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This is the show for IT leaders looking to move fast, optimize costs, and protect against the latest security threats in their IT environments.
In each episode, discussions tackle one aspect of IT, from cloud computing and digital workplace to modern infrastructure and cybersecurity.
If you're looking to stay ahead in the game, enhance your organizational agility, and secure your digital assets, you've come to the right place.
[00:00:00] Al Solorzano: Do you get complaints from your end users about the experience inside of their Citrix VDI sessions?
[00:00:05] Do you have information to understand the difference between monitoring an environment and having observability information on the environment?
[00:00:13] Did you also know that Citrix has a tool, Citrix Analytics, that can give you that information and allow you to take actionable tasks against that?
[00:00:22] We're going to cover all of that on tech sessions podcast today.
[00:00:25] Let's get started.
[00:00:26]
[00:00:33] Al Solorzano: Welcome to another *e360 Tech Sessions*. Today, I'm here with Patrick O'Brien. My name is Al Solorzano, I'm the VP of the Digital Workplace Practice here at e360. We've been doing this for a long time Patrick, observability is going to be our topic for today and we all know observability is very important to giving the best user experience, the best customer experience, so let's talk about that today, you ready?
[00:00:55] Patrick O'Brien: Sure.
[00:00:56] Al Solorzano: Let's go do it. So let's first set the stage. First, we always hear the common complaint, VDI is a horrible experience, Citrix is a horrible experience. Let's talk about that a little bit, let's dig into that topic, where do you kind of usually hear that from customers today?
[00:01:14] Patrick O'Brien: You hear it more in the remote workforce and I know that's really ramped up over the last four or four and a half years, and there are challenges you can't control as an enterprise, you can't control their internet connectivity, you can't control their endpoint, you can't control where they're logging in from in the world, so they have, you know, data locality issues, they're far away from the data, and the user just feels pain.
[00:01:37] So these are very common drivers for us daily. I'd say we still hear about them today.
[00:01:42] Al Solorzano: Yeah. I know, I always hear it from all levels of our clients, right? I'm hearing it from the CTO that he is getting the complaints from a doctor or from a clinician, a lawyer who's having a bad experience from their house but I also know IT support is dealing with it often for You know, not having the right [00:02:00] information for customers, right? I'm really trying to understand what's going on. So definitely hearing it from all levels. So let's talk about observability, right? So observability has tended to mean, you know, it's kind of a more advanced version of monitoring, right?
[00:02:12] Monitoring typically means you're looking at the environment, you're kind of gathering metrics, but really observability is trying to tie that all together, right? And trying to take action based upon what's going on. So let's talk about that for a moment. Where do you feel like observability is different than monitoring?
[00:02:26] Okay.
[00:02:29] Patrick O'Brien: Well, thanks for getting me off my feet immediately. Where do I think it's different? I think a key is monitoring, you're typically, like you said, looking at a metric, a server is on or off, a server is running well or not, a user can get in or they can't. Observability is the entire life cycle.
[00:02:49] With Citrix specifically, it could be a user session. From their endpoint, over the web, over the wire, to their environment in the enterprise space, to the server, to the application, to the process, you can see all of it holistically and be able to see where there's a breakdown or where performance is really good.
[00:03:09] And then run the same process repeatedly through every user at the same time and you can see, is a part of the world having a problem? Is a specific process or a specific app? I think observability is the more holistic approach to just monitoring, in general.
[00:03:24] Al Solorzano: Yeah, and I think you nailed it when you talked about VDI specific observability or Citrix observability specifically because typically what I hear the word buzzword observability, right? We're typically talking about business to consumer applications, right?
[00:03:38] Somebody that's trying to click on a web page and the link takes a little longer to load or they're starting up a cart and the cart doesn't transact right in the system. But when we start talking about Citrix observability, what we're really talking about is that end user experience, the applications, everything that's involved from the endpoint all the way to the back end of the application and all the [00:04:00] way back to the user, right?
[00:04:01] Patrick O'Brien: Yeah, for sure.
