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What benefits does citrix analytics provide to the citrix workspace |
What benefits does citrix analytics provide to the citrix workspace.Citrix Analytics: How it Relates to Citrix Performance Monitoring & Management?
What benefits does citrix analytics provide to the citrix workspace
Reference: Citrix user risk indicators. A policy is defined as a set of conditions that must be met for an action to execute.
A policy contains a single condition and one or more actions. Policies on Citrix Analytics help to perform actions on user accounts when unusual or suspicious activities occur. Once policies are applied, the action is triggered immediately after an unexpected event occurs. As mentioned, the policy is a set of conditions. The risk score and risk score change are global conditions applied to a specific user for a particular data source. Reference: Policies.
Actions help to respond to suspicious events and prevent future anomalous events from occurring. The administrator can take action on user accounts that display unusual or suspicious behavior. It is up to the admin to apply action automatically, or manually depending on the conditions. Reference: Actions. Performance Analytics is a powerful tool to find the root cause for end-user experience issues.
Also, it quantifies user experience, and app performance gives users end-to-end visibility. Performance Analytics supports multi-site aggregation and reporting so that data represented from multiple sites or multiple sources in a unified display. The user experience score is calculated based on latency, logon duration, reconnections, and failures. The exact root cause of the problem identified by keenly looking into the metrics. It allows the administrator to drill down further to find the root cause of the issues that users are experiencing.
Performance analytics is available for both on-premises and cloud-based Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environments. To learn more about user experience, refer to the following link. Operations Analytics is a more specific term oriented to business analytics that focuses on improving existing operations.
Operations Analytics involves the use of various data aggregation to get more transparent information for day to day IT services. Citrix infrastructure consists of multiple products that are an amalgamation of different sets of workloads, and the administrator needs to have insight into the environment. Also, many administrators fail to focus on improving and optimization of the Citrix environment.
To overcome such problems, Citrix has embedded Operations Analytics into an analytics solution. The analytics solution contains machine learning algorithms and delivers actionable insights into the operational data of customers Citrix environments. For example, if an enterprise is using the Citrix Secure Private Access service, admins can use the operations dashboards to get insights into user operations and application operation data. These metrics help in procuring and providing resources and quickly responding to any operations issues.
In another way, operations analytics support the idea of enterprise resource planning. Operation Analytics aggregates information to enhance the proactive approach towards resource management. User Operations: Provides an overview of the user operations data based on transactions and data usage volume. App Operations: Provides an overview of app operations data based on domains, categories, and download volume. Citrix Secure Private Access service enables the administrators to provide a cohesive experience integrating single sign-on, remote access, and content inspection into a unique solution for end-to-end Secure Private Access.
Citrix Secure Private Access and Citrix Analytics solutions gives clear insights into user behavior and monitors the entire network. The inbuilt capability of Citrix Analytics that uses machine learning helps to take corrective actions. Citrix Analytics uses similar metrics and collected by the Secure Private Access service.
The parameters of activities of users, such as websites visited, and the bandwidth spent. It also detects malware and phishing sites. The preceding diagram depicts a holistic view of Citrix Secure Private Access integration with the Citrix Analytics service. Data processing can be enabled by administrator with few clicks on the Analytics UI. Risky Website Access: This policy suggests that the user tried to access malicious, suspicious, or unsafe websites with high reputation ratings.
URL reputation rating is given for websites. The values range from 1 to 4. Unusual Download Volume: The volume of data downloaded by the user from an application or websites has exceeded the threshold defined implicitly by Citrix Analytics. Unusual Upload Volume: The amount of data uploaded by the user from an app or sites has surpassed the limit set implicitly by Citrix Analytics.
Citrix Content Collaboration enables us to quickly and securely exchange documents, send extensive material by email, and safely handle document transfers to third parties. In the Citrix Workspace environment, the user can access all of their files from the Citrix Workspace app. In a small scale or large-scale Citrix environment, threats hidden behind the screen are tough to discern and take precautionary measures. Citrix Content Collaboration can be monitored and troubleshot with the help of Citrix Analytics.
Citrix Content Collaboration service hosted on Citrix Cloud nimbly integrates with Analytics service by enabling the data sources. The preceding diagram depicts the integration of Citrix Content Collaboration and Citrix Analytics service.
