This independent review of the App Availability Testing for Citrix is republished on our blog with permission from Rob Beekmans, CCE-V, VCP5.5, VCP5-DT, VCAP-DTD, MCSA2012, vExpert, vExpert EUC Champion Member. The original post appears on Rob’s blog, EUC, UEM, Mobility and Monitoring.
Earlier this year I wrote a couple of articles about the Goliath Citrix logon simulator as a service, it enables the ability to test the availability of your Citrix infrastructure through simulating the logon with a user. Simulation sounds like the logon process is not really happening and that’s not true as with simulation a real user account is used to process the logon action. They had two offerings, one on-premises and on hosted. The hosted one is now being renamed. So they renamed it to Application availability testing. Application availability testing is understandable to everyone. It will test the availability of your Citrix environment on scheduled times. The on-premises one, Citrix Logon simulator is going to stay as it was, it offers the same as the new application availability offering but on-premises.
If you are wondering what Goliath is offering with their logon simulation please read my previous articles here
Application availability testing
So what is application availability testing, why woud you want to use it? Let me take you through a scenario that will make it clear.
Assume we have an airliner where employees travel the world and when the arrive at their destination they want to open an application on the corporate Citrix environment. This scenario is easily copied to any enterprise where employees travel the world, oil companies, truck drivers, shipping and so on. How can you be sure that the connection from the location they will connect from is functioning? Normal monitoring takes you to the boundaries of your network, the outskirts so to say where your control stops and where the Internet starts.
Will this do for monitoring are you done after this? ideally I think you should implement end-to-end monitoring on-premises and application availability testing side by side or integrated if possible. The availability testing does a perfect job showing and testing the user can log on but it won’t warn for issues to happen, for that you need monitoring that understands you environment. So make sure you know what you are aiming for, monitoring or availability testing. If you have the budget look at both.
Offering
What Goliath is offering with their application availability testing is a way to test this availability from datacenters around the globe. So the outskirts and beyond so to say. So a quick overview of what they offer (also found in the articles mentioned earlier);
- No software onsite
- No internal resource or changes
- Setup in less than 30 minutes
It’s a cloud service and the monthly service offers;
- Logons, schedules 24/7
- Dashboard, real time confirmation of Citrix logon duration, success and failures
- Alerts
- Reports
They are interesting to check out if you look for a application availability as a service.
Visit their site to read more and request a demo, their site is found here