[00:04:02] Al Solorzano: That's a big deal. So, you already talked about a couple of them, you already talked about, like, the user's network at the home, right? That really, we don't have any control over IT. What are some other areas that you typically are hearing from customers around problem areas around not having enough information?
[00:04:22] Patrick O'Brien: Well, you, the big one you just mentioned the support organization, they get a call about the user's network, and if they can't see any data on the session outside of their environment, there's not, like I said, not enough info on the network not enough info on which particular, say, they have 10 application servers in the environment, which one are they on?
[00:04:45] If the support team has to spend time troubleshooting to see where they're connected, what they're doing, that slows down remediation and impacts experience. So I think a big piece is through the infrastructure and specifically with Citrix through the VDAs that the user can be using, seeing which one they're on and getting all the telemetry. From there, it's important and a gap in many solutions today.
[00:05:08] Al Solorzano: Got it. So I'm going to put you on the spot right now. I got a question for you. So I'm a CTO, right? In my conversations, all I know is I get those complaints. The Citrix experience is horrible. What do I do? Where do I start? So, go ahead. Tell me, where do I start?
[00:05:27] Patrick O'Brien: You already have Citrix today in your environment?
[00:05:30] Al Solorzano: Yes, I do.
[00:05:31] Patrick O'Brien: Okay. Where are your users coming from?
[00:05:35] Al Solorzano: All over the place.
[00:05:37] Patrick O'Brien: All right. So home and office
[00:05:38] Al Solorzano: all over the place. I got India users doing development. I got remote workers all over throughout the entire global workforce. I have users working from home from different types of devices. They're coming in from Starbucks, I don't even know, help me out.
[00:05:54] Patrick O'Brien: Sure, do you know today or you want Citrix cloud or Citrix virtual apps and desktops on prem? [00:06:00]
[00:06:00] Al Solorzano: I am, in the cloud, I am ready to go, I've been keeping up to date with everything Citrix has been telling me about.
[00:06:05] Patrick O'Brien: Perfect. Let's log in and go to *Citrix Analytics*. Look, Citrix Analytics is the built in monitoring telemetry observability tool set in Citrix. There's a security component and a performance component. If you're getting complaints about the performance, let's start there. You can look at each end user if you have a specific complaint, say *Patrick O'Brien* calls complaining, you can look at Patrick's session, see what's happening.
[00:06:31] Is everything good? Maybe it's your home internet and we can look into that data. Yeah. If everything's not good and I see errors and alerts throughout the environment, Oh, maybe an application is misconfigured. Maybe a version of a piece of software is out of date and you'll have a lot of that information right there natively in analytics.
[00:06:49] I would start there personally because you get the most data at your fingertips immediately.
[00:06:58] Al Solorzano: That's it, you sold me, we're good. So no, you know, I think you hit it on the head, which is really, you got to be able to kind of gather the information first, right? You have to have a tool like Citrix Analytics that are going to bring that information, allow you to correlate some of that data together. Take some actions and honestly speaking, continually take actions, right?
[00:07:17] That same user that you may have fixed today and told them to move a little bit closer to their WiFi because they were out by the pool and then come in a little closer to get a little bit more bars on their WiFi connection might suddenly have a bunch of people working from, you know, working around the area that's taken down their internet connection for the day.
[00:07:34] So really it's kind of a repetitive process of having that information to be able to constantly correlate that data. So, you know, we talked about networking, what are some other areas that you think observability is going to try to find some information and try to give us some a little bit of where my problems might lie in my typical VDI is horrible experience.
[00:07:56] Patrick O'Brien: Sure, so the problem is [00:08:00] historically everybody's blamed Citrix for all the evils that befall the environment because it touches everything. It's touching the user, it's touching your active directory, it's touching your applications and desktops,
[00:08:11] Al Solorzano: infrastructure, cloud, or on prem, right? storage, profiles, everything.
