This is a guest blog post by Trentent Tye, Senior Technical Specialist, ControlUp.

Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub…

“Lub-dub” is a common way to describe the sound of a heartbeat.

Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.

It’s an interesting sound!

There are a lot of things about the sound of a heartbeat that can give us information. When a heartbeat is slow and constant, the heart is probably resting. If its tempo starts to pick up, then we can assume something exciting is happening. If the “lub-dub” is quiet or weaker, that could be an indicator that something is wrong. And when it’s not beating at all, well, then you know you’re in trouble.

The best tool for monitoring a heartbeat is an electrocardiogram (EKG). It records the electrical activity of the heart and displays it. The display is a graph that contains information that can be interpreted by a doctor. The basics of the graph’s output look like this:

Source: Anatomy & Physiology, Connexions (http://cnx.org/content/col11496/1.6/), Jun 19, 2013.

You can suss out an abundance of information from this simple graph! One of the more interesting things about an EKG is that it does both real-time monitoring — displaying the “lub-dub” as it occurs — and historical monitoring! The graphs of your previous heartbeats are stored for review later.

Both real-time and historical monitoring are critical. Imagine waiting five minutes to get a display showing you how your heart was beating … five minutes ago; this would be near useless in emergency situations! If you had to defibrillate someone and then had to wait five minutes to see if their heart started beating, it would be catastrophic. At the same time, real-time monitoring — while useful in an emergency — doesn’t help establish baselines. What does the heart’s typical beat look like? Is the real-time data reflecting an abnormality or is it routine? With historical data, you can review this information and understand what’s “normal” for this heart.

This brings us to the heart of remote access: Citrix.

Citrix environments — whether they are cloud or on-premises — contain a wealth of components. Like people, each Citrix environment is unique. From the way users log in, how they connect to their resources, which VDA their session lands on, to the hardware they are using all make up an environment’s particular characteristics. There are so many factors that trying to ensure a nice, stable, heartbeat for your Citrix environment can be a difficult job.

Citrix has excellent products for the healthcare market. Ensuring secure, remote access to information has always been a hallmark feature of Citrix. Before COVID-19, monitoring the heartbeat of your Citrix environment was easily done with tools like ControlUp.

But then 2020 and the pandemic reared their heads, forcing organizations to pivot and enable remote access en masse, as users migrated from the traditional office to the home office. Suddenly, just monitoring the heartbeat of the datacenter was insufficient. Admins needed to monitor the heartbeats of the home office — thousands of them — too.

Enter ControlUp: Your On-Call, Home Office Citrix Doctor

Monitoring remote devices is challenging. If the device is a user’s personal computer, installing endpoint management software can cause a conflict of wants between the user and the corporation. Users want privacy and to use their devices however they see fit. Organizations want to control the device to ensure that key metrics and SLAs are met and that the device is following the organization’s security protocols. And corporations want to monitor user activity on their devices to ensure compliance with things like data retention and reduce or warn of detected illicit activity.

Providing thousands of laptops or devices to users may not be the most financially sound decision when users already have devices that they can use. Citrix comes in handy here with Citrix Workspace app or Citrix Workspace app for HTML5. By having people simply download the app, users can connect to their resources securely and avoid having to install endpoint management software.

But now the challenge of end-user devices and the environment in which they operate might be sub-optimal. These deficiencies can cause a poor digital employee experience (DEX). Lag, latency, or just contention on the end-user’s access point can all cause a degraded experience. Is there a way to monitor some basic information on the user’s home environment that can assist the administrator in troubleshooting?

House Call! It’s ControlUp Remote DX

ControlUp has developed a technology that we call Remote DX. It helps administrators in determining whether poor DEX is related to abnormalities in the user’s remote work environment by providing insight into what is causing trouble.

Installing Remote DX is a snap. It’s simply an add-on to the Citrix Workspace app. Remote DX opens a virtual channel where it feeds information about the user’s environment to the ControlUp agent on the remote session. ControlUp Solve reads this data and displays that information for the administrator — in real time — to assist in diagnosing issues.

How ControlUp Remote DX Works

Additional columns are presented in ControlUp Solve, as well as a beautiful topology diagram that gives you a visual representation of the home environment and how it’s performing.

Just like an EKG, ControlUp Remote DX operates in real time and captured data can be reviewed to spot trends and plan for future events. With multiple metrics being measured simultaneously, ControlUp Remote DX helps identify where pain points exist in home networks. By tying into ControlUp Automate, you can automatically alert users if their Wi-Fi signal strength drops, measure latency to the local router, or determine exactly which wireless access point your device is connected to — even in a mesh network!

Healthcare Apps Are Critical

Depending on the source, the average 9-1-1 response time in the United States is around 10 minutes. The time between dialing 9-1-1 to the arrival of help on the scene is critical. And one of the most important factors in saving lives is reducing that response time.

This is much like being notified that a healthcare application is unavailable. The longer an application is unavailable, the more your users are impacted, and the longer it takes to restore service. If you can get notified quickly about an outage, the more quickly you can respond, and the fewer people will be negatively affected.

ControlUp Scoutbees offers unprecedented visibility into the availability of your Citrix applications. When a critical healthcare application, such as Epic or Cerner, is unavailable, it can mean that your most critical processes are crippled. Healthcare organizations typically have downtime procedures that are arduous and prone to error, mostly just due to the human element. This can slow an organization by limiting the number of patients it can see in a day, reduced clinician efficiency, rework from data entry, and increased stress overall.

Scoutbees offers numerous tests to track availability. From a non-functioning Citrix application to device availability, ensuring proper name resolution, or doing a POST command against a web service — Scoutbees is THE TOOL to monitor availability of your infrastructure. Tests can originate from what we call “hives” external to your network, ensuring the tests go through the same processes as your remote workforce!

Reduce Wait Times

When I worked in healthcare, one of the biggest problems I faced was a mathematics challenge. This was the problem:

I had a user population that logged into their Citrix applications 80,000 times per day.

EIGHTY THOUSAND!

If the logon time is 20 seconds (average) per logon, how much time is spent by people waiting for the application to appear after clicking the icon?

I did the math, and it came out to ~444 hours! Put another way, each day, 18.5 days’ worth of potentially productive time was lost to waiting.

The pressure was on to reduce this time as much as possible. And the first stop on reducing wait times? Review the data in ControlUp.

Out of the box, ControlUp breaks down logons to high-level categories for easy targeting of why some categories appear to be painful. ControlUp has done a ton of research on understanding why certain categories have longer logon times. And that research has been put into one of the most comprehensive and best tools for analyzing logon duration: the Analyze Logon Duration script action.

The Analyze Logon Duration script action can break down components in your environment in a much more granular way, including identifying some specific components that cause the largest delays.

By breaking down the high-level categories into individual components, ControlUp shows you things like whether your printer policies are adding to logon delays. Are you using FSLogix as your profile management solution? The ALD script can break down how long FSLogix took to mount your user profile. Finally, there is a time delta between when you click on an icon in Citrix StoreFront or Citrix Workspace app and when the session gets initiated — ControlUp can measure that, too!

In my math problem, ControlUp gave us the tools needed to quickly identify the troubling components and investigate their configuration for optimal performance. In the end, we managed to reduce our logon times to about 9 seconds, on average. Going back to our math problem, we reduced users waiting for applications by about 200 hours per day!

To see ControlUp in action and how it can help you and your Citrix environment, register for the HIMSS 21 virtual event! And don’t forget to download ControlUp and get started on your 21-day unlimited trial today.