Monthly Archives: September 2015

In the second installment of the Facts from the Field series, I wanted to reflect on a first in-person meeting with a Director of IT from “Company X” (who prefers to remain anonymous to protect the innocent.) She started our conversation by sharing, “When I get the phone call after two sips of my first cup of coffee, I just hope they blame Citrix because they’re rarely right. But, I’m still dragged into troubleshooting meetings to work together as a team to resolve whatever issue is at hand that morning. Sometimes the problems are easy to solve — sometimes not — but AppEnsure really helped me last week.”

Only 10 days into her free evaluation of the AppEnsure solution, this Director received that familiar phone call that automatically put Citrix in the hot seat. XenApp users started flooding their help desk with complaints of “Outlook is slow!” and an immediate war room meeting was called to provide an immediate resolution.

A closer look through their various existing monitoring tools didn’t provide any answers. “I didn’t want a problem to occur, but I was anxious to put AppEnsure to the test,” she stated. So she put AppEnsure on the war room’s big screen and went directly to the Topology tab to share a real-time view of the dependency map for their Outlook application. This dynamic view showed all of the response times for each hop between users, servers, databases, etc. that were currently utilizing Outlook.

In just a few seconds, the entire team was able to see the AppEnsure software highlighting the exact hop experiencing higher-than-normal response times. “The hop between the XenApp server and the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Server clearly showed a slow response time of 960m,” she said with a grin. “I was cautiously optimistic AppEnsure had zeroed in on the problem.”

The team then used AppEnsure to quickly dig deeper into the application Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Server and saw the alarm “Active Directory Topology Service Failure” which meant the server containing Active Directory is having a hard time authenticating user credentials. “I couldn’t believe how quickly we pinpointed and resolved the problem,” she remarked. “AppEnsure helped me identify the true root cause and get back to what I originally had planned for the day.”

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Related:

Facts from the Field #1 – “It’s Where You Measure”

Facts from the Field #3: The Wild Card – The Citrix End User

Facts from the Field #4: “IT Operations with Texas-Sized Grins”

Hallo!

A video discussing Application-Aware Infrastructure Performance Management and the AppEnsure solution is now available in German. This detailed presentation of the AppEnsure solution titled, Nie wieder “Mein Citrix ist so langsam!,” discusses common challenges IT Operations face when supporting large, distributed Citrix environments.

AppEnsure is very thankful to have our partner, X-tech, present the solution in German so our message does not get lost in translation. Just like the AppEnsure solution, presenting data is most effective when it’s easy to understand. So, if the German language is your preference, please spend some time listening to X-tech’s IT Systems Architect, Reinhard Travnicek, so you can never again hear the words “Mein Citrix ist so langsam!”

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(In German via Google Translate)

Hallo!

Ein Video zum Thema Application-Aware Infrastructure Performance Management und die AppEnsure Lösung ist jetzt in deutscher Sprache erhältlich. Diese ausführliche Darstellung der AppEnsure Lösung mit dem Titel, Nie wieder “Mein Citrix ist so langsam!,“ diskutiert gemeinsamen Herausforderungen IT Operations Gesicht, wenn die Unterstützung großer, verteilter Citrix-Umgebungen.

AppEnsure ist sehr dankbar, dass unser Partner X-tech haben, präsentieren die Lösung auf Deutsch so unsere Botschaft nicht in der Übersetzung verloren gehen. Genau wie die AppEnsure Lösung, Darstellung von Daten ist am effektivsten, wenn es leicht zu verstehen. Also, wenn die deutsche Sprache ist Ihre Präferenz, verbringen Sie bitte einige Zeit zu hören X-Tech IT Systems Architect, Reinhard Travnicek, so dass Sie nie wieder die Worte zu hören “Mein Citrix ist so langsam!”

