sluggish, they type words in the Citrix session, and the letters appear delayed on the screen. Dragging and dropping in the session do not work well due to the delay. This comes because, unlike in the office, the IT department does not control the internet connection in the end-user’s home. So, the quality of this connection is up to the end user. You can imagine if an end user is working from home in the attic on the Wi-Fi while the kids at home are streaming online video games and watching Netflix, the situation is not ideal.

The problem might sometimes be hard to diagnose for IT when end users say their session is sluggish, slow, and unresponsive. The problem can also be the performance on the VDA or a bottleneck in the internal network. How can we quickly troubleshoot this issue? With Goliath, we can view the network connection of the end user. If we click on a user session, we can immediately see a session summary that includes the user’s path to connecting with the session, logon time, and key performance metrics, as seen below.

If we now click on network latency from this screen, we can see the session network latency directly. One of the cool things about the Goliath Technologies tool is the inclusion of Caution and Critical Warning indicators directly on the graph, as seen below.

This way, you can diagnose super quickly if network latency is the issue. These threshold interpretation lines or Caution and Critical warnings are available for all key metrics so the user doesn’t need to be a Citrix expert to understand the data.

Now, if we dive deep into the network connection further, we can click on ICA/HDX, and there are more easy-to-read graphs.

The top right Graph, for example, shows how many KBs an end-user has available for the Citrix connection. With this, you can quickly diagnose if the internet connection on the end-user side can deliver a good performing Citrix session. In the image above you can see that connection speed is low and the issue is therefore on the client side.

The Graph on the bottom left (ICA Channel Usage) is my absolute favorite network graph in the Goliath Technologies solution.

With this Graph, you can see exactly where the session uses the bandwidth and with the data interpretation lines you can see the user is over the critical threshold. For example, in this Graph, you can see now where there is a lot of usage on the Thinwire BW out. The end-user is streaming a YouTube video over the Thinwire connection and this is taking up most of the bandwidth and the cause of session slowness. But you can also easily see how much data is used for printing, audio, data redirection, etc. This gives you a good insight into the user’s ICA session from a network perspective.

The Goliath Technologies ICA and network monitoring tools help you quickly troubleshoot end-user connection troubles and are the first step in the solution to good performing Citrix sessions.

A big part of keeping a sound, well-performing Citrix Environment is preventing problems before they arise. We can do this with self-healing automation and fix an issue before it becomes a problem. Goliath Technologies also has some great features for this. One of my favorites is the automatic deployment of Goliath Agents to non-persistent VDAs. This allows you not to edit your golden image but have the monitoring tool push agents to the VDA after they have lost contact for x minutes. If the non-persistent image is rebooted and the agent is gone, it will automatically get an agent again. This means that the agent is self-healing.

Goliath comes out of the box with many Citrix monitoring rules, and more can be loaded in directly from the console. From these rules, we can add self-healing automation. For instance, if we look at the “Citrix Delivery Controller – Broker Service” rule, it has the feature to attempt service restart if the service fails.

If the broker service fails on the delivery controller, Goliath will automatically try and self-heal this service by restarting it.  

But, of course, not everything we monitor is a service that needs a restart. This is where the Remediation Tab comes in. This allows you to run a program or script (powershell.exe) when the rule gets triggered. For example, if a disk is running low on free space, you can have Goliath start a PowerShell script that will remediate the problem by running a disk cleaner and removing files from temp folders. You could even create a script that extends the disk size in the hypervisor. It’s all about catching a warning before it becomes critical and you get downtime.

Your Citrix environment will become more stable and deliver a better end-user experience with the correct troubleshooting and self-healing automation tools! 

These were just a few of the great features of the Goliath Technologies monitoring tool. The tool can also give you insight into application availability with active probing, giving you direct insight into your system’s uptime and letting you catch an issue before the end user notices them. With the Goliath Topology feature, you get a straightforward overview of your complete Citrix environment, and it directly shows where an issue might arise within your environment. We will go into more of the Goliath features in a following blog. 

