Terralogic, IT Service Provider, Avoids ‘Citrix is Slow’ Escalations

Level 1 Service Desk Uses Goliath to Resolve Tickets Quickly  

“Our Level 1 Service Desk supports all of our Citrix managed services clients. With Goliath, the team resolves 9 out of 10 performance issues, avoiding escalations to our Level 3 Citrix architects.”

– Mark Gigliotti, CIO of Terralogic

Infrastructure: Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop, Citrix XenServer, Nutanix, RDS, vCenter

Challenge: Citrix Architects Spend Too Much Time Troubleshooting Citrix

Terralogic is a USA based software and IT services company with expertise in IoT, Cloud, DevOps, Citrix, App development, Cybersecurity and more. They turned to Goliath because their Citrix Architects were spending too much time troubleshooting basic Citrix end user experience issues around slow logons, applications failing to launch, and overall slow performance. They needed a solution that would enable their Level 1 Service Desk to resolve more issues on their own, avoiding escalations.

Mark Gigliotti, CIO of Terralogic, shares, “The free tools provided by Citrix do not provide enough insights to troubleshoot Citrix end user issues quickly. They are also too complex for a non-Citrix expert to use.” He added, “Most of our Level 1 Support Desk is managed in India or sourced with recent college graduates. We needed a technology that provided data to isolate root cause, guide the team on how to remediate, and was intuitive enough to be used by non-Citrix experts.”

Solution: Level 1 Service Desk to Solve Citrix Performance Issues With Software

Terralogic selected Goliath Technologies due to its embedded intelligence and automation for monitoring and troubleshooting Citrix and the end user experience for their managed services customers. Goliath automatically discovers the entire Citrix delivery infrastructure, identifies what to monitor, the thresholds to set, and then alerts when thresholds are exceeded for all potential events, conditions, and failure points.

Results:

As a result of using Goliath, Terralogic has been able to reduce time to remediation as well as escalations to their Level 3 Citrix Architects. Not only does this positively impact client satisfaction, but it also lowers cost.

“Prior to Goliath, almost every Citrix ticket went to our Level 3 Architects. We have turned this around to where our Level 1 Service Desk is troubleshooting Citrix and resolving issues for 90% of all performance-related tickets,” states Gigliotti. “Our Level 1 Service Desk is alerted on issues, views data in Goliath to isolate root cause, and resolves them before end users are impacted – increasing our client satisfaction while reducing support costs.”

Level 1 Service Desk Resolves 9 out of 10 Performance Issues

Terralogic uses Goliath’s threshold-based alerts to be notified anytime a VM or host is running low on memory, a primary server fails, memory leaks with 3rd party software, or other infrastructure issues occur that can result in slow logons or performance.

The alert is sent to their Level 1 Service Desk based either in India or locally manned by recent college graduates and interns. The team then resolves the issue quickly by restarting a server or adding memory to ensure end users are never impacted.

Image 1 shows Goliath’s alert dashboard, highlighting all alerts that have been triggered due to performance issues. Alerts can be viewed here or received via email or text message. Terralogic’s Service Desk can monitor this screen to proactively address any potential issues that could negatively impact end user performance.

XenApp Enduser productivity report

Image 1: Goliath’s embedded intelligence and automation will automatically identify what to monitor, thresholds to set, and alert when thresholds are exceeded. All executed alerts can be viewed in the alert dashboard.

Gigliotti summarizes the overall value of Goliath by stating, “Goliath has transformed the way we support our Citrix managed service customers. Our Level 1 Service Desk team in India is being alerted of any potential issues that could negatively impact the end user experience and fixing them before end users start their day. We have reduced support costs and number of escalations to our architects – all while increasing our client satisfaction.”