Service, Availability & Performance - Best Practices for Remote Working

---

Intro

Innovative technologies are making telecommuting and virtual collaboration easier and more effective than ever. More and more businesses are becoming reliant on Remote Working (or Remote Access) Services such as Citrix Remote to allow staff access to required workspaces and applications, wherever they’re located.

Employees now expect the same functionality from a remote working service as they’d achieve onsite. Whether working from home or out on technical field operations, staff working outside the office environment aren’t permitted to achieve less. When access fails, so does productivity, creating major problems for the business. IT support teams are particularly impacted, lacking the correct tools to diagnose and resolve remote working issues and delays.

Standard monitoring approaches are failing remote virtualized solutions

Smart businesses want all employees to experience equal performance of required platforms and systems, regardless of location. Remote Working systems are often installed at huge expense, however measuring their performance can be extremely challenging. Technical teams are often frustrated by their inability to validate or quantify the difference in end user experience at each working location. This leads to further challenges for staff and management.

The majority of monitoring solutions cannot provide an application view inside a Citrix remote access (or similar) system. Most application performance monitoring tools use an agent led, web-based approach, whether they incorporate a RUM (Real User Monitoring) or synthetic method. Unfortunately, this approach is redundant when faced with the functionality of a Citrix session virtualisation, during which applications are streamed from a centralised location. Even when a monitoring agent is placed within the application on the host server, it’s unable to measure the quality of service experienced by the end user (i.e. the screen updates sent to the user device by Citrix).

As a result, IT teams are often unable to quantify, understand or diagnose issues raised by remote staff. When employees working from remote offices experience difficulties accessing or using internal systems via remote desktops, businesses suffer. Remote user productivity decreases, a pause in field operations and the diversion of IT resources from revenue generating activities to system bug resolution can all result.

Solutions

Remasys’ monitoring experts work with businesses to understand their critical user journeys. As a technology agnostic, agentless solution, our Eagle-i monitoring service overcomes the weaknesses of agent-based solutions to deliver effective monitoring of a Citrix remote access system. This is achieved by using a ‘through the glass’, screen-based interaction with an underlying system, similar in concept to Citrix’s virtual application delivery.

Eagle-i engages with the system as an end user would, enabling complex insights into end user experience. Businesses also benefit from a deep understanding of how their remote access systems are functioning across all employee locations and the enterprise as a whole.
Critical user journeys, such as accessing ERP applications, are automated using Eagle-i.

At scheduled intervals, 24 hours a day, these journeys are run, collecting performance and availability metrics. This active monitoring approach allows identification of issues before they affect the end user. This provides support teams with valuable time to resolve issues before they generate detriment to the business. In addition, Eagle-i provides visual evidence of issues, with video recording of user journeys.