[00:08:16] Patrick O'Brien: So you have everything and the next place to look very commonly is which part is driving the complaint is the log on time slow. Maybe your group policies are misconfigured or could be optimized. Maybe your application servers are constrained and maybe they need more resources, more memory, more CPU, that kind of thing.
[00:08:35] Your storage could be misconfigured and maybe it's causing, you know, bad routes to the data. If you're in the cloud, maybe your cloud networking is a little bit is tweaked or maybe needs to be adjusted. So there are a number of places to look and a platform like Citrix gives you the ability to see through very comprehensive logging, monitoring, and then analytics for observability, you have a very complete tool set to look at the entire life cycle of the session from the user first signing on through the log on.
[00:09:05] Every policy that process, is that slow? Nope, that's good, let's move to the next part. They go to launch an application. Did it launch well or did it take too long or did it fail? And if you have failures versus slow logon versus a good logon, you'll be able to capture that and the data is right there, present and available, especially in *Citrix Cloud*.
[00:09:23] Moving past that to looking at the, what's called the *VDA or the Virtual Delivery Agent*. That's the name in Citrix nomenclature for apps and desktops, essentially. You can look at those to see, are they performing well or not as expected? And if it's not as expected, you can make adjustments with your team intelligently.
[00:09:40] Are we needing to add more memory or optimize the storage or add more storage or update the hardware and all the way through to the application level, the process level, and really digging into it from there.
[00:09:52] Al Solorzano: Yeah, I know I recently had a conversation with an executive at a client and we were talking about the same exact topic, right? And [00:10:00] he was telling us about some of the problems that they were having with their environment and when I asked, how did you know where your problems are at? He's like, well, I'm kind of sort of guessing, right? I'm kind of guessing where my problems are based upon months and months and months worth of phone calls. Right?
[00:10:19] I'm thinking I have a particular network problem at one of my clients site at one of my sites. I think I have an infrastructure problem. I think I have a login time problem and like you mentioned, because it touches everything. Yeah, absolutely, all of those areas are potential areas of concern. But the reality is he didn't have enough information to make a true decision.
[00:10:40] So we started talking about, you do need to bring in some of these observability tools. You need to have better data so you can make better and informed decisions and then you got something to compare against, right? Because things are going to change. You're suddenly going to add more people to a branch office, you're going to have more workers be remote, you have different types of applications coming in the environment.
[00:11:00] So it's never a, Oh, hey, I ran the tool once, got the data that I needed and I can shut it down. It's constantly going to be running in your environment to help you find the next bottleneck, the next problem, because you're going to bring in a new application, you're going to bring in new users, and you really need to have that kind of data.
[00:11:16] So, yeah, I think that's important pieces there. So, when we talk about the Citrix analytics, like you mentioned, there's 2 pieces, there's security piece and the performance piece, we definitely been focusing on the performance piece. Let's talk about the security piece, what kind of data do you get on that?
[00:11:31] Patrick O'Brien: And I think that's arguably more important because while we care about providing a valuable user experience, or we put a lot of value into a good user experience, I should say, you know, it's important if your employees aren't happy, they're going to tell you. But at the same time, you need to know if the devices coming into your network are up to par.
[00:11:51] If users are working from home and they're bringing in something with malware on it or bringing it in your office even. You don't want that and *Citrix Security *[00:12:00] *Analytics* can offer a number of flags for things like out of date Windows version, or hey, there's known malware on this laptop, or the antivirus is out of date, and on and on and on.
[00:12:12] And when it comes to the security side, you know devices or data that are out of band outside of, you know, the enterprise standards, it will flag that and tell you up to and including preventing logon. Like it will stop them from getting into your environment until they take action, whether that's contacting the support desk or running an update.
[00:12:31] And Citrix will be able to tell the user, so they don't just get shut down and get upset. It tells them, your Windows is out of date, please click here to update it. So it can, it can start the ball rolling on those actions for you, reducing support time, reducing helpdesk, you know, overhead in general.
