Citrix Application Performance Management
Excitement Abounds Surrounding OPNET's Citrix Application Performance Monitoring Solution
July 18, 2012
By Carrie Schmelkin, TMCnet Web Editor
Citrix Synergy (News - Alert) 2012 – the event that helps IT professionals gain new knowledge, understanding, and insight into the key trends of the cloud era, mobile workstyles and cloud services – may be long over but the positive reactions to CX-Tracer, OPNET Technologies’ (News - Alert) solution which was demoed at the May event, are still coming in at lightning speed.
OPNET’s CX-Tracer, a solution that address the challenges surrounding troubleshooting Citrix application performance, is a breakthrough solution that provides end-to-end visibility of user transactions traversing a Citrix server, according to company officials.
“Our CX-Tracer product is the component that assists the person analyzing transactions – or the person looking at Citrix – to see through the XenApp server,” Bill Eastman, senior director of applications engineering, told TMCnet. “It gives someone the ability to help the person on the front-end who is complaining about end user performance figure out where the problem is really located and observe Citrix itself in the back end, and we are doing all of this through an extension of our APM (News - Alert) suite. It’s an extension of that where we are able to give them the true end user experience and show them what’s happening as far as where the bottlenecks are.”
“I saw a lot of excitement around CX-Tracer because it’s something that is needed in the marketplace,” he added. “It’s something needed out in the enterprises that are using Citrix because without it is very difficult to figure out what is going on beyond just Citrix.”
CX-Tracer leverages AppResponse Xpert’s industry leading analytics to isolate performance problems to application tiers or network infrastructure factors. It also pinpoints the root cause of performance problems for Citrix-hosted applications and automatically correlates front-end user sessions to the corresponding back-end application transactions – two tasks which allow for end-to-end analysis of individual Citrix user sessions.
One of the distinguishing factors of CX-Tracer, according to company officials, is its ability to show managers exactly what is happening on the back end and provide a true end-to-end analysis of applications. CX-Tracer can “see through” Citrix and follow a user from the front-end through the Citrix XenApp server to the backend.
The target customer is anyone with a Citrix XenApp server or, more simply, anybody with applications that needs them to perform – whether that is a large enterprise or medium business. OPNET offers a variety of ways that it can deploy its solution to make it affordable and scalable.
“The messaging we are trying to get across is that OPNET is a Citrix ready partner,” Eastman said. “We are a leader in the space and we want to work with leaders in the space. What we are trying to do is ensure that organizations out there can look at end-to-end response time, particularly with an emphasis on end user response time.”
“CX-Tracer is breakthrough; nobody else did it,” he added. “It’s something that is a critical need for Citrix users and those that are implementing Citrix. There were a couple of customers at Citrix Synergy that gave the typical story of ‘Our end users are complaining. They say Citrix is slow.’ There is a hierarchy of blame out there from the network is slow to Citrix is slow to the server is slow to the XenApp server is slow. Everybody blames everybody. What OPNET is able to do is get in there and tell you exactly where the problem really is and cut down dramatically on troubleshooting time. We monitor and we are proactive. The OPNET analytics provide the ability to do that very quickly and that’s what is resonating with the customers out there.”
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli