* Reflectent EdgeSight manages Citrix remote presentations
This week I’m at Citrix iForum Global, the annual gathering of Citrix users and partners from around the world (following the 2004 hurricane season the event was moved from Orlando to Las Vegas). Among the highlights of iForum are the many announcements from Citrix solution partners.
One of the more noteworthy this year is Reflectent’s announcement of its EdgeSight performance management tool for Citrix – noteworthy because EdgeSight will provide Citrix shops with the tools they have long needed for managing the Citrix remote presentation experience.
Though an innovative way to centralize the desktop or user application environment, Citrix professionals know only too well that the remote presentation experience is subject to a number of factors, including network latency, performance of the underlying client system, or server resource availability. Up to now, the tools that have addressed these issues have not focused on the end user experience so much as on specific aspects of the Citrix server or client platform, such as CPU, memory and disk utilization.
Yet it is the end user’s quality of experience that determines the actual level of customer satisfaction with remote presentation – this is directly analogous to the client-side quality of experience demands that Web administrators know all too well. It is therefore no surprise that Reflectent, with its EdgeSight product’s focus on the end user experience for enterprise IT, has turned its attention to Citrix.
With a product architecture that includes both server and non-intrusive, self-configuring Citrix client agents, and a separate EdgeSight server and management console, EdgeSight for Citrix collects real-time user-level performance data specific to the Citrix experience such as Citrix ICA client latency and identification of specific client sessions across Citrix remote presentation servers. This information can be presented in displays of server and application performance side-by-side with correlated client session and system performance factors on the end user’s device. Instrumentation of network factors include ICA round-trip time, delay and traffic volume. EdgeSight for Citrix also provides historical data and analysis for all-important capacity planning for the Citrix server environment, raising this from the black art it has sometimes been for administrators attempting to size their server farms appropriately.
Citrix administrators will readily grasp the gap Reflectent’s EdgeSight for Citrix fills. Without the instrumentation of factors specific to the Citrix environment, problem diagnosis can be incomplete, which leads to finger pointing and frustration – for Citrix system managers and customers alike. EdgeSight for Citrix gives this community a tool that not only helps pinpoint where in the end-to-end Citrix environment issues can be found, but also helps Citrix managers plan their environments more reliably – meaning that this product is likely to be the first among many to approach these underserved aspects of management.
Citrix and other server-based computing environments pose a number of unique management challenges. Drop me a line and let me hear about your experience with the tools for managing these environments that work best for you today, as well as what you’d like to see tomorrow.