[00:12:48] Al Solorzano: Yeah, I know one of my favorite features is even just being able to log where users are coming in from, right? And so that the same user that's logging in from Los Angeles, California, can't possibly be logging in from Asia an hour and a half later, right? That's not technically possible. So being able to flag some of that data and take actions, I think that's a pretty good piece on the security side.
[00:13:09] Look, security is all about observability because they need data, right? That's why almost all of these security tools have logs and tons of logs. In fact, in some cases, too many logs and too much information, right? So when we start talking about having too much information, right? Do we find that in the Citrix tool set that we're getting too much information, or is it doing a pretty good job of distilling to the big stuff and then allowing you to get to the details later?
[00:13:36] Patrick O'Brien: Well, I think with some of the Citrix tools we just mentioned, like Citrix Cloud and some of analytics platforms and some of the telemetry there, I think it does a great job of keeping it at the high level but if you want too much data you crack open the standard Citrix logs and it's just walls of text. So you can get both flavors if you need specific you know, auditing, capabilities to be able to look at every single transaction in Citrix, you [00:14:00] have that.
[00:14:00] At the same time, analytics, I'll keep relying on that because it's one of my favorite features in the industry. You can go in and immediately see in security analytics, any red flags that came up in the last minute, hour, day, month, year.
[00:14:13] I mean, it goes back historically quite a bit to your threat level of choice, whether it's critical or high or medium or none, and you can sort it out based on category. You can sort performance analytics out based on errors versus warnings, similar to Windows Event Viewer, but in a more meaningful way. It's not just logs on a server. Now it's session behavior all the way through.
[00:14:37] Al Solorzano: So now, you know, you did talk about. The difference between leveraging the Citrix cloud capabilities versus say like an on prem deployment of Citrix virtual apps and desktop. So if I have a customer that is on prem traditionally for the management plane. What capabilities can I get out of the Citrix as a reality suite?
[00:14:58] Patrick O'Brien: Well for the user session, you have the traditional data you can capture through the net scalers. If they're logging into a net scaler in the storefront, log on time reports and I actually can't think of them. I'll stop my head, but there's a number of reports in Citrix director that offer that Citrix WEM or workspace environment manager gives you a lot of data on the infrastructure, you know, the windows servers, but I think you have an answer to this question since you're smiling, so I'll,
[00:15:31] Al Solorzano: Well, no, I mean, I think we're, we're showing this is live, right? We're having conversations because these are coming up, right?
[00:15:37] I think the answers are, you can get some data, right? But realistically, you're going to be probably looking at leveraging Citrix Cloud for a lot of those capabilities of the management plane. For those of you that have not gone down the path of leveraging Citrix Cloud for the management plane, definitely a lot of development, a lot of components are being developed there first, a lot of the services are there.
[00:15:58] And so you're seeing a lot more [00:16:00] advancements in speed of new data, right? The constant improvement, constant change type stuff is moving into their first and then they're bringing what they can from an on prem perspective. But the reality is, you know, if you're not leveraging Citrix Cloud as of right now, you probably should be starting to look at it because that's where the tools and those integrations are going to come into play.
[00:16:18] So I think that's probably the best answer I could give. Right? In terms of that case, it's like you can get some data, but realistically, you're going to have to get up to date with the cloud services for everything else.
[00:16:29] Patrick O'Brien: It is the home of the latest development, that's absolutely true. They are making strides, I don't want to besmirch Citrix here because they are making strides to kind of unify the platforms again and bring a lot of the development back down through the universal licensing. They're hoping to offer feature parity, but right now the latest features are in the cloud portal. Upside is it's hosted for you, so you don't have to install all of these tools to take advantage of them if you're on Citrix cloud, they host the analytics platform. They host a number of the logs and reports all for you through their console
[00:16:59] Al Solorzano: And site topic, not that hard of a migration. If it comes down to it, you need our help. e360 is here to help. So we'll throw that in that little as a little benefit. So we talked about observability.
[00:17:09] We talked about who it benefits. I'm going to talk about like from an end user, right? As an end user of this platform, right? Why do I want IT leveraging observability tools? What is it that's going to benefit me as an end user?
