IT Services Houston

Aternity is one of the best management tool on the market today for Citrix environments because it is able to deliver, in my opinion, what no other tool can help you deliver, visibility into the behavior of applications for end users a quantifiably better end user experience. 

If you want to know exactly what the end user is experiencing, want to see how issues impact your end users productivity, Aternity is your tool of choice.  Aternity does not provide a suite of products, they provide one product, but that one product will help you manage the end user experience at the edge of your environment better than anything else we have been able to find within IT services.   

We are fans of EdgeSight.  It is often the only Citrix management tool in the customer environment, so it is by default, the defacto standard.  We have squeezed every ounce of value out of EdgeSight with custom templates gathered from sources far and wide and met some truly amazing engineers that understand EdgeSight and how to make it deliver value for their Citrix environments.

 In some sense of the word, these products are competitors, but in reality, that makes for an unfair comparison between the two products.

Aternity was built to use real time data to allow you to truly have proactive it management.  EdgeSight, for all of its strengths, was never conceptualized or designed to be a proactive it management tool.    

 If you have Citrix EdgeSight in place today to help you manage your Citrix environment, you may be wondering what additional value Aternity Front Line Performance Intelligence can bring to the table to simplify the life of the IT services department and anyone supporting the Citrix environment.

 In almost all cases, by the way, existing Aternity clients that have Citrix XenApp or Citrix XenDesktop use EdgeSight along with Aternity.  In many of these case they, too, have taken EdgeSight to its bleeding edge, and moved to Aternity Frontline to get proactive insight into their Citrix environment.

 Here are some of the key differences between Citrix EdgeSight and Aternity Frontline Performance Intelligence.

 Aternity & EdgeSight:  The Differences

1. Aternity is a proactive IT management platform with a user-centric view from the edge device back into the datacenter, while Citrix EdgeSight is a datacenter based reactive monitoring tool that provides insight exclusively inside the Citrix environment.
2. Aternity monitors three components (application performance, desktop performance and user productivity) that define the quality of the end user experience when combined in real time, and measures the impact each of the three components is having on the end user.  Citrix EdgeSight is focused exclusively on desktop and Citrix performance metrics.
3. Aternity can monitor the latency, response time, throughput and end-to-end transaction time of almost any business process that users actually perform inside of application environments such as HTTP, AJAX/JavaScript, Client/Server, Java, etc.  Citrix EdgeSight has no visibility into the applications themselves or the actual business processes the end users are performing.
4. Aternity monitors the productivity of the actual users themselves, enabling business process optimization, while EdgeSight has no visibility into the business-level productivity of the users.
5. The core of the Aternity platform is a real-time aggregation, analysis and correlation engine that transforms vast amounts of End User Experience metrics into real-time, right-time business intelligence.  EdgeSight does not have an analytics engine, but does have strong data collecting abilities with extensive reporting. 
6. The Aternity analytics engine preemptively detects and correlates problems across all three tiers of the end user experience, often before end users can call the help desk.  Aternity allows help desk teams to actively engage in proactive it management.
7. The Aternity analytics engine dynamically isolates impacted applications, business processes and users.  EdgeSight relies on the quality of the report templates that are configured for it.  Have the right template you will be able to see any issue that occurs inside of the Citrix farm, but it may just be a symptom of a bigger problem outside of Citrix.
8. The Aternity analytics engine automatically identifies the business impact of performance problems.  With exceptional templates and a fair amount of time, you could bend EdgeSight to give you certain time/performance impact measurements but even that might be conditional on the situation.
9. The Aternity analytics engine automatically identifies probable cause and “silos” cause according to Desktop, Network, Presentation Server and Application related issues.  EdgeSight can give you Citrix metrics, but would require a more manual process with reports from other systems like the hypervisor, network etc. to arrive at a probable cause.
10. The Aternity analytics engine monitors problems throughout their lifecycle – from the outset until problem resolution – and automatically opens and closes trouble tickets through the integration of its Problem Life Cycle Manager with the 3^rd party trouble ticketing systems.  EdgeSight’s only answer to this would be to run new reports once you have fixed an issue to see what other systems are still being impacted until you reach final resolution.
11. The Aternity analytics engine supports strategic business initiatives such as informed capacity planning, usage-based software license optimization, virtualized desktop (Citrix/ICA, Terminal Server/RDP and VDI) evaluation, planning and management.  There is EdgeSight for load testing functionality, for capacity planning, license tracking and some planning and management functions.  These features work, and while not as glamorous, and much more manual, you can squeeze a meaningful amount of this functionality out of EdgeSight.

Citrix EdgeSight is the management tool Citrix offers for its software product line.  Citrix EdgeSight is included with Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum licensed products as an optional component.  Citrix EdgeSight is available and licensed separately for all editions below Platinum but is currently scheduled to go End of Life February 24, 2016.