Citrix Application Performance Management
OPNET Solves Citrix-Related Application Performance Bottlenecks
May 23, 2013
By Ashok Bindra, TMCnet Contributor
Although Citrix XenApp empowers users with on-demand self-service to enterprise applications, troubleshooting application management and monitoring-related problems can be daunting and time consuming. The success largely depends on the experience of the analyst.
A post on OPNET Technologies’ (News - Alert) Application Performance Matters blog shows that slowness across Citrix servers can be due to oversubscribed server in terms of CPU or memory, the WAN connection between the user and the XenApp server may be congested, or the backend application may be over utilized. The blog post suggests that if the analyst does not see any obvious problems, then the next step is to take a closer look at the individual user sessions.
Typically, investigating user transactions in Citrix involves downloading the packet data at each hop along the path between the end-user, the XenApp server, and the backend application. “Packet analysis across Citrix XenApp is always a time consuming process that is sometimes impossible (e.g. when the packets aren't available, or the payload is encrypted),” wrote Matt and Janet.
Even when the data is available to analyze, the interpretation of the data is subjective. In other words, there is no common information shared between the front-end Citrix user session packets and the backend application traffic. The mapping between front-end Citrix session and backend application boils down to an educated guess, at best, according to the bloggers. Consequently, “analyzing user transactions was seen as a “hail mary pass” that should be approached with caution,” the post added.
However, to address this problem, OPNET’s recently released product, CX-Tracer, drastically changes the approach to Citrix monitoring and troubleshooting.
As per the description, the CX-Tracer automatically traces every end-user transaction through the Citrix server and into the backend application with perfect accuracy. Identifying the root cause of a performance bottleneck with CX-Tracer is much faster than the old workflow. In fact, a root cause determination can be made within a few minutes. After being alerted to a problem, the troubleshooter can jump directly to a clean, end-to-end transaction trace that spans from the desktop, through the XenApp server and into the backend application. This transaction trace will conclusively point the finger at the bottleneck. Most often the slowness is related to the backend application rather than the Citrix server or the WAN connection. In this case, CX-Tracer automatically integrates with OPNET's APM (News - Alert) suite to correlate the user transaction with delays in SQL and other application protocols.
Last summer, OPNET was positioned by market research firm Gartner (News - Alert) in the Leaders Quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring” report. According to Gartner, it evaluated 14 vendors in this report, and recognized eight in the Leaders Quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute.
OPNET’s chairman and CEO Marc Cohen, commented at the time of the recognition, “We are very pleased that OPNET has been recognized by Gartner as a leader in the rapidly growing APM market. A core part of OPNET’s business strategy has been to be a market leader in APM, both in terms of innovation and market share.”
Edited by Jamie Epstein