Questions to Separate Troubleshooting Products from Monitoring Utilities

I used to be an IT administrator and as such spent an inordinate amount of time testing and evaluating troubleshooting and monitoring solutions simply to identify if the vendors could actually do what they said they could. Over time I realized that if I asked the right questions I could eliminate much of the time spent in evaluation and get straight to the true value of a product. So I developed a series of questions that I use to cut through the marketing B.S. and determine the best monitoring and troubleshooting solution without having to do multiple POC’s.

For some context I’ll share my backstory. I have done many, many Citrix implementations for customers. Along the way I have also had the responsibility of managing the deployments afterward. In doing so, I usually had the responsibility of selecting and recommending the tools used to support the environment. As you can imagine this was a flat-out headache. If you are reading this then what I am about to say is something you already know—all vendors, especially monitoring vendors, say they do the same thing. They all monitor Citrix XenApp/Desktop, get HDX metrics, logon times, and they all now have logon simulators. They also promise complete, proactive end-to-end visibility into user experience and the underlying infrastructure. And, as you well know, this is B.S.

The problem is, they aren’t all the same. Frankly, I don’t know how most marketing people can sleep at night with the misleading half-truths that are used to describe functionality. Not to get off track, the problem is that we Citrix administrators don’t really know, even after a successful POC, if the product will really support us when we need it—at least until things get tough and are troubleshooting a complex Citrix issue. Unfortunately, by that time it is usually too late.

Read the entire article here, Questions to Separate Troubleshooting Products from Monitoring Utilities

via the fine folks at Goliath Technologies