Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Microsoft Active Directory is a key component of the IT infrastructure of any organization that uses Microsoft Windows servers or desktops. Active Directory is responsible for managing users, their accounts and their access to individual computers, shared drivers, printers, servers and more. From a user’s perspective, Active Directory’s single sign-on capability ensures that users do not have to remember and use different passwords for different types of accesses.

“Change is the only constant in life.” This is a quote often attributed to the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. In the world of application performance monitoring, you know this to be true. Things are always changing. New technologies force you to come up with new ways and processes for doing things. And new challenges force you to develop new methods of solving old problems. Performance monitoring is an old problem.

Citrix application and desktop virtualization technologies are widely used by organizations that are embarking on digital transformation initiatives. The success of these initiatives is closely tied to ensuring a great user experience for end users as they access their virtual apps and desktops.

A recent analysis by Skyhigh Networks on 27 million employees rated Microsoft Office 365 as the most widely popular enterprise cloud service by user count. While Office 365 offers a wide range of Microsoft products on a subscription basis, from the cloud, one of its popular offerings is SharePoint Online. A recent Hyperfish, Sharegate, Nintex and LiveTiles survey estimates that adoption of SharePoint Online grew to 50% in the last year.

If you have deployed a Java application in production, you’ve probably encountered a situation where the application suddenly starts to take up a large amount of CPU. When this happens, application response becomes sluggish and users begin to complain about slow response. Often the solution to this problem is to restart the application and, lo and behold, the problem goes away – only to reappear a few days later.

It is no longer sufficient for IT operations teams to monitor resources like CPU, memory and disk utilization. The success of any IT initiative these days is measured based on user experience. Irrespective of the type of application in question – whether email, Citrix/VDI, SAP, web application – application availability and response time are key measures of user experience. Application outages not only affect users, they can also impact the business.

Java applications deployed in production must be multi-threaded for scalability. Threads can be used for performing different tasks or they could be executing the same task to service different user requests. Often, it is necessary to synchronize between different threads.

Things don’t always go right. And when things do go astray, you need to save the day. Especially in a Citrix digital workspace environment, there are too many things that could go wrong and affect application/desktop session access. When your end users are in peril, you – the Citrix admin, engineer, architect, consultant – need to become a superhero and save them: Diagnose the cause of issues they are facing and triage them to ensure seamless and uninterrupted connectivity.

Continuous application performance management (CAPM) is a key focus area in the enterprise IT segment. With organizations increasing their focus on digital business services, monitoring and managing the application performance becomes paramount. When a digital business service is slow or down, it impacts the business adversely.

The performance of any application is measured by its availability and responsiveness. When an application is slow, IT operations staff must troubleshoot the cause of slowness, identify it and resolve it. While application performance problems may be caused by issues in the supporting infrastructure, often the issues are related to the application components themselves.