For those of you taking your first peek at Introspect, a little history is in order. The prior releases provided a very powerful, yet simple, user interface for slicing and dicing usage metrics. The resulting information provided the insight needed to ease the planning, managing and auditing of Citrix farms. With Introspect, XTS now introduces configuration reporting with a similar user interface that makes it very straight forward to produce advanced configuration reports.
Introspect historical usage reports are the perfect complement to real-time monitoring products like Citrix EdgeSight (now rebranded by Citrix as Application Performance & Monitoring for
XenApp – I’ll stick with the EdgeSight name for simplicity). While monitoring tools like EdgeSight do a great job providing real-time alerts, root cause analysis for troubleshooting and improving end-user experience, the historical analysis provided by Introspect can be used for capacity planning, license analysis, chargeback (billing for usage), security audits and documentation of Citrix environments. Plus, now you have the bonus of configuration property and policy reports in Introspect.
In this paper, I’m going to look at the major challenges that are faced by those of us responsible for the overall health and reliability of Citrix farms and why I think Introspect should be a key component of your systems management arsenal for overcoming these challenges. In addition, I’ll review some of the new features available in Introspect 5.0, which is now available in three editions.
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