Creating Productive Digital
Workspaces with SysTrack and
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops
Remote work isn’t going anywhere—and organizations increasingly don’t want it to. But they are facing an unprecedented challenge: keeping workers productive when traditional on-premises IT oversight isn’t an option. Use pattern changes and network problems can slow down devices, which in turn slows down remote employees who are already dealing with personal chores, their
children’s needs, barking dogs, and new work routines. This paper explores how Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Lakeside Software’s SysTrack dovetail to provide a better remote work experience for end users as well as constant monitoring of performance to keep IT on top of any problems that may occur.
Understanding the New Normal in IT
Remote access patterns
Remote work is the new normal and all indications are that it will continue to be the main mode of work for knowledge workers. Most companies are enthusiastically on board with this phenomenon, due to the myriad advantages they derive from remote work. These include lower office-related costs, the ability to set up location-agnostic teams, and saving employees commute time, to name a few.
However, this wholesale move to remote work has upended existing IT setups. An increase in remote work means new endpoints and increased deployments of virtualization solutions such as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, which offers a way to provide a consistent and secure IT experience for users at home. You can deploy the solution as a cloud service and as an on-premises product, which gives employees the freedom to work from anywhere, on any device, while bringing down IT costs. You gain the ability to deliver Windows, Linux, web, and SaaS applications, or full virtual desktops from any cloud: public, on-premises, or hybrid.
Amidst all this change and the rush to remote work, IT teams have had to scramble to provide access to systems and databases for remote workers in a short time. This could be on a company-provided device or an
employee-owned device, and typically over consumer-level internet connections. Users are sometimes
juggling multiple devices to get work done, while expecting the remote-office IT experience to match their consumer technology experiences.
This gives rise to new issues, as not all devices or networks are created equal. Employees may face a lag in connecting or retrieving information, and often the new remote system doesn’t work with the same efficiency as the more controlled, closed environment of the office.
Root cause analysis of problems
When employees face slowdowns or access issues, their first port of call is their IT contact to get them up and running as soon as possible. With so many variables across remote users’ hardware and software, this is sometimes quite a challenge for IT. It’s not always easy to ascertain exactly where in the chain endpoint the slowness is coming from. IT teams need to have the correct data at their disposal to solve the problem remotely.
For this to happen, the correct monitoring systems need to be put in place. That means intelligent systems that use the best of available technologies to gather, parse, and analyze the data, as well as provide warnings proactively. One of the cornerstones of a great end-user experience for IT is the speed and smoothness with which systems and applications can be accessed and run.
Why End-User Experience Matters
The advantages of a great end-user experience
Your people are your strategic advantage. Each company needs to provide optimal working conditions for its employees and a great end-user IT experience does just that. It optimizes users’ experience and makes it that much easier for them to get their work done—better, faster, and with more creativity. As we know, though, these kinds of engagement and productivity are not ends in themselves; they give organizations a huge strategic advantage too. Smooth user experience helps employees perform at their best to build a best-of-breed company. From a practical IT standpoint, a good experience helps lower IT costs by reducing help desk requests.
Why we need to address bad user
experiences
Anything that gets in the way of your employees being able to work smoothly and quickly is bad for your business. A slow or clunky user experience costs serious money, especially if it affects a large portion of your employees. If all users have to wait around for their machines, you’re losing money. If workers can’t start a meeting because they have to wait for an app to load, or if a worker has to go get a cup of coffee while waiting for her machine to boot up, the company will never retrieve that lost time. Persistent lag also saps employees’ energy and motivation.
How Citrix Virtual Apps
and Desktops Help
Citrix streamlines remote work
With over 100 million users worldwide, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is the leading solution for application and desktop access. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops facilitates remote access (with world-class security) for Windows applications and desktops, as well as Linux, web and SaaS applications, from any device over any network. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops makes IT’s job that much easier by centralizing all business applications and devices, and enables secure work from anywhere. Sensitive data always stays safe, while IT gets full visibility and control over the virtualized environment.
Benefits of Citrix Virtual Apps
and Desktops
• Flexible: Adapts to business needs
• Secure: Offers a secure way to access apps and information from anywhere and any device • Optimizes User Experience: Users experience the
same high-definition experience (HDX) no matter what device they use
Citrix systems are easy to administer
The Citrix Cloud and Cloud Connectors are directly managed by Citrix; it is the front-facing aspects of the Citrix Workspace app that are managed by you, along with the hypervisors and your Active Directory domain. You can manage the network and control access from selected devices, or all devices. This access is controlled based on user profile, device, network, or location. You can empower employees to work on any device they want and deliver a uniform user experience for all applications.