Security Analytics as part Analytics service support monitoring and troubleshooting of user behavior and activities. Excessive file downloads: This policy indicates an attempt to download data that exceeds the AI-based threshold for this period. Excessive file sharing: This policy indicates that the share links created and shared have exceeded the threshold set by the machine learning algorithms for this period.
Excessive file uploads: This policy indicates an attempt to upload data that exceeds the AI-based threshold for this period. Ransomware activity suspected File Replaced : This policy indicates an effort to replace existing files with encrypted versions, resembling a ransomware attack. Ransomware activity suspected Files Updated : This policy indicates an attempt to update existing files with encrypted versions, resembling a ransomware attack.
In case any unusual behavior or suspicious activity detected by Citrix Analytics service, then it can protect the data by disabling the user and expire all links. Citrix Endpoint Management is a solution for managing endpoints, offering mobile device management MDM and mobile application management MAM capabilities.
With Endpoint Management, the administrator can manage device and app policies and deliver apps to users. Usually, the end-user might change device or install one of the blacklisted apps.
Such incidents trigger an alarm in the Endpoint Management environments. Most of the time, it may go unnoticed to Citrix administrators or the possibility of manual errors. In such cases, when an administrator has to manage thousands of endpoints, it becomes a burden. This process tends to increase much working hours managing the devices. To overcome these problems, Citrix Endpoints Management can be integrated with Citrix Analytics service by the administrator.
That helps in detection of unmanaged device, blacklisted app installed device detection, and applying actions on such device can be automated. From the Analytics UI with just a few clicks, the Endpoint Management service can be monitored and detect any suspicious activities on endpoints.
This monitoring service starts on any device Android, iOS, managed, or unmanaged, so that the administrator will have a clear view of devices such as jailbroken, blacklisted apps. The following policies that an administrator can create to take actions based on the devices and applications.
A device with blacklisted apps detected: This policy indicates the detection of a device with blacklisted applications on the network using Citrix Endpoint Management service. Jailbroken or rooted device detected: This policy indicates the detection of a jailbroken or rooted device on the network using Citrix Endpoint Management service.
Unmanaged device detected: This policy indicates that an unmanaged device discovered by Citrix Endpoint Management service in your network. When any of the conditions are met, the administrator has an option to give a notification to the administrator and user. The administrator can also lock that particular device. Gateway service helps in delivering a unified experience into SaaS apps, heterogeneous Virtual Apps and Desktops, and so forth.
Similarly, Citrix Gateway detects all the user logon failures, which can be primary, secondary, or tertiary authentication failures. Also, authorization failures distinguished from the Citrix Gateway. Citrix Gateway metrics on user logon activity are collected by Citrix Analytics to perform an automated task that would not be practical for an administrator to do manually.
The administrator has to enable data processing so that Citrix Analytics starts capturing the data from the Gateway Service. Authorization failures: This policy indicates that the Analytics AI engine identified that the user has attempted to access a resource without sufficient permissions. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are virtualization solutions that give IT control of virtual machines, applications, licensing, and security, while providing anywhere access for any device.
Similarly, administrators have the advantage of managing the network and control access from selected devices or all devices. Citrix Analytics for Virtual Apps and Desktops framework gives an insight into user activities. App-based risk indicators are triggered when users attempt to access an unauthorized application over a specific period.
Data based risk indicators are generated for unusual data upload and download with a large volume. The inbuilt machine learning platform keeps feeding the latest update into its database, and profiles are updated. In the future, any anomaly in the environment can be easily detected and mitigated without admin intervention. Potential Data Exfiltration: This policy indicates an attempt to exfiltrate data from Citrix Workspace to an external device or location.
Access from New Device s : This policy indicates an attempt to log on to Citrix Workspace from a new device. Access from a device with unsupported OS: This policy indicates an attempt to access the network launching receiver from a device with an unsupported OS version or unsupported browser version.
During the policy creation the administrator can enable the action when any conditions are met. Performance Analytics gives an insight into user session details in the Citrix environment.
