ExtraHop Treats Citrix Slowdowns With Real-Time Diagnostics and Prescriptive Guidance

DENVER, CO--(Marketwired - Jul 20, 2015) - BriForum 2015 - ExtraHop, the global leader in real-time wire data analytics for IT intelligence and business operations, today announced a specialized offering that helps customers maximize the efficiency and value of large-scale Citrix VDI initiatives. The ExtraHop Citrix Module delivers end-to-end, real-time visibility, giving customers a clear view across both their Citrix environment and the supporting infrastructure. For one healthcare delivery organization, this insight helped them save hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialist consulting fees and reduced Citrix VDI login and load times from 45 seconds to 10.

Unlike legacy monitoring approaches, the ExtraHop wire data analytics platform provides real-time, end-to-end visibility across the entire application delivery chain, including on-premise, virtualized, and cloud environments. This passive monitoring approach requires no instrumentation or application changes, and delivers both real-time insights and proactive guidance to help IT teams not only see that there is a problem but identify the root of that problem and how to fix it. Key benefits of the Citrix Module include the following:

• Complete visibility into the Citrix delivery chain from remote access to XenDesktop servers to authentication and storage.
• Ability to troubleshoot and reduce Citrix login and load times to increase business productivity.
• Clear visualization and guidance around interactions and dependencies between the VDI deployment and the rest of the IT infrastructure.

For one large research hospital, the visibility and prescriptive guidance delivered by the ExtraHop platform not only saved them an estimated $400,000 in consulting fees but salvaged their entire Citrix VDI deployment. 

Prior to deploying the ExtraHop platform, the hospital had undergone a large-scale Citrix VDI expansion to support over 4,000 clinical and business users and more than 100 applications. While the initial Citrix rollout was successful, within a few weeks login times had slowed to 45 seconds or more -- an eternity for clinicians trying to access critical patient information.

"The hospital even brought in Citrix specialists to diagnose the problem, but with the tools they were using they could only confirm a slow-down, not where it was coming from," said John Smith, Citrix Technology Professional and Solutions Architect at ExtraHop. "Without the ability to see across the entire application delivery chain, the complex and interdependent Citrix environment remained a black box."

With ExtraHop, the IT team at the research hospital was able to pinpoint the specific server associated with the slow login times, and then drilled down to see login times on a user-by-user basis, as well as the specific L7 protocols being used by the specific server. 

"As it turned out, the 'ghost' in the hospital's VDI infrastructure was a large number of hi-resolution .jpeg files being downloaded to a particular user's profile each morning," said Raja Mukerji, Co-Founder and President, ExtraHop. "This was causing storage I/O contention, slowing Citrix login times for all users. The fix was as simple as removing the My Pictures folder from the user's profile, but the problem had almost derailed the entire Citrix VDI deployment. With ExtraHop, the hospital not only saved thousands on consulting fees, they saved their entire VDI investment."

Learn more about how customers are using ExtraHop to gain visibility and proactive guidance to dramatically improve Citrix performance. For more use cases and customer stories, visit ExtraHop in Action.

To get started with ExtraHop, request your free-forever ExtraHop virtual appliance or try the ExtraHop interactive online demo.

About ExtraHop
ExtraHop is the global leader in real-time wire data analytics. The ExtraHop Operational Intelligence platform analyzes all L2-L7 communications, including full bidirectional transactional payloads. This innovative approach provides the correlated, cross-tier visibility essential for application performance, availability, and security in today's complex and dynamic IT environments. The winner of numerous awards from Interop, TechTarget, and others, the ExtraHop platform scales up to 40 Gbps in a single appliance, deploys without agents, and delivers tangible value immediately upon deployment. Learn what we mean at www.extrahop.com.