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Best Practices to Extend and Maximize Citrix DaaS

February 8, 2023

Many Citrix shops have shifted their operations to Citrix Cloud in recent years. Since every journey is different, some have moved their entire infrastructure to Azure to realize the benefits of the Cloud. Others have taken a hybrid approach to safeguard sensitive data and streamline application delivery.

No matter where or why, a major deciding factor was likely the end-user experience.

When discussing the idea of a significant transformation like migrating critical services to the Cloud, the goal is to ensure that the end-users will have an experience that meets or exceeds their expectations. Throughout the years, Citrix has evolved to meet the needs of its customers with capabilities to manage and maintain end-user experience.

As the industry standard for end-user experience, our platform Login Enterprise complements and extends Citrix capabilities.

Here are three key areas that Login Enterprise benefits Citrix users:

1. Proactive Monitoring

Many organizations were forced to act quickly, evaluate, plan, design, and implement Citrix DaaS environments because of the pandemic in 2020.

Three years later, many of those environments are vastly different—whether that includes service expansions, repatriation of resources back on-prem, or upgrades to the OS or key applications.

As the environment changes, so do performance and user experience.

Traditional monitoring tools only provide the capability to investigate and remediate issues once end-users alert IT, leaving a gap in proactivity and limiting IT’s ability to catch these issues before anyone ever experiences them.

At the end of the day, end-users care most about whether they can efficiently do their jobs using the applications they rely on to contribute to the business.

When the performance of key transactions degrades, our Virtual Users notify IT immediately, empowering administrators to take immediate action.

For example, rather than a physician calling the help desk to notify an admin of unacceptable end-user experience issues, our Virtual Users send automated alerts to get in front of the degradation and provide insights for remediation before the physician ever experiences it.

2. Capacity Planning

Because of the urgency to shift to the Cloud to rapidly support remote workers, many organizations relied solely on reference architectures to construct and implement their virtual environments.

While these are a great place to start, every technology stack varies: from its OS and security agents to its antivirus solutions, applications, etc.

Reference architectures are unable to cover the unique qualities of each environment. The same can be said for on-prem hardware guidance.

Even if reference architectures included those agents or unique applications, they are only accurate for so long. Every environment is much different than it was during its rollout, so it is critical to consistently baseline performance and capacity.

Change lowers capacity impacting performance and, ultimately, the total cost of ownership.

The value-add between the Cloud and on-prem environments is different. In the Cloud, you can compare and choose the right instance type based on your unique workload, considering the price-to-performance ratio.

On-prem, where hardware expansions can take months to get on the floor, it means you can accurately predict when those investments will be required.

For more information on Capacity Planning, check out my friend Paul’s blog. His article discusses the capacity challenges associated with Cloud and on-prem environments and outlines Login Enterprise’s ability to identify which workloads are suitable for the Cloud and which workloads are best suited on-prem.

3. Cost Optimization

One of the great benefits of the Cloud is on-demand provisioning. You no longer need to pay for resources unless you use them, which is a huge cost-saving benefit. But still, a gap remains.

How are organizations choosing the correct instance for their workload? With the myriad of instance sizes available, there is a paradox of choice.

As mentioned, capacity has consequences on performance and cost. Our Virtual Users are great at piloting change—new hardware, new applications, new collaboration tools, or new security agents.

For example, A/B comparisons can be used to analyze the performance of Dell vs. IBM servers, the overhead from BitDefender vs. CarbonBlack, or the overall performance impact of using Teams vs. Webex.

We eliminate guesswork from the equation and provide objective, actionable data to simplify complex technology decisions. Because they operate in the same fashion as your end-users, you are provided a “know before you go” insight that is unique to Login Enterprise.

Any combination of instance size, hardware type, storage, or networking can be analyzed and optimized to find the right cost-to-performance balance unique to each workload.

Especially in the era of doing more with less, constantly reevaluating capacity, performance, and end-user experience is crucial to provide insight into areas for cost optimizations.

Citrix Leverages Login Enterprise for Their Products

Login VSI helps organizations proactively manage the performance, cost, and capacity of their virtual desktops and applications wherever they reside. The Login Enterprise platform is 100% agentless and used in all major VDI and DaaS environments, including Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

Citrix trusts Login Enterprise to maintain the peak performance of its own digital workspaces and guarantees the quality of its products. Login VSI and Citrix recently connected to discuss various use cases where Login Enterprise is used within their Q&A process in our recent webinar.

“You can really utilize a tool like Login Enterprise for replacing real users with workloads to understand scaling and sizing. It is always good to experiment with your specific situation, but this guide helps to set a benchmark. Then, you can take it a step further by simulating your workloads, and lastly, test your environment and monitor to ensure everything is going well,” says Rody Kossen, Senior Principal Quality Engineer at Citrix.

Want to learn how we can extend capabilities in your Citrix environment? Connect with a Login Enterprise expert today!

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