This independent review of the Goliath Logon Simulator for VMware Horizon 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.

Please Note: The Goliath Logon Simulator has been replaced by the Goliath Application Availability Monitor! This brand new technology provides an early warning system to logon issues and includes detailed screenshotting, flexible scheduling, preemptive alerting, and seamless remediation actions – just to name a few.

Goliath Technologies has offered a logon simulator for Citrix both hosted and on-premises. They renamed the hosted version last year to reflect the real purpose of it. I wrote some articles on Goliath technologies in the past so if you want to understand what they offer read the following articles;

Now they introduced a new simulator, one for VMware Horizon. Now you can pro-actively test your VMware VDI environment with Goliath.

Let me give you a quick introduction in what they offer, the pictures you will see are given to me my Goliath (I asked for them so I could write this blog). So no worries this is no sales article just me showing you what is on the market. I’m planning to write a comparison article on VMware Logon simulators like I did for Citrix – Citrix logon simulator: What are vendors bringing to market? A comparison white paper in a nutshell but time is a bit hard to find right now.

Logon process

So let’s take a quick look at the logon process and how they setup this simulation. So they will use the Horizon client for this and launch that one. Once it is launched the resource you assigned is launched.

Once it launched the resource you wanted it will wait to make sure it did and then logoff again. In the dashboard, you will see these simulations and the times they took.

The interesting thing about Goliath is that they also think about remediation, so what are you gonna do when something doesn’t work as expected?

So together with their VMware logon simulator but also the Citrix ones comes a remediation tab, here you can configure that e.g. a batch file is started that will reset or start a service.

 

The logon simulation can be scheduled so that it runs every 20 minutes like in this example. If you want to be alerted every time about the same event happening with a server you can enable that here. If you don’t want to be notified you also manage that here, it just depends on what your management requirements are.

And all this comes together in a dashboard where you will see quickly in an overview what the status is and if the logon simulation succeeded or failed. Whatever the status you can click and zoom in to see the exact steps of the logon process so in case of issues the reason for that issue is found fast.

If you are interested to see more of this, if you have a VMware Horizon environment I can’t think of no better reason, click on the following link and you in a new TAB the Goliath technologies website will open. There is a video about the new feature and more information.

Conclusion

It was just a quick overview to get you on track, you see the market for more functional monitoring is on the move. More and more vendors are releasing products to really test what user are experiencing. I think it is a good thing because besides chain monitoring this is the next logical step. Goliath technologies did a great job with their VMware logon simulator, perhaps in the future a hosted version will be available if demands are there.