AppEnsure
Minimizing Application Loading and Latency Times in Citrix Deployments

Virtualization is the wave responsible for the dynamic shift from traditional methods of application and desktop delivery. Citrix, a significant part of this change, has enhanced enterprises with its capability to securely deliver Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). “Since last decade, enterprises adopting Citrix often hear users complain about delays in the response of application or desktop delivery, and applications freezing,” begins Colin L.M. Macnab, CEO and Co-Founder, AppEnsure. The slowing of response, despite on boarding many tools, concerns IT operations teams as it degrades application efficiency, challenging the overall performance level and productivity of an enterprise. AppEnsure, an end-user centric Application Performance Management (APM) solution provider, determines the root cause of applications freezing by automatically analyzing the topology in terms of throughput and response time to enhance the performance of the application. “In real-time, AppEnsure discovers the user’s activity and topology from end-to-end to build an instantaneous view of the response time hop by hop,” says Macnab.

AppEnsure, an APM solution, proactively maximizes the performance and efficiency of the Citrix environment. It delivers unprecedented end-to-end visibility by automatically correlating every user and VDI’s access of backend infrastructure. The offering measures the backend response time for each user accessing any application, baselining the latency for every VDI screen of the customer at a given time. The solution also notifies the IT operations team of response-time issues degrading the customer experience. This enables them to resolve the issues, preventing workflow inefficiencies. As an issue starts deteriorating the performance of applications by slowing down the response-time, the team can leverage AppEnsure to gain a real-time overview of the topology, helping them identify degraded components in the delivery of the application through measuring the change in latency of each element. “If an active directory is no longer responding, then we will be able to see that in real-time and IT ops can act on it immediately. This reduces by 90 percent the time to route a trouble ticket to the technologists and network-engineering teams, directing them to the specific component IP address and determining the root cause affecting the end user’s experience,” says Macnab.

AppEnsure’s approach provides unprecedented end-to-end visibility for Citrix delivered applications or desktops empowering our customers to resolve user experience related issues 10X faster

One customer, a hospital group was having problems delivering EMR/EHR and other health applications to various locations within their system due to widely varying load and response times. The customer had spent huge amounts of resources trying to determine the issue, yet was unable to resolve the performance variability issues. With AppEnsure deployed in their environment, the client was able to discover the issues and root cause within hours of first deployment. The solution highlighted and traced the elements slowing the delivery, supporting their resolution of the issues quickly, providing a result that greatly improved Clinician efficiency and enhanced the patient experience across locations.

The AppEnsure architecture leverages lightweight agent technology where the agent resides on an end user’s device and in the tiers of applications, enabling IT operations tracking a user’s activity in an application. With real-time visibility of a user’s activity, the solution correlates the end user response time with the application-delivery infrastructure performance, providing contextual and actionable intelligence to IT. “AppEnsure’s approach provides unprecedented end-to-end visibility for Citrix delivered applications or desktops empowering our customers to resolve user experience related issues 10X faster,” says Macnab.

In the future, on the next-generation of virtualization, Macnab states that AppEnsure will be able to resolve the problems in an end-to-end delivery chain automatically, guaranteeing response-time SLA’s.