Citrix Director vs Performance Analytics for Monitoring
Now more than ever, organizations need to deploy applications and desktops to end-users so they can have a productive remote work environment. However, if the user experience is poor then you will need a solution to diagnose the issue. You’ll need a system that can help you easily monitor and report on user experience based on received data. This solution must be easily accessible, highly responsive, and have little to no errors.
Are Citrix Tools Vulnerable?
The recent Solarwinds Orion Platform breach caused alarm for many enterprises who use the network monitoring software. A hacker group breached the Solarwinds network and installed malware updates. Are Citrix monitoring tools vulnerable to the same type of attack? In short: yes. But, you can guard against these risks with an updated patch management and vulnerability management program.
This is where a monitoring tool can help. You may be familiar with Citrix Director, but what about Citrix Analytics for Performance (also known as Performance Analytics)? A newer tool from Citrix, Performance Analytics is a Citrix analytics service that enables you to monitor the performance of your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. It works across Citrix portfolio products and third-party products, providing a user experience score for every user who accesses apps and desktops from your on-premises deployment.
Ultimately, each tool has benefits that may serve your monitoring needs. So, which one should you use? Let’s dive into the definitions, pros, and cons of Performance Analytics vs. Citrix Director.
A Tale of Two Monitoring Tools
What is Citrix Director?
Citrix Director At A Glance
- What It Is: A monitoring and troubleshooting console for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops
- Who Uses It: Citrix Administrator, Help Desk Personnel
- What You Get: Real time performance data to help you troubleshoot issues, like failures and access problems
Citrix Director is a web-based monitoring console for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops that allows administrators to control and monitor the Site. Director uses a troubleshooting dashboard that provides real-time and historical healthcheck of the Citrix Virtual Apps or Desktops virtualization platforms. This feature allows admins to see failures in real time, giving you deep insight into what the end users are experiencing.
What kind of tool is it?
Citrix Director’s primary functions are administration and troubleshooting. It is built for Citrix administrators and help desk personnel. Citrix Director enables the help desk to do things like reset sessions and shadow users. It provides usage data including profile load, interactive session, brokering data, and session log on duration.
What Citrix Director cannot provide are deeper insights based on these usage statistics. It provides the “what,” not the “why.” For deeper understanding of user experience, we should look to Citrix Analytics for Performance.
What is Citrix Analytics for Performance?
Analytics for Performance At A Glance
- What It Is: A user experience analysis tool for optimizing your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops
- Who Uses It: Citrix Architect or Administrator, IT Management
- What You Get: Easy to view User Experience and Infrastructure dashboards, helping you analyze all available data in a single console
Analytics for Performance is a Citrix Analytics service offering that enables you to track, aggregate, and visualize key performance indicators for your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment.
This tool is part of Citrix Analytics, Citrix’s broader cloud-based service that works across Citrix portfolio products and third-party products. Performance Analytics gathers data from Citrix and third-party products (or data sources) and uses built-in Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to detect anomalous behavior of a user or any other entity. It then monitors and troubleshoots user sessions and views operational metrics for users and shares links across an organization that uses Citrix products.
What kind of tool is it?
Citrix Performance Analytics is a user satisfaction tool. It is designed to help your Citrix architects and IT management understand how satisfied end users are with the network environment and how well you are supporting these users. With the recent transition of many employees to a remote setting, user experience measurement is more important than ever.
Performance Analytics is all about diagnosing the user experience. The tool’s monitoring and reporting capabilities give a new perspective by showing a single pane of glass view of your entire network environment.
What are the differences between Citrix Director and Analytics for Performance?
Although both solutions provide the same data, Performance Analytics takes the data one step further by analyzing root causes and suggesting solutions.
Imagine that your users are experiencing a higher than average GPO processing time. Citrix Director can alert you to this issue. Performance Analytics can alert you to this issue, AND tell you why it is happening so you can spend less time troubleshooting and more time fixing the root issue.
Analytics is also more intuitive than traditional monitoring solutions, like Citrix Director. Citrix Director only monitors key resources in use within your environment, managed under a single Site. Citrix Analytics can aggregate all the Sites together and provide that one pane of glass view of everything in the environment across the entire company. This will allow your admins to monitor all factors of Citrix user experience proactively and quickly detect and resolve issues to minimize downtime.
In general, there can be a tendency to blame the Citrix environment when there is a performance issue anywhere in the infrastructure. Performance Analytics gives your Citrix administrators the tools to find out if it is certainly a Citrix issue or is there something else going on and they can use this data to prove it.
How Analytics for Performance Monitors User Experience
The Performance Analytics portal provides color-coded user experience scores for each UX Factor. A red user classification factor usually indicates a poor user experience. Within the tool, you can drill down to identify the actual factors and subfactors responsible for the poor user experience in your environment. These factors include:
Session Availability: The rate of failed session connections with respect to the total number of attempted session connections. What is the rate of users being able to successfully connect to the app or desktop? A poor Session Availability experience could indicate possible machine failure or client connection error.
Session Responsiveness: The screen lag that a user experiences while interacting with an app or desktop. How long does it take to launch an application? For example, a high number of poor users recorded for data center latency could indicate an issue with the server-side network.
Session Resiliency: The number of times the Citrix Workspace app auto-reconnected to recover from network disruptions. How is the user’s network connection at home? If users experience network disruptions, they will continue to see the current application screen until it auto reconnects.
Session Logon Duration: The time taken to launch a session. How long does it take for a user to log in? For example, if a user logs in, steps away briefly, and then returns to see they are still not logged in, there is a possible login script issue.
Who Should Use Analytics for Performance?
If you’re like most organizations, the idea of receiving additional user experience data is a welcome one. Performance Analytics will benefit nearly any organization. However, you should definitely consider if your company fits any of these categories.
You have a large company with many site aggregates. Performance Analytics will aggregate all locations to give your administrator a single pane of glass view for total environment health. While you can get this information out of Citrix Director, it’s simply not as intuitive. Performance Analytics provides a comprehensive, top-down environment view.
Your user population is geographically diverse. Analytics performs wonderfully when diagnosing remote user issues. If you have users all over the country or globe, the tool can monitor and report on their network experience from anywhere in the world. Conversely, if most of your users are in a single office or location, Citrix Director will do the job.
You’re receiving remote user complaints about application or network performance. Are your users experiencing slow session logon duration, poor session responsiveness (latency), high session failures and so on? Performance Analytics can drill down and pull solid evidence that a user’s experience is poor and pinpoint why a performance metric is taking longer than usual. This eliminates any guessing you once may have had to do when troubleshooting performance issues using Citrix Director.
You value detailed user experience data. Before making the shift from Director to Analytics, you must consider how important user experience monitoring is to your organization. How granular do you need this data to be? Citrix Analytics for Performance is licensed on a per user basis. It can be purchased as an add-on to an existing on-premises or cloud service Citrix deployment or with new purchases. On the other hand, Citrix Director is free, perpetual, and does not have any subscription licensing.
Make the Best Decision for Your Business
Performance Analytics makes it easy for IT management to see key performance metrics that make the user experience great - or not so great. It will help you realize the kind of user experience the Citrix environment is delivering to your users. If your organization values this type of digital workspace data, the tool may be worth the investment.
November 5, 2020
