Application TCP latency is an area with room for improvement, but I believe this is already on the roadmap.
I have not encountered any scalability issues.
Customer Service:
Customer service is fantastic!! They are very responsive and always follow up to ensure a solution has been provided.
Technical Support:
eG seem to take ownership of any raised issue, even if it is not on their side. They will assist and escalate internally to get the correct level of technical support for the individual call.
PRTG was offered as a managed service through a service provider; limited visibility and in some cases NO visibility for certain infrastructure servers / hypervisors.
Citrix visibility was very basic then, too (OS only). Only about 1/3rd of the company was being monitored, so when a fault did occur, we still had to try to work out where it was.
It was good to know there was a problem, but it didn't assist us in finding it! eG now does both and we cover visibility across all tiers of the infrastructure.
Initial setup was straightforward; most of the complexity was trying to get visibility of the SAN storage. It turned out the model of EMC we used didn't have built-in CLI capabilities. eG Support kindly pointed this out.
You may get some monitoring products with certain licensing you may own. Some of these can take ages to configure and setup, along with needing a license to drive the software. Once you start down this path, then other limitations of visibility can creep in that make you then look for ANOTHER product to fill the gap. Before you know it, you are managing five different monitoring products, flooding you with alarms. Think ahead and plan for a single-pane monitoring solution now.
If you want directions and can work a compass, then buy a compass. Otherwise, get a GPS and throw away the map book!! Go eG Enterprise!
Originally posted at https://www.robbeekmans.net/uncategorized/eg-innovations-citrix-improvements/
eG Innovations – Citrix improvements
Boy have I been overdue with this blog, I’m sure it is over a month that I gotten the information about an upcoming change with eG Enterprise. At first I couldn’t share the information, NDA and so on, but after that ship sailed I kind got busy with other things…
Today I got a question about eG and possibilities there, so I logged on and bam I got hit in the face with the new features… So here it is the long long over due article about eG innovations.
eG Innovations
First a quick introduction for those not familiar with eG. eG Innovations brings to the market a end-to-end monitoring product. Their solutions shows severity of issues in relation to other components in a layered model. Read my previous blog to learn more, one of them is found here.
Version 6.1
So let’s see what version 6.1 brings you for Citrix improvements, I think you like it.
Logon process
Back in the Citrix Edgesight days we had that cool report, with the Enterprise license, that showed the breakdown of the user logon process. In Citrix Director those metrics are also available per user grouped in the console for the last three sessions.
Citrix director gives a nice basic overview but nothing like that cool Edgesight report. With version 6.1, eG Enterprise is showing all those cool metrics that you once had in the report.
The high level logon process information will show you exactly what Citrix Director is also showing, that is the logon duration in total, the profile load, the group policy processing duration and the logon script execution duration.
It show enough for basic troubleshooting but sometime you want more.
If you want more we look at the different metrics like the Client start-up metrics.
how long did it take for the ICA file to download to the client, how long did it take for the client to load the Citrix storefront page, Is you DNS name resolution having issues.
That kind of data is valuable, every week I have a meeting with customer where they are how can we monitor from the client to the server so that we can solve issues a employee has.
If the client side is load fast and there are no issues there perhaps the server side is having issues. So metrics like how long did it take to pass credentials or how long did it take to create printers… those are metrics that will give you insight in what is happening.
Application launch
Sometimes logon is fine everything works fine but the user is complaining that it takes ages to get a desktop. What we see often is that users automatically start applications at logon and what if those applications are slow to load, that would slow down your perception of the desktop logon process. So we need to dive into that.
Per application you will see the average time it took to launch the application and the maximum time it does. Of course you can see these numbers also in reports and so on.
So troubleshooting will show you information over time and you can find out whether it was a one time hickup or something that is building up over time.
Framehawk
Citrix bought Framehawk a while back and for certain use cases Framehawk is a solution. The New version of eG now has next to the default Citrix monitoring a new section dedicated to Framehawk monitoring, so can see the Framerate, network bandwidth, latency and network loss. The last one is very interesting working with Framehawk for that would prove it’s doing it’s job.
GPU Monitoring
The boys of eG have been busy it seems, the also added GPU monitoring to the new version. So now you can monitor the GPU in a host, XenServer and vSphere, not he host itself or at the vm where you add the GPU.
This will help you solve issues and see if there are enough GPU resources available for your virtual machines and for your users.
Monitor latency to the user end point
When looking at latency the issue always is whether it is a client side issue or a network issue. Users working on remote location will always be caught up with IT guys saying you Internet provider connection is slow or crappy that’s why the session is bad.
Now you can compare the screen refresh latency to the network latency and see if they align, more data to build you opinion on and more triggers to give alerts to show something is going wrong.
Integration with Netscaler insight
In version 6.1, perhaps not such a small announcement, also the integration with Netscaler HDX insight is there. This broaden and deepens you visibility in the Citrix session of a user.
When you setup a end to end visibility now you have the visibility from one console all adding up for you to monitor, Much more user friendly than the Citrix Director console is offering.
There are more cool metrics to show there but that’s for you to find out. Version 6.1 also offers to monitor the syslog of the Netscalers so that next to the user session details you will also see the details of the Netscaler device itself and how it is preforming.