User Experience: This offering provides insights into the user and session performance parameters — a profound view of all sites in the organization within a concise dashboard. The user experience score helps to segregate the users based on their experience namely Excellent, Fair, or Weak. User Sessions: The User Session section of the User Experience dashboard displays an important session metric for the chosen period and Site.
The administrator can view Total Sessions, Total unique users, and Session failures data. The information used to quantify user experience. If any session is facing network issues, the session responsiveness trend data helps to identify such problems in the network. Session Logon Duration: Logon duration is the app or desktop availability after the user clicks in the Citrix Workspace app.
This section has Total logons, Session classification, and sorted by Delivery Groups. Reference: Performance Analytics. Citrix Analytics supports and discovers data sources automatically. Citrix Analytics automatically discovers the sites once added to Citrix Workspace.
The Virtual Apps and Desktops site card displays the number of discovered Sites and users. To add Sites in Citrix Cloud the customer needs to have a Workspace subscription.
The administrator has to do Site aggregation before proceeding with onboarding on Citrix Analytics. The administrator has to turn on data processing on the Site card. Once the Citrix Analytics start receiving the events, collected data can be viewed based on the selected time.
A policy agent installed to configure the policies and this step is not associated with data transmission from the data sources. To know more about policy agent and installation, refer to the following link.
Another method that StoreFront can become a data source to Citrix Analytics is by aggregating applications and desktops from Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Sites into a single store for users. User events captured by Citrix Analytics process through to get actionable insights into user behaviors. There are a few prerequisites that the administrator has to configure before enabling this method.
On the networking front, StoreFront deployments must have TCP port open for outbound internet connection. In case environment uses proxy servers on the network, administrator has to allow a particular port of communication. From the Citrix Analytics service, the administrator has to connect to an on-premises StoreFront deployment. To enable this feature, import the configuration settings. That makes Citrix Analytics receive the data from StoreFront. To learn more on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as a data source, refer to the following link.
Performance Analytics is a comprehensive monitoring solution. Performance analytics helps in monitoring and viewing the usage of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Sites in the organization. To enable these capabilities, the administrator has to configure on-premises sites with Citrix Analytics from the Citrix Director console.
Reference: Configuring on-premises Sites with Citrix Analytics for performance. Citrix Analytics is an intuitive analytics service that allows administrators to monitor and identify inconsistent or suspicious activity on the networks. A turn-key machine learning platform that provides actionable insights into user behavior based on indicators across users, endpoints, network traffic, and files. An organization can solve business challenges and performance-related issues by adopting analytics solutions built-on a machine learning platform.
There are various benefits that organizations and administrators can realize by selecting Analytics Service in Citrix brownfield deployment or green field deployment. Detect and analyze threats based on user behavior Detect and prevent ransomware attacks by taking security measures. Monitor and analyze user access, and authentication behavior helps to stop malicious activity and prevent any data loss.
Automated platform with the help of ML and AI algorithms, any anomalies are detected. Health visibility Advanced analytics helps to identify issues proactively. Application Performance Analytics distills app data and many real-time performance metrics into a single-digit App Score that shows responsiveness of an app. Admins and app owners can drill down into the infrastructure associated with specific apps to troubleshoot issues.
Tighter external security Citrix Analytics generates a threat index based on violation type, rate of attack, location, and client details. Improved internal security Citrix Analytics collects a wide variety of data from many sources surrounding user activity, access behaviors, and network and data usage patterns.
The automated machine learning platform helps to mitigate any unusual occurrences. Central management and automation Citrix Analytics collects different metrics from multiple resources, that help an administrator to monitor all Citrix portfolio products from a single UI.
Cloud service Citrix Analytics is a SaaS offering from Citrix Cloud that has security, performance, and the operational dashboard. The UI provides a summary and categorization of the user risk profiles, user experience details, and so on in the Citrix environment. Many of the global security challenges are not addressed by existing traditional threat protection tools alone. Most of the attacks come from external actors that possibly defended, but strikes from within the perimeter are even more menacing.
While defending external threats, many organizations fail to recognize the impact on performance and identifying the root cause. Citrix Analytics that comes with built-in machine learning enhanced with artificial intelligence holds great promise in addressing many security challenges in a Citrix environment.