Citrix makes issue tracking a breeze
When faced with a complaint or an issue, IT administrators of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops do not need to hunt for solutions on multiple systems. Administrators can track problems in the Citrix system from a single screen. This is important from a user experience perspective as the user’s issue can be resolved that much faster and more accurately.
Lakeside Software’s digital experience monitoring solution, SysTrack, helps IT teams streamline performance and optimize productivity whether employees are remote, in the office, or somewhere in-between. SysTrack provides complete insight into and control over endpoint devices—monitoring technology use, performance, and end-user experience. SysTrack gathers data on everything that may impact users and their productivity by tracking more than 10,000 data points every 15 seconds on each device in the environment. SysTrack allows you to track historical trends, as well as diagnose real-time issues, and enables proactive IT action via AI-driven sensors and automation. With SysTrack’s proactive and predictive management, IT teams can significantly reduce help desk costs and prevent dips in user productivity.
SysTrack is a certified Citrix Ready solution that is trusted by enterprises worldwide, with deployments scaling over 400,000 seats. It supports a wide variety of endpoints, including Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, Android, and more.
Key Features of SysTrack
• Workplace Analytics: How well is IT meeting users’ productivity needs?
• IT Asset Optimization: Are IT resources over- or under-provisioned?
• Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations: What problems exist in the environment and how can they be addressed proactively through automation?
The Role of SysTrack
What is SysTrack?
“SysTrack gives us an incredible amount of meaningful data and
analytics. As a solution, it really helped us succeed with VDI
transformation as well as understand and improve user experience
for physical endpoint users.”
sessions, helping IT understand the performance, usage, and end-user experience that underpins the Citrix system.
How to optimize assets
with SysTrack
• Implement need-based procurement with SysTrack data
• Make the most of software licenses and enterprise license agreements
• Take advantage of how SysTrack simplifies application/hardware performance management • Gain SLA transparency with end-user experience
scores and issue point-of-origin tracking
How to accelerate IT support
with SysTrack
• Remediate issues before end users notice them through continuous monitoring
• Triage incidents quickly and implement click-to-ticket functionality through ITSM tool integration • Perform full root—cause analysis with SysTrack’s
continuous data recording and analysis tools • Utilize self-healing and self-service or Level 0 support
How SysTrack and Citrix
Complement One Another
Providing context
Working in tandem, Citrix and SysTrack help organizations deliver better experiences for remote workers with optimized remote sessions. The solution works natively with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as well as with Citrix solutions layered on top of Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop.
The system usage and performance insights SysTrack provides can be used for both assessment and planning, and also ongoing monitoring of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments. During the assessment phase, SysTrack helps identify users who are good candidates for virtualization as well as which systems or applications pose challenges. To optimize deployments, SysTrack identifies critical applications and capacity demands so that IT can provide the exact resources users need to be productive. For ongoing implementations, IT can use SysTrack alongside Citrix management tools to provide a complete end-to-end monitoring view. With full visibility, IT teams can understand the root cause of problems, whether on the device, remote session, infrastructure, network, or application.
Combine desktop, network, and infrastructure data results to gain a complete picture of the user’s experience at any given moment. By layering SysTrack with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, IT can gain a unified view of performance and end-user experience. This unified view helps to discover, diagnose, and resolve virtual
desktop and app problems. This level of visibility into the end-to-end experience also helps IT get to the true root cause of problems, as well as log which issues are the most severe or widespread.
Benefits of using Citrix Virtual Apps
and Desktops and SysTrack together
• Holistic performance monitoring for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops
• Faster and more accurate troubleshooting and root cause analysis
• AI-driven real-time and predictive insights • Improved end-user experience and productivity • IT gains more value from Citrix products
The details of focused monitoring
SysTrack is seeded with pre-defined Citrix roles, configurations, and dashboards to add insight to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Storefront, and Citrix Director. SysTrack also integrates with Citrix Gateway through SysTrack dashboard third-party data connectors.
answer critical questions such as:
• What is the cause of slow sessions?
• Is the issue with Citrix or is it a back-end issue? • Did the Citrix upgrade result in any issues? • What are the impacts of the log-on and session
experiences?
• Are users experiencing ICA latency and virtual channel bandwidth issues?
• Are there any user, configuration, network, or application issues?
• Which users and applications should be shifted to other servers or desktops?
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is an industry-leading tool enabling remote work for companies all over the world. When Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is paired with SysTrack, the two solutions provide visibility into and control over the entire environment. They can monitor technology usage, performance, and end-user experience whenever and wherever employees get work done.
To learn more, visit Citrix Ready today.
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