I have been following XTS for a couple years now and felt it was time to revisit their product because they recently released XTS Introspect, the next generation of their award-winning management analytics solution for Citrix. After playing with Introspect in my Presentation Server (sorry, I mean XenApp) lab, I see the engineers at XTS have been busy.
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 analysis with a similar user interface that makes it very straight forward to produce advanced configuration reports.
Introspect is the perfect complement to real-time monitoring products like Citrix EdgeSight. While monitoring tools to a great job of real-time alerts, root cause analysis for troubleshooting and improving end-user experience, historical analysis provided by Introspect can be used for capacity planning, license analysis, chargeback (billing for usage), security audits and documentation of Citrix environments.
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.
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