IT performance monitoring has long been known to be a wicked problem--- it is highly social in nature (monitoring 'silos'), it has numerous stakeholders (each with different opinions) and is inextricably interconnected within the IT organization, technologies and processes. But while wicked problems are never really 'solved', they are worth addressing. Effective monitoring has the unique ability to help break down walls. To establish real organizational transparency and trust. In fact, an effective monitoring program is fundamental to any continuous improvement effort.

Java-based applications are powering many business-critical IT services today and Java technology is widely used as the middleware on which the business logic of multi-tier infrastructures reside. Since the performance of the Java middleware tier has a significant impact on the performance of the business services it supports, monitoring is a necessity and not a choice.

The technology of cloud computing has caught up with virtual desktop infrastructures. Tapping into the agility and flexibility of cloud-hosted infrastructures, Citrix Cloud enables organizations to simplify digital workspace delivery. With many of the critical components of the Citrix delivery infrastructure hosted in the cloud and managed by Citrix, organizations can speed up deployment, lower hardware footprint, increase ROI, simplify IT operations. Despite the many benefits of Citrix Cloud, the performance management challenges still persist, just as they do in traditional on-premises Citrix deployments.

Read this white paper by George Spiers, Citrix CTP and EUC Architect, where you will understand the changes in Virtual Apps and Desktops 7.x in detail and what types of monitoring best practices to adopt for ensuring top performance of your virtualized environment and outstanding user experience.

One of the toughest problems facing enterprise IT teams today is troubleshooting slow applications. When a user complains of slowness in application access, all hell breaks loose and the blame game begins: app owners, developers and IT ops teams enter into endless war room sessions to figure out what went wrong and where. Have you also been in this situation before?

With hundreds of monitoring products being promoted today, navigating the features of different products can be a significant challenge. It's important to 'read between the lines' when looking at marketing literature associated with monitoring tools.

Citrix environments incorporate numerous components as well as diverse back-end application elements and user-specific items - all complex variables that can affect the user experience.

Business transaction monitoring, a critical aspect of application performance monitoring (APM), is the approach commonly used to identify and diagnose server-side processing slowness in web applications. While it has many benefits, business transaction monitoring has its limits. It stops with identifying of the server-side tier that is causing application slowness and highlights application code-level and database query-level issues.