I’m a big fan of having the right tool for the job. Since the pandemic began, I’ve taken advantage of staying at home more to complete renovations around the house — tiling, electrical, plumbing, painting, and more. There’s just no substitute for a quality wet saw, beam level, wire stripper, wrenches, and everything else needed to get a job done properly, with results you can be proud of.
I think the same holds true for digital workspace solutions. With the right tools the knowledge of how to use them, monitoring your environment for optimal performance, availability, and user experience is seamless and integrated. The right tools also offer a more proactive approach to preventing many issues before they occur (and help quickly resolve those that do).
Citrix has three primary “monitoring” solutions for virtual app and desktop environments within the broader workspace: Citrix Director, HDX Insight, and Citrix Analytics. Let’s start off with a brief overview of each.
New to performance analytics? Learn the essentials in our comprehensive guide: Digital workspaces 2.0—Security and performance analytics.
An Overview of the Offerings
Citrix Director — This web-based daily monitoring console is included with all versions and editions of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. First introduced more than a decade ago, this offering enables both admins and help desk staff alike to view user session details and take action as required. Environmental trends and custom reports can also be created, as can health checks and alerts for the overall infrastructure. Learn more in our Citrix Director product documentation.
HDX Insight — This value-add offering provides end-to-end visibility from the network perspective for traffic passing through a Citrix ADC (which is most all traffic these days). Through reports, it helps admins answer questions such as “Which users are consuming the most bandwidth and why?” or “What are the highest roundtrip latencies experienced and why?” or “What is the traffic breakdown of virtual channel capabilities like printing, graphics, audio, etc.?” Learn more in our HDX Insight product documentation.
Citrix Analytics — This value-add offering is the newest of these three, but we have seen tremendous adoption and potential. Available in Performance Analytics (focused on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as of today) and Security Analytics (focused on Citrix Workspace), Citrix Analytics is a cloud-delivered service for cloud and on-premises environments that provides actionable insights. Leveraging machine learning, users are dynamically grouped by risk and performance scores with proactive reports, automated actions, and more to get the most out of your environment. Learn more in our product documentation.
Going One Click Further
Director is something that every Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment needs to keep the lights on and users productive (that’s why it’s included). If you’d like to take your environment to the next level in network visibility, however, we’d suggest looking into HDX Insight, as well. Finally, Citrix Analytics goes even further by making sense of all the data across your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment before making recommendations and telling you where to focus efforts with unique insights.
Here’s a chart that breaks down the offerings across several criteria:
| Criteria | Citrix Director | HDX Insight | Citrix Analytics |
| Purpose | Monitoring and troubleshooting for admins and help desk | Network visibility and reporting on HDX sessions | Quantifies user experience and security risk |
| Packaging | Included in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops with features varying by edition | Licensed with Citrix ADM | Add-on subscription for security, performance, or both |
| Alerting | Yes | No | Yes with intelligence |
| Automated Actions | No | No | Yes |
| Platform location | On-prem or cloud | On-prem or cloud | On-prem or cloud |
| Data sources | On-prem or cloud | On-prem or cloud | On-prem or cloud |
| Site aggregation | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Delegated administration | Yes | No | No |
| Prescriptive recommendations | Limited | Limited | Yes |
In summary, Director is essential and will show mostly the WHAT aspects of your environment. HDX Insight will show more WHAT aspects within the environment having a network focus. Only Citrix Analytics will show WHAT aspects along with detailed WHY aspects and includes configurable automation to effortlessly meet business objectives. The analytics space is a fast-growing one within the industry, and we anticipate this trend to continue given the amount of data generated in IT environments.
What’s Unique about Citrix Analytics for Performance?
The key differentiator is user experience scores that are dynamically generated for each user every seven days. This helps admins uncover which users need some help and why — often before they call the help desk.
Here are just a few examples of key differentiated value that is only available in Citrix Analytics for Performance:
Failure Insights: See how many user connections have failed due to brokered machines not accepting connections (black hole) and communication errors along the network path with recommended steps to correct.
Self-Service Queries: Run searches to uncover insights from the rich data set, including criteria such as gateway FQDN and endpoint location to correlate with session experience scores.
Try Citrix Analytics for Performance Today!
I hope you found this blog post helpful and have a better understanding of the true value that analytics solutions can deliver to your environment. Citrix Analytics for Performance gives admins insights and proactive next steps in ways that simply aren’t possible in other solutions.
For our Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops customers, I encourage you to visit https://analytics.cloud.com/ to try out the Citrix Analytics service today. See how much further you can take your environment with actionable insights.
