Introduction:

Identifying and Resolving Application Performance Problems quickly and efficently is the real power that EdgeSight brings to the table.

Some people think Citrix is guilty until proven innocent. Well, EdgeSight to the rescue. This product focuses on recording performance on the Presentation Server side and the Client PC, allowing you to compare Errors, Pauses, Exceptions, network performance, presentation Servers performance and client pc performance on the same timeline to help track down and resolve and even prevent issues.

EdgeSight 4.5 leverages Microsoft SQL 2005 with Reporting Services, which provide very impressive performance for reporting. Citrix did a really good job architecting the user interface, which allows many different ways to view and report on performance data. Providing the ability to chart most of the data, or export summary graphs and charts for automated delivery to IT support staff or Business contacts via SMTP.

Here is a list of the EdgeSight Product offerings.

Citrix EdgeSight for Endpoints

Citrix EdgeSight for Presentation Server

Citrix EdgeSight for Load Testing

Evaluation:

Installing and configuring:

During my evaluation of EdgeSight, I only installed and worked with EdgeSight 4.5 for Presentation Server and EdgeSight for EndPoints. Installing and configuring the EdgeSight server went very smooth for me. Installing the EdgeSight for PS agent on 2 of my test servers, I discovered it would not install if McAfee NAI 8.0 patch 11 was installed, which is currently our standard. After upgrading to McAfee 8.5, the agent installed flawlessly. However, you have to add Virus Scan exclusions to McAfee manually. I hope we can automate these exclusions when we deploy the agent to our PS and Client PC's after we purchase the product.

After about a week of gathering data, I began running some reports, and to my surprise, there were many application related errors that do not get recorded in the Windows Event Logs, but EdgeSight was able to capture them, and was also able summarize them in a chart. After drilling down on the data, I discovered that EdgeSight was able to read the application exceptions and present a mini dump for view or export.

Performance metric data is viewable in many different ways, by device, user, process, and by day, month or custom timeline. The perfomance reports can be displayed in graphs or text format, with export ablility for html, pdf, xml and csv. Oh and you can print them.

Weakness: Before I tell you what I discovered as a weakness in EdgeSight 4.5, let me just say this product is feature rich, and I would recommend to any Citrix Farm, especially larger PS Farms. I'm sold on this product. The weakness that I found in EdgeSight 4.5 is that it does not allow you to change the performance recording interval, which is 15 seconds. It is important to change the interval to a low number if you are tracking down a 5 second application performance issue. Citrix has indicated to me that it could be included in the next release.

The issue with allowing you to change the metric recording interval is data retention, there will be alot more data retained at a 1 second interval than a 15 second interval. But if Citrix allows this interval adjustment in the next release, I hope they will allow the interval adjustmnet per device with a scheduling capability. It would be very nice to have the ability to schedule a 1 second interval recording for say CPU, %DiskTime for one device during 2 hours of peak usage time.

Summary: We will be buying EdgeSight.

Writen By: Scott Chiara Date: 11-11-2007