XenMobile 10
It’s a vast list of enhancements for XenMobile 10 in eG Enterprise version 6.1. Hope this will also come for other vendors like AirWatch.
Last but not least, Real user monitoring for web applications.
Real user monitoring for web applications
eG used to have an emulated monitoring solution where you can create a flow to start an app and do things there. That would give you an insight in how transactions etc. would run and you could see if there were delays.
Now they bring to market real user monitoring, They monitor where users connect from, how long certain actions take and will report that in a nice dashboard.
If you are in web apps business or your company expands several countries this might be very handy even for a Citrix environment alone. You can now see which users from which countries or cities are having load issues and where you traffic is coming from.
I hope this quick overview of version 6.1 of eG innovation Enterprise gives a nice insight in what they offer today, visit them at https://eginnovations.com to find out more.
Look out for my next blog about the new version of ControlUP another cool monitoring product and did you read up already about all the VMware Horizon 7 announcements I made earlier?? Good times ahead when all these vendors keep adding the good stuff to their products
In my last review I wrote about the new version of eG Enteprise emerging at VMworld. Since then the folks at eG Innovations haven't been doing nothing. One thing they did was release a mobile app to take your monitoring with you.
In a world where our office is the world we need access to our data in different ways, our users rely on a highly available environment and they don't care if you are in New York, London or Amsterdam. With the eG app you can monitor your environment from just there and take action when required.
Read about what I think about the mobile app..
So lets assume you are a Citrix administrator and you're dying to know, all day long, what the launch time is for your end users.
First install the eG App on your iOS or Android device...
Google App store : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eG.eGinnovation&hl=en
Apple store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/egmonitor-app/id931348922?ls=1&mt=8
Like many apps you get the push question and of course with monitoring you want push notifications.
So click on Yes and head on to the data.
Once you logged on to your environment you will see all components that you have configured in your eG Innovations environment. Instantly you see the Green/Yellow/Red or Blue signs that give a clear status. Something is going on with Storefront and the emulated client. The emulated client is a process to test the connectivity on a regular bases so you know when something is wrong with connecting to your Citrix desktop.
As I said there is something wrong with Storefront, so let's click on that one and dive in. There is one Storefront server configured and it's giving issues. So let's take a look.
The issue we are seeing is with the Storefront services and so we have to go deeper and deeper in the system. Think about this, your have to watch a daft TV show with your wife and your are actually deep diving in your environment solving an issue, how cool is that... I just saved you evening, who cares about The voice of, this is our interest.
The last one we get to is Common resources, once we open that we see the real issue... okay I won't stop you with a lot of text, go on.
The Common resources are the measurements like ICA Lauch call, Average time and that kind of stuff. Very interesting for the averages have to be low enough to keep your end users happy.
When we click on the ICA Launch average time we see a graph that show the averages over a period of time. You can specify the time period from 1hr to 12hrs, so you can troubleshoot and see if the issue was there before or just appeared.
When extending it to 3hrs you see the graph like here below. Of course the troubleshooting doesn't stop here, from here you would go to the emulated client and see which step in the process is doing this. I think for now you have a good idea of what is possible.
As you can see you can drill down to any metric or measurement as you would be able to in the real system, just now you can do this from you couch on your mobile phone.
I think eG Innovations has created a nifty tool to make our lives a lot easier, now we just have to implement end to end monitoring to be able to use this tool.
Okay for who is unfamiliar with eG Innovations a quick introduction, eG innovations is focused on a intelligent performance management solution. Their solution offers an end-to-end monitoring solution for virtual, cloud and physical environments. Their layered structure gives a fast and clear view on what is going on.
So let's take a look at the new look of eG Innovations. I know they have been working hard on this for a while and I was pleasantly surprised when they showed it to me.
Let's just jump in straight away and show you the new main interface. You will see this dashboard when you log on.
It's a fresh and clear dashboard for me, much better than the old one. At the top of the dashboard you see the different health status of your environment. The big difference is that the infrastructure screen and the status screens have been converted. The focus of the screen is much better now, in the old version there was to much going on. First thing you see it the status bar.
The status bar shows how much percentage of the total environment is healthy and will show per severity the percentage. It's a good start to see the overall health, it shouldn't be to far from 95-99% to often I think otherwise you're in trouble.
In the old version many things were text lines you had to click on and here it's more like a modern graphical interface, well done I have to say.
One last thing about the top bars, the right bar will give a quick overview of what you are monitoring, the number of measurements and components. If the number of measurements is very low something is wrong with your configuration.
Let's take a look at Service topology.
Clicking on Service in the main screen will show the services you have configured in the main screen.
Here we have two services configured, a website and pnc_trading. Let's take a look at pnc_trading.
Clicking on pnc_trading we will see how this service is configured. The service is built up from a number of actions, accessing the desktop, performing trade and so on. In this screen you will see the response time of an action and a graph with the historical response times as well as availability.
When we click on Topology we will see the relation between the components, building this map allows you to set the relationship between components. A relationship can be that one component connects to the other or that one uses the other. The map gives a good overview of all components and by clicking on them you are taken right to that components.
Read the full review here.
Looks cool to me.
Enjoy the show.
Henry