I love the Citrix user experience dashboards. It's so simple. If a user has an issue, I look at the dashboard, see the network, see the application, and say network is fine, Citrix is fine, but the application is having latency; let me take a closer look at the application server. And I can do all of that in a single console. 
Background
Community Care Physicians (CCP) is a modern and efficient healthcare organization servicing approximately 1.2 million residents of the Capital Region of New York. The organization's 1,800 medical and admin staff provide care to 200,000 patients across its 75 practices.
Delivering exceptional end-user experience for employees is of paramount importance to CCP's IT team because this helps ensure the best quality of patient care. The IT team focuses on ensuring that providers can service patients throughout the day without IT issues slowing them down and employees are not taking work home after-hours due to slow systems.
CCP's tech stack has 750 servers, including 260 Citrix servers, 200+ key medical applications, Office 365, multiple EHR systems, and various Tier 1 healthcare applications, Microsoft SQL Server for data storage and analysis, VMware Sphere virtualization and IGEL thin clients. The IT team consists of seven Level 2 and 3 support engineers working standard business hours, as well as having people on-call when out of hours.
Initially, CCP was using basic network and database monitoring tools but they needed their monitoring to focus on the key Citrix services. Switching to eG Enterprise provided the IT team with a monitoring solution that gave them deep visibility into the performance of their virtual applications and helped them to identify and fix problems before it impacted end users.
CCP's Challenges
- The IT team must ensure flawless experience for employees and help them deliver better patient care.
- The IT team has to focus on patching new zero-day exploits, firmware/software upgrades and general security issues, besides troubleshooting performance issues. The longer the team spent on performance problems, the longer their workday became.
- Medical staff reported IT issues days after they occurred and the IT team had to guess what caused them.
- The IT team had challenges justifying budgets to management for purchasing new hardware.
How CCP Benefits from eG Enterprise
- Peace of mind: The CCP IT team is now proactive and doesn't get into situations when storage drives suddenly run out of space, Office 365 licenses are not available, or database queries are causing slowness.
- Fewer incidents: The number of incidents has noticeably decreased, thereby freeing up IT staff to focus on other areas like security, maintenance, and upgrades.
- Reduced MTTR: Instead of spending 20 minutes looking for the cause of a problem, the IT team now diagnoses and remediates the problem in 5 minutes.
- Reduced manual work: CCP staff no longer need to manually check different services each morning. Time is saved each day by using synthetic monitoring.
- Eliminates guesswork: Armed with historical data, the IT team is able to 'replay' user sessions from the past and identify what may have caused slowness.
- Justify investments: The IT team is able to show resource usage trends and justify new purchases.
End-to-End Monitoring, Diagnosis & Reporting
Since deploying eG Enterprise, the IT team has realized significant time savings where AIOps and synthetic monitoring has automated previously manual tasks. The team now runs a tight ship that doesn't get blown of-course when inevitable IT problems crop up. Earlier, problems would have taken the team 20-30 minutes to identify and fix but these now take as little as five minutes.
Being able to visually see the IT infrastructure in color-coded topology maps means there's no second guessing as to where to look. Furthermore, the team is no longer chasing the symptoms of problems. eG Enterprise auto-correlates between applications and infrastructure and pin-points where the source of the problem lies.
Other time savings have accrued using eG Enterprise's Citrix logon simulator. Earlier the IT team had a checklist of 20 items to look at each morning, but now that's been automated, saving 30-40 minutes every day.
Since the IT team manages many applications, it had been using multiple screens to monitor multiple dashboards. eG Enterprise has consolidated dozens of consoles into a single-pane-of-glass, helping the team to be more efficient. It has become very easy to know simple things like how many unused licenses are there for Office 365, without logging into another console.
Capacity planning has also been automated. From eG Enterprise reports, the team can determine how many additional servers and storage they'll need when the Tier-1 EHR application is upgraded to the latest version.
With eG Enterprise, the IT team is receiving noticeably fewer incidents and fixing them faster. This frees up time so the team can focus on security and maintenance.
The Future of Proactive Monitoring at CCP
The IT team are confident that eG Enterprise is working to help them prevent problems cascade out of control. Operational procedures are already helping them to navigate away from being reactive to proactive.
CCP is looking to be even more proactive with the addition of full-session simulation for Citrix and AllScripts.
eG Enterprise is being integrated into their new ITSM solution so that tickets can automatically be created, prioritized by severity and presented with contextual information to the IT service desk.
CCP expects to train its Level 1 IT service desk on eG Enterprise and free up more time for the level 2 and 3 team members as problems are triaged and routed more efficiently.
About eG Innovations
eG Innovations is dedicated to helping businesses across the globe transform IT service delivery into a competitive advantage and a centre for productivity, growth, and profit. Many of the world's largest businesses, across different verticals, use eG Enterprise technology to enhance IT service performance, increase operational efficiency, ensure IT effectiveness.
