For large banks, monitoring EUC environments means ensuring quality end-user experience on thousands of systems despite aging infrastructure and a global workforce. Adding to that challenge, those in banking and finance also contend with tight security and compliance standards to protect themselves and their customers’ assets. Security and end-user experience are frequently treated as opposing…
Lakeside Software is leaving VMworld 2018 on a high note. Literally. I’m writing this over the Mojave Desert, surrounded by members of our team, swiftly (hopefully) returning to our home base in Michigan. There’s a strong blogger and press presence at VMworld, and sites like BrianMadden.com have already published great live blogs and recaps. To…
Few times in a company’s lifetime does a new release introduce truly revolutionary functionality. Today, I am happy to share with you a bit more about our latest release promising just that: SysTrack 8.4. With this recent release, the Lakeside team is offering customers a whole new level of diagnostics by making use of artificial…
With the release of Remote Desktop modern infrastructure (RDmi) around the corner and Microsoft Inspire just having finished, there’s a lot of discussion around migrating to RDmi environments. RDmi is a new PaaS offering that’s viewed as a redesign of the familiar RDS. This new offering has many new features and security settings including a…
Do your users’ virtual desktops spark joy? If not, it might be time to right-size your VDI. There are many compelling reasons to implement VDI. Placing multiple users on the same host can make hardware use more efficient and lower maintenance needs. Additionally, because the guest OS doesn’t live on the user’s device, VDI can…
APM is commonly used to describe two different practices: application performance management and application performance monitoring. While seemingly almost identical, these terms mean—and can lead to—two different things. In short, application performance management is a subset of digital experience monitoring (DEM), while application performance monitoring has a narrower scope of a specific application’s functionality. Both involve identifying…
Picture this: a father shows up at his daughter’s wedding, sick with a bad cold, walks up to the bride and says, “sorry I’m taking a sick day.” This was the premise of a pretty successful ad campaign by Vick’s showing how parents simply don’t take sick days. Similarly, neither does IT support. When business-critical resources underperform or flat out fail,…
Citrix XenDesktop is a dedicated software solution for configuring virtual environments. While virtualization can apply to several areas, including the virtualization of servers, storage, as well as networks, XenDesktop is specifically designed for the configuration of virtual desktops. However, this is often confused with a similar virtualization software solution, Citrix XenApp. In this post, we…
At some point, many of us have either shamefully filed a ticket to a service desk with a problem or have been on the other side and worked to resolve tickets that have piled up out of nowhere. Sometimes we are both lucky to get a quick resolution (have you considered not leaving your laptop running for a year straight?) or sometimes it takes a little bit longer (RIP your motherboard). However, a consistent battle that IT at the service desk face with their users is reducing the time-to-resolution…
5 Best Practices for Proactive Monitoring Becoming proactive within the enterprise can be a challenging mountain to climb. As a past level 1 help desk employee, I can safely say that I wish proactive monitoring was something we took more seriously.Independent of the obvious benefits of a proactive approach to digital experience monitoring, if done properly, it can bring about numerous benefits to the support…
If data is the new oil, AIOps is IT’s refinery. Short for artificial intelligence for IT operations, AIOps refers to software that combines big data and AI or machine learning to help IT manage data and find insights faster. But what does comparing data to oil mean in practical terms? And what aspects of IT operations can…
The topic of Terminal Server/Citrix XenApp workloads has been at the forefront of our attention since Meltdown and Spectre patches were released. The potential for slowdowns after applying Meltdown and Spectre patches prompted us to investigate the matter for ourselves, and we released some initial findings for VDI that showed a noticeable CPU impact (with the caveat of impact being workload-dependent). Now…