Effective communication is an essential part of any attorney's day.  To keep up with client calls, docket schedules and routine business communications, attorneys rely on an arsenal of applications.  They depend on applications for e-mail, e-discovery, document management, time and billing and litigation.  Many of these require significant CPU processing capability on the front end and frequent software updates.  The challenge for many CIOs is how to provide reliable and uninterrupted service of business-critical applications for a customer base that uses these applications from multiple endpoints and cannot simply return to the office for periodic updates.  This challenge has driven CIOs to look for an application delivery mechanism that is affordable, scalable and reliable.  That's why many law firms have chosen thin-client architectures, such as Citrix, to help build their application deployment strategy.

Scalable and Reliable Delivery with Citrix
Citrix provides flexible access infrastructure that makes it easier to connect people to applications and information from any location, with any device and over any network.  Because both application and information access are delivered through the network, availability and performance are key components of a successful application deployment.  If a critical Citrix solution component is unavailable or performance does not meet required service levels, users and business operations are impacted.  Comprehensive monitoring is vital to ensure high availability and superior performance of a Citrix application deployment.

Pinpointing Problems with Service Delivery
The server-based computing model, while very cost-effective and efficient for deploying applications to a wide audience or user base, presents significant performance-tuning challenges; it is difficult to gain the details of performance and, therefore, difficult to know what to tune.

The technical challenges start at the client end and work their way to the Citrix server farm.  It can be challenging with any application to maintain a global view and also be able to address performance baselines and availability.  Configuration for best throughput and performance is particularly challenging given the difficulty of gaining visibility into the black box with average tools.

Identifying client traffic.  Client traffic is very obscure.  Instead of easily recognized application signatures, the terminal server traffic stream is simply a collection of bitmaps, key strokes and mouse movements.  Encryption and compression of traffic further obscure the content of the traffic so that thread-level decodes have limited meaning.  The ability to identify the traffic as Citrix, and then to associate Citrix traffic to a specific server, gives a meaningful way to track traffic by application.

Maximizing the number of clients a Citrix server farm can support.  The complexity of this challenge occurs primarily with the type of application being supported, back-end server requirements, and the number of round-trip requests for resources by the Citrix server farm.

Determining the point of data collection.  In a Citrix-hosted application, the back end refers to the Web and application servers the Citrix server farm talks to on behalf of the end user.  However, from the end user's perspective, the back-end environment refers to IT infrastructure other than their access points.  Thus, for application performance to be measured, quantified and improved, the measurement point must start from the end user and then continue through the entire IT infrastructure and back.

Evaluating Citrix Environment Performance
Below are some questions that often arise when deploying applications with the Citrix platform for law firms:

• Do IT administrators have a global view of application availability and performance in a Citrix environment?  Can end-user performance be identified?
• Are applications meeting lawyers' performance expectations or are lawyers performing extra steps, allocating more time and resources to work with Citrix-deployed applications?
• Does Citrix traffic impact network performance?  More important, how does application traffic impact overall Citrix performance?
• If a bottleneck occurs, where should troubleshooting start?
• How are IT managers and users notified when a serious error appears in the event logs, when a Citrix server goes down or when a crucial Citrix resource has serious performance issues?

Visibility into Your Citrix Environment
One of the biggest challenges when deploying access infrastructure solutions like Citrix is ensuring the application performs well on many different client platforms and meets or exceeds the expectations of the end user.  Some monitoring tools on the market today provide information on Citrix performance or let you know if Citrix is down; however, these tools focus on individual components such as the client network or server.  Other Citrix monitoring tools concentrate only on the Citrix farms themselves and not the application database servers, the file servers that the applications are using or the complete network path supporting the application.  What these tools are missing is an end-to-end view that allows you to pinpoint problems quickly with minimal resources.

However, true end-user experience (EUE) monitoring encompasses more than just monitoring response times and bandwidth utilization between the client and the Citrix Server.  True EUE monitoring must include:

• Measurements for all resources required to service the user's request, including all network components, back-end application servers and back-end database servers.
• Measurements that incorporate response times for each transaction and for each component of the transaction (SQL Query, Java, .Net, HTML, etc.), as well as bandwidth measurements for delivering the information back to the end user.
• Fast, simple reporting of those measurement metrics to allow the IT staff to diagnose and resolve performance problems quickly, eliminating both the guesswork and finger-pointing that typically occurs.

EUE Monitoring Provides Solid ROI
When one client firm began consolidating its distributed network of data centers under a centralized Citrix-based platform that supported a growing portfolio of more than 450 applications, the firm knew it needed to have insight into the end-user experience.  They implemented an EUE-monitoring solution to see the end-to-end transactions through Citrix.  This provided the granularity they needed to see the actual user experience.  They can start from an enterprise view, drill down to a single user's end points to see what users were doing within Citrix, as well as the amount of traffic they generated and any associated errors.  This allows them to see a condition emerging and address it before it become serious.  With this data, the firm learned from their users' experiences and improved both their infrastructure and user training.  Since initiating end-user monitoring, they have gone from running only 18 users on one Citrix server to running nearly 70 users per server with no issues.  That's a big cost savings.

As this example shows, effective EUE monitoring provides measurement data that encompasses performance related to the entire transaction path.  Firms can learn from that data and improve the end-user experience, while making their flexible access infrastructure more robust.

About our authors . . .

Stephen Karniotis is a Product Manager at Compuware, where he is responsible for third-party integrations with Compuware solutions.  With over 22 years of experience in capacities including both distributed and mainframe architectures, database architecture and administration, instructional development and design, software development and business development, Stephen has a comprehensive understanding of how organizations use IT to satisfy business requirements and how business requirements drive the creation of IT solutions.  Stephen can be reached at Stephen.Karniotis@Compuware.com.

Trisha Winter is Compuware's Marketing Manager in charge of the legal industry.  Trisha has been at the forefront of Compuware's entrance in the legal market and is an expert on how law firms utilize Compuware's IT Service Management solution.  Prior to Compuware, Trisha was responsible for launching new products and markets for Hitachi Medical Systems America, Inc.  All of Trisha's marketing experience is grounded on a 10-year engineering career.  Trisha can be reached at Trisha.Winter@Compuware.com.