Network Diagramming Channel Feature

OPNET Explores Citrix Technology Pain Points and How its CX-Tracer Can Help

By Carrie Schmelkin
TMCnet Web Editor

While Citrix technology affords data center managers with a plethora of benefits – particularly its ability to allow companies to deliver stellar results for customers – one of the chief drawbacks of this technology is that managers can end up losing end-to-end visibility into their networks.

Accordingly, starting last week and running until next week, OPNET Technologies (News - Alert) is holding CX-Tracer Web Briefings, briefings that touch upon the root causes of performance problems for Citrix-hosted applications and demonstrate how OPNET’s CX-Tracer can bring transparency to Citrix performance issues.

“CX-Tracer is a new capability of our application performance management technology suite that is targeted specifically at a very hard to deal with use case for people who own and manage Citrix technology,” Russ Elsner, vice president of application performance management at OPNET, told TMCnet. “What we want to do is introduce the concept, the technology and the solution to our existing customer base and the broader community of Citrix users.”

“When you employ Citrix technology, it comes with a lot of benefits; there are a lot of really positive reasons to deploy Citrix,” he added. “However, it also comes with a downside and one of the downsides is that by the nature of the technology you lose end-to-end visibility. So, in order to obtain the benefits of Citrix, you wind up giving up this end-to-end visibility which makes troubleshooting problems exceptionally difficult.”

OPNET sets out to rectify this problem through its CX-Tracer, a solution released this January that is specifically designed to recover that visibility and provide that end-to-end visibility into user transactions in the presence of Citrix. Thanks to the offering, users can have all the benefits afforded by Citrix without the downside of the loss of visibility, Elsner said. 

According to OPNET, one of the most common things that the network diagramming solutions provider hears is that enterprises are experiencing a lack of visibility with Citrix. Since almost all major enterprises have some amount of Citrix in their environment, it has become very common for businesses to express concern that their users are “screaming” about performance problems and the enterprise doesn’t have a good way to solve those issues, Elsner said.

“A lot of times the network team or the Citrix team suspects it’s not their fault- that it’s not Citrix that is causing the problem – but they have no way to defend themselves,” Elsner said. “The default assumption by everyone involved is that Citrix or the network must be slow so it’s now up to the Citrix or network teams to either identify what the problem is or prove that it’s not their problem and that’s the part that has been very difficult for them. They wind up getting blamed for problems that they suspect aren’t really theirs but they don’t have any evidence to prove that. That’s the specific use case the CX-Tracer resolves.”

“It allows those teams the ability to establish if there is a problem, decide what is causing it and if it’s not their problem get it to the right team,” he added.

From teams who own the Citrix installation themselves to network operations teams to whoever owns the SLA for application delivery, OPNET’s ongoing Web briefings can benefit a variety of individuals. The last briefing, taking place Feb. 28 at noon EST, will include a demo of how CX-Tracer can bring transparency to Citrix performance issues, automatically correlate front-end user sessions to the corresponding back-end application transaction, and quickly determine why performance is slow, whether the problem originates with the client, network, server, or application.

As OPNET gears up for its final briefing in this series, it looks back on what has made briefings like these so popular.

“These tend to be popular because we do these for things that are identified pains and things that people recognize,” Elsner said. “It speaks to a fairly obvious and well-known team and we tend to do these on things that we have sort of a unique perspective on. We are not the 12^th company to come out with something in this field, that this is really a novel approach. Those two things together – the fact that this is a day-to-day pain point for a lot of organizations and they haven’t found a good solution to this point – tend to be two reasons these Web briefings draw large crowds.”

To register for the final briefing, click here.