Work Smarter, Not Harder

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

Xangati wants to help you work smarter, not harder.

Managing a virtualized infrastructure is no easy task, especially when you’re dealing with a myriad of physical and virtual devices. We know that the amount of data you need to monitor for performance management in your virtualized infrastructure is mind boggling to say the least. 

With infrastructure resources being continuously shared across the infrastructure, managing performance in a VDI environment, in particular, requires a vast amount of detail as to what is happening at the exact time of a performance problem in order to accurately identify the source. As Gartner analyst Terry Cosgrove points out, “Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD) is trading a configuration management challenge for a performance challenge.” Hundreds of thousands of different objects are in a constant state of flux, and every single element’s activity can potentially impact another, setting off a chain reaction that can be overwhelming to track.

At Xangati we realized early on that the changes in the data center operation required a completely new approach to identify and resolve performance problems. Our products have been designed to allow you to work smarter, not harder to locate problem sources faster and more easily than any other solution out there. Our goal has been to make it as effortless as possible for you to monitor your infrastructure to ensure performance success.

Xangati’s visual trouble ticket is one of our very best tools to do that by allowing your end users to trigger a ‘trouble ticket’ uniquely paired with a DVR recording at the time of their specific performance problem. With this visual trouble ticket, you have unparalleled insight into the virtual desktop that completely captures the precise moment when a problem took place. Our customers have found this tool invaluable in quickly isolating issues, and no one else offers a similar capability.

The visual trouble ticket provides you with a constructive “incident management process” giving objective information about an end user’s activity so that you can effectively focus your efforts to resolve the problem. Mark Vaughn of SearchServerVirtualization.com describes the visual trouble ticket as follows, “The Xangati Management Dashboard Suite takes a unique approach to record-and-replay capabilities, allowing users to record the current state of a virtual machine (VM) and immediately attach it to a help-desk ticket.”

With the visual trouble ticket, you get objective data surrounding a user’s activity that is presented from multiple vantage points – from the standpoint of the infrastructure, protocols and even from within the desktop care of the Windows Management Interface (WMI).

This data is invaluable in helping the service desk to immediately triage an issue and determine the source:

• Is it human error? Is a user, for example, impacting his own experience by trying to watch a high definition YouTube video over his remote access VPN while using his virtual desktop?
• Is it a storage latency or a network congestion issue?
• Or is there some kind of process bogging down the desktop?

Armed with the facts provided through the visual trouble ticket – as opposed to time-consuming speculation – Xangati has seen customers reduce time to problem resolution by up to 70 percent! And that translates to satisfied end users – crucial in a VDI environment, where a poor end user experience can effectively kill a VDI project.

By showing second-by-second the environment that existed when an individual was experiencing performance problems, the visual trouble ticket allows you to successfully track the escalation process – instead of trying to piece together what happened from an end user’s memory.

With the visual trouble ticket, you can more quickly focus on the cause of the performance problem, resulting in faster time to problem resolution, and enabling you to work smarter, not harder.