The Most Impactful IT Trends of 2021

Article originally posted by Citrix CTP, Theresa Miller

As we look back at technology in 2021 it can always be interesting to reflect on what we thought was going to be and what actually came to fruition.  Reflecting, one thing that was for certain is that there was more interest in cloud than ever, but who could have realized the hype that cybersecurity would get?  Today, let’s look at the technology trends that came out of 2021 to kick off a year in technology review.

Hybrid work

The trend towards remote working options were amplified in the past couple of years just by way of the pandemic, but the reality is that most employees want the flexibility that comes from working remote.  Gartner estimates that “remote workers will represent 32% of all employees worldwide by the end of 2021, and as offices reopen throughout 2021, 51% of those employees will be working in a hybrid environment at least one day per week”.

My observation around the flexibility of work remote as a side effect of the past couple years is that this was a much-needed change for many industries.  This shift is crucial to employee wellness, balance, and proved that productivity is possible regardless of where someone works.  I would expect to see this flexibility ongoing well into the future.

Multi-cloud

When cloud was first introduced the concept of multi-cloud was not widely received.  IT departments knew that once their data was in the cloud it would be near impossible to move the data around.  Plus introducing multiple clouds to an enterprise meant more complexity by way to on-prem integrations with the cloud, DR planning and more.

Fast forward to today and we are embracing a multi-cloud trend that is unavoidable.  Enterprises may make a commitment to one cloud provider, but other work teams may opt to start working with a different cloud provider without thinking twice or pulling in Central IT.  SaaS applications also leave enterprises with little to no choice around what the backend cloud is. The bright side around all this, is that today there are tools that give enterprises the flexibility to move and migrate their data to any cloud which makes the multi-cloud environments of today more supportable for the long-term. And there are solutions available to IT professionals that enable monitoring and troubleshooting across these disparate clouds and across a hybrid ecosystem.

Cybersecurity

Cyberthreats are no joke, and the rate of occurrence has become so frequency there are new headlines in the news daily.  The advancements around cyberattacks make it a viable and profitable business for the attackers and is why enterprises need to be more proactive than ever.

The modern technology trend is to stay ahead of advanced threats, it’s important to have a data governance plan that allocates internal owners of data, audit/compliance of data, protection of data and routine system patching as a foundational means to planning and protecting.

Additionally, the adoption of multifactor authentication and use of frictionless biometric factors continues to increase as methods of disrupting bad actors. Cyberthreats are no joke and protecting enterprise data is critical to long-term business success.

Analytics via Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The last of the technology trends we are covering today are analytics via artificial intelligence. What is being seen with outcomes from AI in tech varies greatly, but AI foundationally gives technology the ability to learn.  Applications that use foundational AI that learn behaviors in a human way to be critical to advance cyberthreat detection, can transform monitoring and response, and provides innovation in a way that I am excited to see transform in the future.

Technology Trends 2021 Wrap Up

It’s always fun to reflect on the year’s technology trends and consider how they will impact how we do business today, tomorrow and in the future.  The continued impact of the pandemic on how we conduct business and live our lives has certainly fueled technology uptake. Are these trends here to stay? More likely than not. What will 2022 have in store for us – we will look at some predictions next month.

How to move your VDI workloads to the Public Cloud?

Article originally posted by Citrix CTP,  Marius Sandbu

A couple of weeks ago, I had a webinar together with Goliath Technologies about what we need to consider before moving your VDI workloads to Public Cloud. In this blog post I will try and write a summary of the various stages that should be part of the journey and also some of the pitfalls that you can encounter when moving your VDI workload to Public Cloud. Moving a VDI service to Public Cloud is not a simple task, and also with new services such as WVD from Microsoft, which one should you choose for your organization when starting your cloud journey?

One of the first things that we should always consider is understanding the destination. Moving to Cloud might mean moving heavy services and business critical applications to a datacenter which might be a lot further away than it is today. That latency increase will affect the end-user performance, and secondly VDI workloads should always be placed together with the data to ensure that when moving or building these new services that they are grouped together.