Troubleshooting Citrix Application Performance

Challenges of Troubleshooting Citrix Application Performance

Citrix offers significant benefits to IT organizations but alters the performance troubleshooting process due to its unique architecture.

• Citrix acts as a proxy for back-end applications, relaying information between the user and the back-end tiers that process user transactions
• It is difficult to relate user traffic on the front-end to proxied sessions on the back-end
• The lack of an end-to-end view of user transactions makes it difficult to identify and troubleshoot end-user experience problems
• By default, problems are typically blamed on the Citrix tier or ‘The Network’

CX-Tracer: End-to-End Performance Visibility in
Citrix Environments

CX-Tracer is a breakthrough solution that provides end-to-end visibility of user transactions traversing a Citrix server.

• CX-Tracer leverages AppResponse Xpert’s industry leading analytics to isolate performance problems to application tiers or network infrastructure factors
• Pinpoints the root cause of performance problems for Citrix-hosted applications
• Automatically correlates front-end user sessions to the corresponding back-end application transactions
• This enables end-to-end analysis of individual Citrix user sessions
• CX-Tracer is complementary to and extends your existing investment in Citrix monitoring solutions such as Citrix EdgeSight™

Before deploying CX-Tracer, it is difficult to identify the back-end traffic that corresponds to a specific user

CX-Tracer correlates user traffic and tracks performance of individual user transactions

Benefits

• Accelerate troubleshooting by rapidly pinpointing root causes of Citrix end-user experience problems
• Clearly prove when the Citrix infrastructure is not the problem
• Eliminate “finger-pointing” among teams
• Use a single solution to drill into the performance of the network, Citrix, database, and other application tiers
• Gain visibility into individual user's Quality of Experience for Citrix-hosted applications

Key Features

• Trace user transactions through the Citrix tier and extract only related back-end transactions
• Continuously monitor end-to-end Citrix user performance
• Store Citrix performance metrics and related packets for subsequent troubleshooting
• Use intuitive dashboards and visualizations tailored for end-to-end Citrix analysis

Compare CX-Tracer to other solutions

• Traces transactions through all tiers, correlating a front-end user session to back-end traffic
• Provides broadest scope of monitoring for Citrix-hosted applications with coverage of the network, Citrix tier, database, and other application tiers. Other tools provide siloed views
• Reports on front-end network metrics as well as back-end response time and statistics. Other vendors are often strong in only one area
• Performs packet-level analysis of Citrix ICA channel performance. Other tools provide limited insight into the protocol
• Complements and extends your existing investment in Citrix monitoring solutions

Integrations

• One-click integration with AppTransaction Xpert for forensic (packet-level) analysis of back-end transactions executed by the Citrix tier
• One-click integration with AppTransaction Xpert for forensic analysis of front-end Citrix ICA sessions
• One-click integration with AppResponse Xpert’s database performance module for analysis of back-end database transactions
• Integration with AppInternals Xpert for deep monitoring and troubleshooting of back-end application tiers
• Integration with AppSensor Xpert for broad infrastructure monitoring