CM Health Improves Clinician Satisfaction with Cerner by Drastically Reducing Time to Remediation
“Every morning I have my coffee and Goliath which sets the stage for my day because the software is proactively monitoring events, conditions, and failure points 24/7/365 that can cause end-user experience issues. Then, alerts me before users are impacted.”
Aaron Hilton, System Administrator at Central Maine Healthcare
The Challenge: Troubleshooting Citrix Performance Issues Exhausts IT Support
“I’ve received so many tickets where I would spend hours troubleshooting four or more applications to try and find what was causing the latency when it was connection speed all along,” shares Aaron Hilton, a system administrator at Central Maine Healthcare system. Aaron is one of the main points of contact for resolving Citrix tickets, and the lack of visibility into the Citrix delivery infrastructure caused him to be reactive instead of proactive. “It took so much time to react to complaints that I didn’t have time or data to isolate the root cause and resolve the underlying issues that were actually causing the Citrix and Cerner performance issues.” Central Maine’s IT team needed a solution that would allow them to become proactive and reduce performance issues that were causing clinician frustration.
The Solution: End-to-End Visibility into Cerner & Citrix End-User Experience Improves Clinician Satisfaction
Goliath Technologies was selected by Central Maine Healthcare to give their IT team an end-to-end view from the initiation of a Cerner Session, through the logon process and experience while using the application. All the data is presented based on what the user is experiencing. The traditional IT approach is to monitor the health of IT elements like networks, servers, storage, and the applications. This, however, offers no insights into how the IT delivery infrastructure is performing and one is left to infer that the end user is having a good experience. Unfortunately, that is often not the case and administrators are regularly surprised by complaints without the details necessary to solve the problem. Goliath approaches it from the end-user’s perspective and proactively identifies if there is slowness, for example, and then identifies the IT element causing the issue. Aaron remarked, “Goliath has improved the credibility and reputation of the IT department due to the success with resolving clinician issues. In addition, other Cerner application support analysts are coming to me to get user experience data that Goliath collects.” Read on to learn about the ways Aaron and his team are making the most out of their solution.
Resolving “Citrix is Slow”
The very ambiguous “Citrix is slow” complaints have increased since the pandemic when their users went remote. With Goliath operational, Aaron and his team have been able to quickly determine if issues actually came from the Citrix or data center side, or if they were the result of the end-user’s behavior. Being able to drill all the way down into an end user’s session in real time when a ticket is opened and having an array of visual proof of the actual cause makes it much less challenging to convince end users that something on their end is the cause of their performance issues.
Automated system notifications resolve issues before users are impacted
In addition to responding to regular “Citrix is Slow” tickets, Goliath can also be used to set up reporting to track the status of different components of the Citrix environment. For Central Maine, this involves monitoring their use of drive space within their cache. “When the drives all fill up, the server will start being unstable and kicking users off. I’ve made some custom reports to alert me now to let me know when they reach a certain threshold so I can put the server into maintenance mode to get all the users off and do a quick reboot on it before anyone gets kicked off.” This kind of proactive management using Goliath’s documentation helps to keep server instability from unexpectedly interrupting the workday for end users. As the team grows more comfortable with the platform, they hope to start making use of Goliath’s remediation functionalities to allow the system to automatically update when the alert conditions are met.
Conclusions:
Before adding in the Goliath solution, they only had time to do the bare minimum in support, which did not leave time to be proactive. Now that they have deeper insights into the root cause, they can solve issues quickly and have the documentation to put permanent fix actions into place. Goliath has changed them from being reactive to proactive.
Aaron summed up his experience with Goliath this way, “I recommend Goliath to any other Citrix admin that has never used this before. Once you use Goliath, it is going to be your go-to tool for sure. The software is so user friendly and has such detailed metrics that I can resolve sporadic end-user experience issues incredibly quickly and move on to fixing longer term issues.”