Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ensuring that a Citrix infrastructure is working well is no easy job! Here are several free tools and scripts that can help you with your daily activities.

Virtualization technology is being widely adopted thanks to the flexibility, agility, reliability and ease of administration it offers. At the same time, any IT technology – hardware or software – is only as good as its maintenance and upkeep, and VMware virtualization is no different.

Monitoring, observability and analytics have become common phraseology in the Citrix world. Alongside every Citrix project, whether it’s a new deployment, expansion, upgrade, or cloud migration, what is essentially needed in the IT toolkit is analytics. Analytics means not just data, but insights obtained through continuous monitoring; periodic measurements of critical performance metrics that convey a lot about the health and availability of the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops session.

The biggest challenge when a user complains of slow application is diagnosing why it’s slow: Is it due to a code-level issue or a database issue? Should we call the DBA or the application manager? Performance problems with the database can cause up to 70% of all application performance issues in production, according to consensus among database practitioners and experts.

User experience is the biggest and most important factor in determining the success of Citrix rollout in an organization. When end-users are happy with their virtualized applications and desktops, then everything is hunky dory and Citrix admins can focus on operations and maintenance.

One of the biggest challenges Citrix admins face is uncovering answers for Citrix performance issues. When an application or a desktop is slow, people naturally pin the blame on the Citrix infrastructure. It’s possible that there could be issues stemming from the Citrix side of the house, but often the real culprits are the supporting infrastructure components: network latency, virtualization bottlenecks, AD issues, storage hotspots, database issues, etc.

Forty-three percent of application performance problems occur because of an issue in the application code, according to a DZone study. Code-level issues include bugs in the code constructs, such as long waits, poor iterations, inefficient code algorithms, unhandled exceptions, bad choice of data structures, etc. Developers and application owners need code-level insight, so they can pinpoint issues in the code and fix them before users notice.

In today’s digital economy, user experience is truly the most important factor that makes or breaks a digital business. Customer experience is even surpassing price and product as the biggest brand differentiator. Even one bad experience on a website can hurt your brand. 55% of consumers report that a single bad website visit can hurt their opinion of a brand. So, how do you know whether your customers are satisfied with the performance of your website?

Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most business-critical services in enterprise IT. SharePoint is widely used by organizations to create websites where information is centrally stored, shared, organized and accessed by users from anywhere, any time and any device. Major use cases of SharePoint include knowledge and content management, intranet, file hosting and collaboration, and so on.

User experience is the basis for competition in the digital services world. A slow website means you’re potentially losing money and customers.