Monthly Archives: February 2016

 

 

In our series Facts from the Field, #5 explains how AppEnsure helped a big customer close down what the Dir of IT Ops, Steve, calls “Trouble Ticket Heaven”, the place where the trouble tickets can live forever!!! He is NOT being complimentary in this definition.

 

The start point for this is that many legacy applications that were “modernized” by applying a web layer at the access layer, are streamed using XenApp as the delivery mechanism. This an effective approach and widely used, however, the independent tech silo admins have never found an effective way to see where the issues are that cause slowness, hence passing trouble tickets around, not closing them.

 

Steve’s BU users were typically having 30 – 60 seconds delays for published applications to respond back.  They would call the Citrix admins complaining and the Citrix admins looked at all the counters they get from Citrix which claimed that everything is working well.  Then they pass the trouble ticket to the backend infrastructure team who would look at the application servers and determine that everything is fine because the servers that are running the application workload all report back with green lights that they are up and running.  However, this approach to tech silo “availability” cannot highlight slowness problems as this approach does not give the granular visibility of every call coming from XenApp and what its’ response time is.  The ticket remains open in Trouble Ticket Heaven and the user gives up and gets used to the slowness.

 

With AppEnsure deployed, we quickly identified the bottleneck was in the backend infrastructure.  We were able to drill down immediately showing that the calls coming from XenApp were the ones that were experiencing long response times compared to other calls that were directly accessing the backend infrastructure.  We were able to automatically detect that there was a proxy misconfiguration which resulted in multiple retries from the XenApp executable to get the response back from the infrastructure. The trouble ticket was issued directly from the Citrix admins to the server team with the specific IP addresses and misconfiguration identified. Problem successfully identified and resolved in real time!

 

That is how AppEnsure closes “Trouble Ticket Heaven” completely, resolves problems quickly and makes Steve look like the local Superhero. Congratulations Steve!

 

For those of us with siblings, we know what it is like to be blamed for something we didn’t do. In the school classrooms of our youth, you also may remember getting blamed collectively for the trouble for a few of our fellow classmates were the cause of. We also may remember allowing our siblings and/or classmates take the blame and the subsequent interrogation even when we knew it wasn’t their fault. We were just happy to be in the clear.

Fast forward to our adult lives, and we still find our objective can be to defend and deflect when there is trouble heading our way. For IT professionals, this can come in the form of who is to blame for performance issues. Discovering the location and the peers that can take responsibility AND who can fix it, expeditiously, should be the paramount goal. One technology group that often is blamed for a poor user experience is the Citrix delivery team.

IT Operations professionals need a comprehensive monitoring solution that can determine whether or not the Citrix delivery infrastructure is the culprit or is it the backend infrastructure of the applications being delivered or published.

When a tool like this doesn’t exist in your IT tool bag, there is no quick way to determine the root cause of the end-user’s poor application experience. Why spend countless hours and IT resources playing the blame game, when there is such a tool available that will make users more productive, the company more money and IT work more gratifying?

I was recently copied on an email from an executive of IT Operations at a top 10 US financial corporation. It was sent to his team to explain why he wanted them to start deploying AppEnsure. I liked it so much that I thought I would put it right on our blog:

“Hi all, I want to introduce you to AppEnsure, an end user performance solution that tells us how the application is experiencing the infrastructure, as measured by the end user experience of application response times. It is designed for HA (High Availability) at enterprise scale and is complimentary to the data we get from APM.

1. Live architecture analysis: the only thing that I can guarantee about the CMDB is that it is WRONG minutes after it is defined! We can’t use static tools in dynamic, virtualized cloud deployments.

2. You can see the Gartner definition of AA-IPM: “Application Aware Infrastructure Monitoring” at https://www.gartner.com/doc/2678316/leverage-applicationaware-infrastructure-performance-monitoring. That is what Appensure is and does.

3. We have APM tools to perfect the code but they aren’t designed to show application interactions with infrastructure. They do not account well, if at all, for topological performance data across silos and different infrastructure elements/technologies. APM gives us the App internals and tuning elements but NOT the infrastructure elements.

4. So both capabilities are needed for a complete understanding of end to end response time, APM for code performance & Appensure is the other part of the delivery experience overall. It has very elastic Splunk like qualities and powerful built in correlation capabilities. These attributes get us to TTD & TTR much faster than digging around manually. It also provides trending. Unlike legacy tools such as IP Mon or SiteScope etc. which are device based tools, this one is top down. Once it builds service maps, in minutes, you’re in business. No nitpicking and endless hand builds. Powerful & quick!”

 

Thanks for that, I could not have said it better myself. I know your team will like the results they will get with AppEnsure. It is great that you have the previous experience and insight to know.