As founder and CTO of a Silicon-Valley company, I feel fortunate to continually meet other technology-minded people solving real-world problems and some industry leaders who have greatly influenced my vision. In each meeting, I learn facts….valuable facts that I thought would be a good idea to share on our blog. So, I’m happy to announce AppEnsure’s new blog series titled, “Facts from the Field” to communicate interesting facts we hear and our experiences in the industry with you.

Fact from the Field #1: Shortly after starting AppEnsure, I was introduced to John Young, HP’s CEO from 1978-1992 and who later served on President Clinton’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. When I explained my ideas and principles behind the AppEnsure solution, I remember him putting his arm around my shoulder and saying with a smile, “I have been in instrumentation all my life, son, and one thing I learned is what you measure is less important than where you measure it at. You discovered where to instrument to measure the true performance of applications in this new world of virtualization and clouds.  That will make you and your idea very crucial in the future.”

What an exhilarating experience it was.  Commodity data yields in commodity results – a lesson I learned in 30 years that I have been involved in performance management.  Perfecting performance is a continuous present tense. AppEnsure is built on that principle.  Thanks to the inspiration from people like John and many other luminaries of Silicon Valley – AppEnsure is bringing in new concepts of Application Operational intelligence to our customers that is beyond just fixing problems but focusing on perfecting fundamentals that are crucial to business success – end-user experience of critical applications.

I look forward to sharing more Facts from the Field blog posts after learning (IMHO) interesting facts from IT Operations team members, industry leaders, and great influencers.

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Related:

Facts from the Field #2 – “I Love It when People Pick on Citrix.”
Facts from the Field #3: The Wild Card – The Citrix End User
Facts from the Field #4: “IT Operations with Texas-Sized Grins”

Double-edged Sword of Human Competition

Competition amongst the human race benefits society by stretching ourselves outside, what many psychologists say is the paradigm we avoid the most, the fear of success. When we agree to compete, we flip to our more natural ideology, the fear of failure. This latter mindset keeps us alert and provides us with the motivation to take action, to adjust and stretch to new realms of high performance, and it allows us to evolve.

In the business and corporate world, we speak of leaders. As Al Pacino stated in his role as Big Boy Caprice in the 1990 film, Dick Tracy, “(humans) crave leadership!” We want someone to show us the way, though we all can be positive and influential leaders in all walks of our lives. What stops us from breaking out of the “tribe”? It is likely the fear of success. If we go outside our corporate group/division’s current theme of protectionism, we aren’t sure who we will become and who we may alienate and be required to leave behind. We stick with protecting our turf and with the familiar.

We can and do make progress within these corporate world frameworks, though we likely don’t do it at the speed and with the level of enjoyment that is likely available to ourselves, our fellow colleagues and the marketplace we are trying to serve.

Some would say this is all the fear of failure playing out, though I believe failure is a given. We are humans. As we all know, we are not perfection, so we need not waste countless hours of lives avoiding failure.

In the workplace, why are we protecting and concealing information from other groups that would efficiently and effectively move our business mission forward? It appears that our fight or flight instinct is at work. One group is in flight which prompts the other group to take unnecessary days, weeks and sometimes years fighting the battles against their colleagues that allow them to optimize their value to the organization.

Nowhere are these battles more real and prevalent than amongst corporate IT departments. We can’t expect the CIOs to know about all these battles and the ensuing turf wars, though these leaders need to empower their management teams and subsequently the individual team members to lead with “success” (improvement) as the main motivation.

IT groups (i.e., Network, Server, Application, Storage) should not be conveying that performance issues, outside their specific jurisdiction, “are not my problem.” IT is a service provider to the organization and to the market they are trying to capture and maintain, so overall departmental success is the only goal.

Don’t fear that my position will be eliminated or that my group will be downsized, thus, leaving me with less authority within the department. Focus on what working together and not against one another will do for the company. How can we possibly see all the “success” possibilities, if we fear them so much that we sabotage our true growth potential?

Contributor, John Ward, Director of Sales, AppEnsure, Inc. For comments, john@appensure.com 603.479.2511, www.appensure.com