How to Detect & Resolve Five Common Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop Performance Challenges

Editor's Notes

• #13: H: To better understand how complicated diagnosis and troubleshooting is, we asked our survey takers how often the helpdesk resolves user complaints without involving Citrix experts. 78% of respondents indicate that less than half of the time, the helpdesk is able to resolve user complaints without involving the Citrix expert team. Doug, what do you typically see? D: I can confirm that most Citrix related support tickets are escalated to Citrix experts. The more user complaints the helpdesk can resolve without involving Citrix experts, the faster the problem resolution and the lower operations costs (experts can perform more productive tasks than fire-fighting). However, this is not happening today. S: To add to what Doug mentioned, more often than not, the helpdesk does not play an active role in performance troubleshooting. They often have no visibility into the performance of the different tiers. The performance tools are often in the hands of the specialists – the experts. The result is that the helpdesk often is a pass through – they pass problems to the experts and coordinate bridge calls with the experts of the different domains to get a resolution on what is causing a problem. Based on our experience with some of the largest Citrix deployments in the world, I think there is a significant opportunity for companies to optimize the way that they are doing Citrix performance management today. If you can get the helpdesk to use monitoring tools and do the first level triage quickly and accurately, organizations can reduce the workload on their Citrix experts. Empowering the helpdesk to do more will also help organizations lower their support costs and at the same time fix problems quickly and improve user satisfaction.
• #25: H: Part of the complexity in troubleshooting Citrix environments is driven by the sheer number of silo tools available for monitoring and performance diagnosis. We asked our Citrix professionals how many tools they use to manage their Citrix infrastructure. The answer to this question explains why Citrix admins have to spend so much time troubleshooting issues. 55% of respondents are using two to five management tools to manage Citrix performance. 25% of respondents are even using six to ten tools. Doug, do you have any comments? D: I would say larger the organization, more the number of domain experts and each of them has their own tools. Many organizations are still using administration tools supplied by the vendors for each tier. So even if you had the same expert managing the entire environment, there is still one tool for Citrix XenApp, another for , another for the storage tier, yet another for the network. S: The use of multiple tools by itself is not a problem – the problem is the amount of time needed to review the metrics from each tool and manually correlate and analyze what the tools are telling you to determine what action to take. This is a very slow, manual process and also one that needs the experts to be involved.