Welcome to the fifth installment of our Seven Ways to Simplify Your Digital Workspace Deployment blog series. In this blog we are going to look at how to simplify reporting, analysis, and issue remediation.
Information overload is real, making it hard for administrators to get the information they need to address issues proactively and reactively in their environment. Citrix Analytics for Performance is a service that enables you to track, aggregate, and visualize key performance indicators in your environment. By gathering data from different data sources, it provides administrators with a cohesive view of their environment and provides prescriptive insights to remediate the environment proactively. Through its different dashboards, Citrix Analytics provides administrators with easy-to-consume data alongside actions they can apply.
The user experience dashboard shows administrators information on the experience their users are having. Citrix Analytics does multi-site aggregation, making it easier for administrators to have a holistic view of their environment or filter out for a specific site. Although Citrix Analytics is a cloud service, it is able to gather information for both on-premises or cloud environments alike.
The user experience score is calculated based on different performance factors that affect a user session including: session logon duration, session responsiveness, session availability, and session resiliency. These factors also have sub-factors associated with them. The factors are dynamically calculated on a per customer basis and recalibrated based on metrics collected during the past 30 days. This is to account for any changes that were made within an environment. Administrators are able to look at exactly what is causing a user to have a poor experience and dig deep into the factors/subfactors. Citrix Analytics even provides administrators with insights as to why someone might not be having an optimal experience; allowing administrators to proactively resolve issues before they become a problem.
Beyond the end-user experience analysis, Citrix Analytics for Performance provides machine statistics which allow administrators to easily correlate high CPU or memory usage with session failures or poor user experience. Citrix Analytics also points out any failure insights such as communication errors or failures caused by black-hole machines. Administrators are able to complete actions straight from the Citrix Analytics dashboard; allowing them to do things like restart or put a machine in maintenance mode. Citrix Analytics for Performance provides administrators with the tools and information they need to help ensure their machine health is optimal and their end users have the best experience possible.
Even though planning and sizing are key components prior to implementation, sometimes the issues related to the user experience lie deeper in the environment. The administrators of the environment need to quickly dig in and find the root cause of the performance issues that are causing poor user performance. Having all the data and tools available in a single pane of glass, through the Nutanix Prism® interface, allows administrators to quickly identify bottlenecks. Even better, Prism alerts administrators to where the problem exists in the infrastructure, thereby cutting the discovery time significantly.
Identification of any underlying issues is a first step, but the end goal is to remediate issues as quickly and simply as possible. For example, if the virtual desktops are configured with too little memory, it would be too time consuming for the administrator to add memory to every desktop. Using Prism X-Play™ automation tool allows administrators to automate the task with zero coding, instantly improving operational productivity. Furthermore, with Nutanix X-Play administrators can set up a policy to trigger automatically when a condition or an action is detected.
No company is immune from regulatory oversight. Sooner or later reports of the changes in the environment need to be produced to comply with regulations. Through the same interface, Nutanix provides a robust reporting engine that shows the actions taken, but can also show what-if scenarios related to possible future events, such as adding more users or acquiring the assets of a company.
The partnership and deep relationship between Nutanix and Citrix helps organizations of all sizes manage their EUC user experience. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the blog series and stay tuned for the next installment of the series, where we will discuss simplifying unified workspace.
Read the previous installment, How to Simplify Digital Workspace Security.
Read the next series installment, How to Simplify Unified Workspace.
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