[00:17:28] Patrick O'Brien: Honestly, not getting stuck on hold, sending an email and waiting for an answer or calling the help desk and waiting on hold, those times are reduced significantly. Understandable, it's not the fault necessarily of support. You know, I'll be a very rational person I'm waiting on hold, I'm frustrated something's not working, but there might be another hundred or thousand people having problems at my company. With these tool sets and them being able to pick up my call and say, I see the problem already, your wireless latency is 500 [00:18:00] milliseconds, that's very poor performance. Try restarting your equipment at home. Great! I have a call to action. I can do something and possibly resolve my problem myself. So it empowers the user to be able to, you know, fix a problem potentially and reduces their time to remediation.
[00:18:19] Al Solorzano: Yeah. I think that's the same answer kind of pivoting it to the IT side, right? IT support is the same thing, right? I'm not going to call it self service, but it's being able to have a lot more data, having a lot more information. Are you seeing people leveraging some of the tools to simulate user login sequences and kind of do some testing and validation being proactive?
[00:18:42] Patrick O'Brien: I think, I mean, we do see it and I think everyone who uses those tools loves it and not enough people do.
[00:18:49] Al Solorzano: I'm going to agree with you, right? I think we see the features are there for you to be more proactive with understanding what your users are experiencing. It's a little bit of work, it is. It is a little bit of work to set it up, especially with customers that have like multifactor authentication on the outside, right?
[00:19:04] And dealing with security purposes. But, if you can simulate a user logging into your environment every couple of minutes to test your applications and have better data, why would you not do that? Right? Simulate the users and try to get some data. What are some of the, so I already mentioned MFA. What are some of the other ones that you typically hear why they haven't set it up?
[00:19:25] Patrick O'Brien: Why they haven't set up which?
[00:19:27] Al Solorzano: Like any of the automation simulation?
[00:19:29] Patrick O'Brien: It really, because not enough time, you know, there's not enough time in the day and a lot of, we'll say IT in general. Helpdesk behavior, administrator, you know, architect behavior is driven by what's the most pressing issue, and that pressing issue is typically driven by where's the loudest complaint coming from.
[00:19:50] So they go and fix something where they have to take time away from day to day fixing and firefighting to do something [00:20:00] proactive, and there's tremendous value in it, but unfortunately many groups don't get to see that until they're pressed by their users. So, that's the challenge and why people love calling firms like ours, we can save time, but not trying to sell anything here, just pointing out it's not enough minutes in the day, not enough hands.
[00:20:22] is typically what it comes down to because they are extremely nice to have and people typically deploy these feature sets and go, how did I live without this? And it's fantastic. We just have to do it.
[00:20:35] Al Solorzano: Perfect! So real quick, I'm going to challenge you on this one, Patrick. Here we go. We're going to go back and forth.
[00:20:41] You're going to pick an issue that you typically hear for customers when they talk about performance issues. So you're just going to give me one topic, right? Whatever it happens to be, profiles, whatever and we're going to go back and forth until we can't get to one. You ready?
[00:20:55] Patrick O'Brien: Sure.
[00:20:55] Al Solorzano: I'll start. Well, you already nailed one, so I'll give you a freebie. You already got first one, which is the network, right? The end user network performance issues.
[00:21:04] Patrick O'Brien: Yeah.
[00:21:04] Al Solorzano: That's number one. I'll take the next one, profiles. Size of profiles, information that's going into the login time for profiles. So all the location of the profiles, observability is going to help define some of that data and kind of tell you that, hey, some of these users have large profiles. So, you take the next one.
[00:21:21] Patrick O'Brien: Group policy, so processing all the potentially outdated and legacy *GPOs, group policy objects* that have existed in the environment. Maybe it's been built on top of for 15, 20 years, and I've got 20 years of junk you have to clean out. They're all processing and the user feels it when they sign in.
