Product Review by Rob Beekmans
The original review was published on Rob's site: https://robbeekmans.net/euc/release-update-eg-enterprise-version-6-3-eg-innovations/.
In January 2018, while Citrix Summit was going on, eG Innovations released version 6.3 of their monitoring solution. There are several reasons Citrix and eG Innovations are important to each other. One of them is that Citrix Summit and Citrix Synergy is monitored by eG Enterprise. For eG Innovations, Citrix is an important vendor and many of their customers use Citrix as the primary application delivery solution.
eG Enterprise is a monitoring solution. It can be deployed on-premises or used as a SaaS solution. Its licensing scheme is simple: You either deploy an agent or you deploy agentless. If you deploy an agent, you have two options
Application monitoring is the advanced option where you can monitor, for example, SQL services or Exchange services. With the standard agent, you monitor the operating system metrics only. To monitor networking components, you could use the agentless option. What's important to know is that when you monitor a hypervisor, you also monitor basic virtual machine metrics. Outside and inside and through the Admin$ share data from within the virtual machine is retrieved. You need to have access to the virtual machine to allow this.
So, they have a new version on the market right now. Let's look at what they have released.
With version 6.3 eG Enterprise adds the ability to natively monitor all Citrix offerings in Microsoft Azure.
The offerings they support now are:
Next to the Microsoft Azure Citrix monitoring, there are more enhancements for Citrix customers. The enhancements are:
Version 6.3 also brings AWS and Azure enhancements; a massive number of 31 services from AWS are added to the support list. Together with these additions, you can now monitor your AWS services from all regions in all zones and instances.
If we look at Microsoft Azure, which was already supported, a purpose-built monitoring model for Microsoft Azure Resource Manager deployments has been added to the new version. Several public cloud monitoring enhancements have been added but mostly minor ones. eG Enterprise 6.3 also adds support for monitoring virtual workspaces running on public cloud (AWS, Azure, etc.). Using a lightweight agent installed on the cloud desktop, eG Enterprise collects metrics about user experience, session performance, and VDI session resource utilization. This cloud desktop monitoring feature is supported for VDI sessions running on Citrix, VMware Horizon, and Microsoft RDP.
Enhancements have been added to go even further into protocols and find the culprit that is causing the slowness or issues. Again, many of the features added are focused on Citrix. Features added to monitor performance deeper are:
More in-depth reports are available. Some of these metrics are like the old EdgeSight metrics that were available in the advanced reports.
Several new devices and platforms have been added to the solution. With these additions, version 6.3 of eG Enterprise now supports:
In addition to the existing Citrix logon simulator, version 6.3 now introduces a logon simulator for VMware Horizon environments, which helps detect which step of the Horizon login process is causing slowness.
Version 6.3 also offers Support for new storage systems. The storage systems that are supported by the new version are:
With this version, support for new network devices is added as well. The following networking additions are found:
Further on there are enhancements on e.g. monitoring IBM AS/400 systems.
eG Enterprise version 6.3 also adds the ability to monitor Microsoft .NET web applications. Monitoring of these web applications will be done with the APM module. The following features have been added in version 6.3:
I think version 6.3 offers a lot of enhancements. Many of these enhancements will be of value to your environment. If you are interested in this version of eG Enterprise, please contact eG Innovations for more in-depth information, https://www.eginnovations.com.