Citrix Analytics is not just about the security of a Citrix environment. It gives visibility into performance with user experience score and user operations visibility in terms of domains visited, data consumption, and so on. Integration of Citrix Analytics in green field or brownfield deployments helps the administrator to have greater control of the Citrix environment and reduce IT costs.
Goal of this reference architecture is to assist you with planning your own implementation. To make this job easier, we would like to provide you with source diagrams that you can adapt in your own detailed designs and implementation guides: source diagrams.
As a short recap, user experience monitoring is becoming a more popular way of monitoring an end user computing environment such as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. As any Citrix administrator will tell you, user experience is top of mind.
It is important that we deploy applications and desktops to our end-users so they can be productive wherever they work from, but if the user experience is poor then that effort begins to address the issue. User experience monitoring takes a new angle and tells the story of your environment in a different way than traditional monitoring solutions which focused mainly on key resources in use in your environment. User experience is top of mind for us, so how can we quantify it in a more-precise way?
This is where Citrix Performance Analytics steps in. It calculates the user experience for every user who accesses apps and desktops from your on-premises Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment, or Citrix Cloud hosted service, and categorises users into Excellent, Fair, or Fair user experience UX categories. There are a number of key performance indicators that make up the overall User Experience score. These include:. If all these performance indicators are within excellent thresholds, the user experience is calculated as Excellent.
If some or all key performance indicators measure in at high values, your users may drop into Fair or Poor user experience categories. User Experience score, along with Infrastructure Analytics, part of Performance Analytics, allows you to easily see which of your users are not receiving the best user experience.
You can then focus your efforts on rectifying the problems causing poor user experience. The performance indicators used for computing the User Experience score are not computed directly by Citrix Performance Analytics. Instead, this service relies upon a number of data sources. You can read the detailed article on Citrix Performance Analytics here.
They are different products and behave in different ways. As indicated earlier, Citrix Director actually feeds performance metrics up to Performance Analytics. From an on-premises perspective, I have to connect Director to Performance Analytics before I can calculate the user experience for users connecting to my on-premises deployment.
This means I still need Director in my environment, but it is not the only reason. Whilst the two products collect much of the same data such as your logon times, session failures and so on, Director reports that to the administrator for reporting on. Citrix Performance Analytics actually consumes the data into its machine learning engine, and from there is able to calculate the user experience for each user accessing your Virtual Apps and Desktops resources.
Citrix Director also provides additional performance data that is not used by Citrix Performance Analytics currently. It also looks at application usage and can report on the number of instances of applications in use in your site.
An overview of the health of your hypervisor is also available in Citrix Director. Administrators can also use Citrix Director to perform actions — e. Overall, Citrix Performance Analytics is a user experience analytics solution. Citrix architects and executives can use this tool to understand how well they are supporting their users. On the other hand, Citrix Director is an administration and troubleshooting tool.
It provides a lot more granular detail than Citrix Performance Analytics and is intended to be used by the Citrix helpdesk staff and Citrix administrators. Over the years, several vendors have developed monitoring tools for your Citrix platforms.
So how do these tools compare with Citrix Performance Analytics and Director? Do I really need these solutions to monitor my Citrix environment? It is quite simple really, from my perspective, you still need core monitoring solutions in your environment. They actually greatly assist Citrix performance monitoring.
Do not view Citrix Performance Analytics so much as a monitoring product. When you think about it, Performance Analytics looks at key performance metrics that makes a user experience great. It is not necessarily the job of Performance Analytics to pinpoint why a performance metric takes an extra-long time. You still need the core monitoring solutions to monitor the availability of your VDAs, the core Citrix management layer if deployed on-premises, and of course all the other infrastructure needed to not only run a Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment, but ensure it runs optimally.
Logon duration is one of the most important user experience metrics for an end-user, and Citrix administrator. Citrix administrators often put in a lot of work to drive down logon times across their environment, but it is often an ongoing battle as changes made to the environment, including the introduction of new code for example when Virtual Apps and Desktops is upgraded, has the potential to add on seconds to the logon time.
Other factors can periodically affect logon times. For example, the network may suddenly have a slow period, there could be packet loss, or outside of the network desktops and application servers could grind to a halt. The logon process is sensitive to any small change in the environment. You notice that the Group Policy processing times are what is causing this slowness.
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