[00:21:40] Al Solorzano: Great one. Infrastructure, I'll go next. So, typically, sizing of infrastructure, the amount of applications, the size of the VMs. Very typically, we run into customers that have outgrown their original sizing for their deployment and so, observability is going to be able to give you some of that data. Maybe the applications are using more memory than you originally had set up.
[00:21:58] Scoped or planned for [00:22:00] maybe you're trying to understand that more people are using different applications. Common one, how many people are using multiple web browsers inside of their virtual desktops today, even on their physical desktops, how much RAM is being eaten up by those applications. So that's my next one.
[00:22:14] Patrick O'Brien: Application performance, so it's different from the infrastructure. The application itself could be throwing errors, could be running a stale process and it's hanging up on the application servers. That doesn't show up on an infrastructure report. So let's say you have a tool deployed in your environment to monitor the infrastructure, it might not catch an application or an application level issue. A specific process, a specific script is hanging, that's something that you can catch through the session data in Citrix, for sure.
[00:22:43] Al Solorzano: So I'm going to say you got me, Patrick. You win, you win this contest. You got all the ones I was thinking about. So definitely that was a good conversation. So yeah, I think that's going to wrap it up for today's tech session.
[00:22:55] I know I'm hoping that we, we got a little bit of information to you to explain the differences between. You know, what it means to monitor environment versus having some observability information and be able to take action on there and hopefully you're seeing that tools from Citrix Analytics, their performance and security tools are going to be able to help address a lot of that information and try to be more educated from what your problems really are, rather than just being obtuse and saying something is a horrible experience and really trying to get down to it.
[00:23:24] So for everybody, for Patrick, I want to say thank you very much for partaking in this as you always do, you're a great conversation. So I really do appreciate your time.
[00:23:30] Patrick O'Brien: Yeah, thanks, always a pleasure and I'm even going to punch up one more for Citrix here, because you missed it. The cool thing with these tools, especially with Citrix Cloud, it's a single pane of glass and I, as somebody who's had to slog through problems in data centers for many years, I don't like having to open 10 tools. I like one, if I can get away with it in Citrix, really, it gets you pretty far along with a single pane of glass.
[00:23:55] Al Solorzano: Right! Thank you for wrapping that up, Patrick. So for everybody here at [00:24:00] e360 please continue to watch our tech sessions and our podcasts that we have around all sorts of different topics that we're providing here at e360, make sure to check out our website, follow us on YouTube, check us out on LinkedIn.
[00:24:11] Hopefully we're getting a lot of information to you to make informed decisions and being more observable with where you're going. So thanks for your time today.
[00:24:19] Patrick O'Brien: Yeah.
[00:24:20] Al Solorzano: Thanks Patrick.
[00:24:23] ........
[00:24:23] Al Solorzano: ~do you get complaints around the user experience inside of your Citrix VDI session? ~
[00:24:24] ~Do you know the difference between monitoring an environment and having an observability tool? ~
[00:24:24] ~Do you know that Citrix observability can help find what your problems are in your environment?~
[00:24:24] ~Do you get complaints from end users around the experience in their Citrix VDI sessions?~
[00:24:24] ~Do you know the difference between observability and monitoring an environment? ~
[00:24:24] ~Do your users complain about the experience inside of their Citrix VDI sessions? ~
[00:24:24] ~Do you think you have a good understanding about monitoring versus observability and what it means to a VDI session? ~
[00:24:24] ~Do you understand that Citrix has a tool in Citrix Analytics that can get you better information and better observability about the user's experience?~
[00:24:24] ~Today, we're going to be talking about all of that on Tech Sessions Podcast. So check it out.~
[00:24:24] ~Do you get complaints from your end users about the experience inside of their Citrix VDI sessions? ~
[00:24:24] ~Do you have information to understand the difference between monitoring an environment and having observability information on the environment? ~
[00:24:24] ~Did you also know that Citrix has a tool, Citrix Analytics, that can give you that information and allow you to take actionable tasks against that?~
[00:24:24] ~We're going to cover all of that on tech sessions podcast today.~
[00:24:24] ~Let's get started. ~