VDI vendors often offer diagnostic tools to their customers, but there are root cause analysis tools that can help IT dig deeper.
There are a number of root cause analysis tools available for VDI shops to help them get to the bottom of any problems. It is helpful for IT to know a few of the more popular root cause analysis tools available today. Whether the vendor does not provide diagnostic tools, or if the tool does not cover everything IT needs, these third-party options can make life easier for IT.
Liquidware Stratusphere UX
Liquidware's Stratusphere UX is a monitoring tool that provides both high-level and granular views of an organization's VDI deployment. IT can initially get a high-level view of the infrastructure as a whole to assess which areas might be contributing to the issues users are having. Once an administrator determines an initial area of focus, it is possible to drill down into things such as machine, user and application details, with adjustable levels of granularity.
Quest Foglight for Virtualization
Quest Software's Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition manages and assists with troubleshooting performance in Citrix and VMware VDI deployments. The Quest Foglight for Virtualization tool monitors all of the major levels of VDI to spot conditions that will ultimately affect the end-user experience. Some of the areas it monitors include user sessions, services, desktops, applications, Active Directory, NetScaler and virtualized storage tiers.
eG Innovations VDI Performance Assessment
VDI Performance Assessment from eG Innovations shares similarities with other root cause analysis tools. The software works by analyzing all the various layers of the VDI in search of any issues that might affect the end user experience.
What makes VDI Performance Assessment unique, however, is its ability to perform automated diagnostics and provide actionable answers to performance issues. It works in both Citrix and VMware deployments.
Lakeside Software SysTrack Workspace Analytics
Lakeside Software Inc.'s SysTrack Workspace Analytics also uses monitoring to detect bottlenecks that may affect the end-user experience. One thing that differentiates SysTrack from some of the other root cause analysis tools is its insight engine, which enables IT to make natural language queries. An administrator might, for example, ask the software if any users are having a bad user experience. The software lets IT professionals ask exactly what they want to know, as opposed to navigating a complex interface in search of the information they need.
The monitoring engine does not look solely for performance bottlenecks, but also for security issues. The software includes a risk visualization tool that helps IT see where security vulnerabilities may exist. More importantly, the built-in threat detection engine can recognize malicious activity and can contain certain threats, and even remediate the problem.
ControlUp Insights
ControlUp Insights utilizes infrastructure monitoring, but does not limit administrators to viewing only real-time performance data.
ControlUp Technologies LTD's Insights is another tool for monitoring the end-user VDI experience and for troubleshooting performance issues. ControlUp Insights utilizes infrastructure monitoring, but does not limit administrators to viewing only real-time performance data. ControlUp instead provides a wealth of historical performance data so that administrators can compare the current performance data to data recorded at a time when the system was known to be performing well. The historical data is also useful for spotting long-term trends.
ControlUp also provides a number of reports designed to help quantify the end-user experience. For example, there are reports related to login duration and protocol latency. ControlUp even creates a report of the top Windows errors happening within the organization.
