Does Citrix Need To Change EdgeSight?

I have been working with Citrix products for a very long time and while I appreciate the technology in most of the products, I can't help but look at EdgeSight and wonder: At what point will Citrix make a change?

EdgeSight is a good monitoring tool, but it is a very complex and difficult tool to work with. Frankly, it's past its time. There are software packages on the market today that can do everything that EdgeSight does without requiring an MBA in software development to get things done.

Companies like eG Innovations and Splunk are fantastic alternatives to EdgeSight that extend the ease of use and monitoring capabilities down to the application layer without EdgeSight's complexity. Citrix charges a significant fee for customers who want the Citrix Platinum licensing package, and one of the selling points for upgrading to Platinum is EdgeSight. Even so, is anyone really using EdgeSight?

Furthermore, companies want to be able to report on simple things, not just complex things. If I've deployed a NetScaler Access Gateway in my environment and I want a report of which users have logged in at what time, can EdgeSight give me that? The answer is no. Granted, the NetScaler appliance can't give me that either, and at least not without going through an extensive exercise in software development. In both cases, how is this acceptable?

The bottom line: With XenDesktop catering to an enterprise audience, the ability to have a more comprehensive monitoring solution is imperative, especially when customers are paying a premium for the Platinum edition of the software. We would also expect that this monitoring platform is now hypervisor-aware, such that the monitoring understands the hypervisor layer and can also report any performance degradation or bottleneck at every junction. And any enterprise customer can benefit from being able to see the different hops that packets travel through and where a potential bottleneck exists. Such built-in, fully integrated solutions just do not exist today.

I would love to hear from anyone that has implemented EdgeSight and how you are using it.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/21/2011 at 12:49 PM