Citrix Application Performance Management
Application Performance Management (APM (News - Alert)) is gaining momentum in the industry, in light of its effectiveness of quickly finding and tackling performance problems for Web applications and narrowing down bottlenecks in the IT infrastructure.
One provider of application and network performance management solutions, OPNET Technologies (News 
- Alert), has gone through some game-changing acquisitions as of late. Just six months ago, the company acquired Clarus Systems, and just recently was acquired by Riverbed Technologies. Among many other things, these acquisitions exhibit the importance of Unified Communications (News - Alert) (News - Alert) (UC) today.
Currently, OPNET's solutions deliver broad visibility and monitoring across infrastructure domains as well as deep data collection and analytics to enable efficient root cause diagnosis. These solutions have been proven in thousands of customer environments across the world, including corporate and government enterprises, defense agencies, network service providers and network equipment manufacturers.
These days, it is key to detect a performance problem and address it immediately. And, Riverbed (News - Alert) is one of the only companies that have the end-to-end suit related to accelerated performance, according to Gurmeet Lamba (News - Alert), VP of R & D and chief architect, UC Management, OPNET (recently acquired by Riverbed). Acquiring OPNET gave Riverbed an APM suite to add to it’s existing Network Performance Management (NPM) products – the two together are now the Riverbed Performance Management (RPM) business unit.
“The new tablets may be cool, but in my mind performance management and optimization is really the new cool,” Lamba told TMCnet in an exclusive interview at ITEXPO Miami 2013. “Right now you see tablets, social media, cloud computing and a lot of innovation in the industry, but all of it can come to a screeching halt in the back end infrastructure doesn’t keep up with the performance.”
The whole idea behind APM is figuring out where the performance bottlenecks are such as network, servers, Web servers and clients. Lamba shared five dimensions of APM including:
- End user experience
- Application discovery
- Application component monitoring
- Transaction tracing
- Analytics
So, how does UC fit in to APM?
“UC is ripe to start utilizing APM approaches because UC is no longer locked down PBX,” explained Lamba.
UC applications are IT apps, incorporating real-time communications like VoIP, video communications, Telepresence (News - Alert) (News - Alert), IM/Presence, and Unified Messaging. Traditional definitions of APM are sound, but implementations must adapt to current technologies and extended to provide end-to-end monitoring of service availability and performance of UC as well as real-time communications.
But, with APM comes real-time communication challenges as APM implementations are more transactional and do not address real-time. This creates the need for extensions for APM implementations that are deeper in the domain of UC. Fortunately, OPNET’s UC Xpert, a product extending Riverbed APM implementation, goes deep into end-to-end management and monitoring UC.
Additionally, UC needs extensions, which impact the four pillars of end-to-end UC performance management as applied to APM. These extensions including proactive automated testing, performance monitoring with deep domain plug-ins, configuration management, and analytics.
“Overall, RPM has the most comprehensive APM product suite giving true end-to-end performance management of IT infrastructure and applications – including UC,” continued Lamba.
Lamba will be speaking in an ITEXPO (News - Alert) session tomorrow, Wednesday, January 30th at 2:30 pm entitled, “Time to Rethink Performance Management.” He will educate the audience about APM and how it relates to UC by answering questions like: Do traditional APM implementations work for these apps? How can your IT team monitor service availability of an end-user’s softphone using traditional APM implementations? What about a ring-no-answer on Unified Messaging? Will a misconfiguration in the routing table in the call management application resulting in poor end user experience be detected?
To find out more about OPNET Technologies and Vice President of R&D and Chief Architect Gurmeet Lamba, visit the company at ITEXPO Miami happening now in Miami, Florida. ITEXPO is the only gathering where the community of communications and technology buyers, sellers, resellers, and manufacturers meet to forge relationships and close deals. Lamba is speaking during “Time to Rethink Performance Management.” For more information on ITEXPO, click here.
Edited by Brooke Neuman
Which team, in your organization, is responsible for managing Citrix application performance?
0%0%0%0%0%0%0%Featured White Papers
- Resolve Performance Issues Within Your Citrix Environment
While powerful and beneficial, the Citrix environment can present new challenges to IT departments when troubleshooting application performance issues. Citrix acts as a proxy for backend applications, making it difficult to get end-to-end visibility of transactions and to identify and troubleshoot end-user experience problems. Learn about a breakthrough solution that provides unprecedented end-to-end visibility of user transactions traversing a Citrix server.
- High Definition Application Performance Management
Most IT organizations struggle to address end-to-end application performance management, despite the fact that the responsiveness and availability of critical business applications significantly impacts the bottom-line. This report, featuring research from Gartner, presents a "High Definition Application Performance Management" approach based on the principles of breadth, depth, analytics, integration and low overhead.bottom-line. This report, featuring research from Gartner, presents a "High Definition Application Performance Management" approach based on the principles of breadth, depth, analytics, integration and low overhead.
- Managing Performance of Critical Applications by Forrester Consulting
In conducting a survey of IT professionals, Forrester found that the lack of performance and availability of critical and complex applications had direct and negative consequences on business productivity, business finances, and IT efficiency.
Featured Case Studies
- Duane Morris uses AppResponse Xpert to obtain a "big picture" view of their network
Duane Morris LLP is a full-service firm of approximately 550 lawyers. The firm has doubled in size in the past five years and continues to expand. The IT team has been working to build a more centralized IT infrastructure to improve performance and reduce costs.
- Trafigura uses AppResponse Xpert to resolve an optimization issue with a critical Citrix application
Trafigura is now one of the world's largest independent commodity trading companies, specializing in the energy and base metals market. The Trafigura IT department maintains four data centers and 16 core sites supported by an MPLS network that enables the prioritization of key applications, including video conferencing, VoIP, Citrix, HTTP web browsing, database links, and email.
