eG Innovations has been an active
player in the virtualization and cloud performance management area for many
years. VMblog recently caught up with Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO of eG
Innovations to understand what is new with the company and its products.
VMblog: I have been following
eG Innovations for so many years now. Has your focus changed over the years?
Srinivas Ramanathan: At eG Innovations, we have always
had a razor focus on helping IT teams monitor and manage their key business
applications. Almost every business today is digital, and applications are a
key to the business functioning well. If your IT application or infrastructure
is not performing well, it affects your revenue and more importantly, the
brand. Our software products help IT teams proactively monitor their key
applications, troubleshoot problems quickly and overall provide a great
experience for their users.
VMblog: Citrix and VDI
monitoring were areas of focus for you. Is that still the case and what's new
in this area?
Ramanathan: Citrix and VDI remain key focus
areas for us. While there are many monitoring tools in the market, very few
cater to the unique requirements that these technologies have. And the vendors
of these technologies do not provide end-to-end visibility that administrators
need to troubleshoot problems.
One of the key changes over the
years has been a growing awareness among administrators that user experience
matters the most and that is how their performance is measured. So, over the
years, our products have evolved to monitor and diagnose different aspects of
user experience.
Today, we offer different
synthetic monitoring options that administrators can use to proactively test
their key applications and to make sure that these are working well. At the
same time, we track and report on the real experience that your users are
seeing. Both these views are essential to know how well a Citrix or VDI
deployment is working.
And to get to what's new, over
the last 2 years, both Citrix and VMware have revamped their respective
products - the architecture has changed, the protocol itself has changed, there
are more deployment options and both vendors have acquired and integrated many
new technologies (AppVolumes, AppLayering, Workspace Environment Management, etc.).
As a monitoring vendor, we must
adapt to these changes quickly. If you monitor a Citrix 7.x stack the same way
that you did a Citrix 6.x stack, you will not detect a number of issues that
can come up in the new architecture. We've enhanced our eG Enterprise suite to
support the new enhancements in the Citrix and VMware Horizon
architectures.
At the same time, we have focused
on making our products easier to use. Deployment of our solution has been made
a lot easier in our latest release - eG Enterprise v7.
We have also introduced new
visualizations that make it easy for IT admins and help desks to detect and
troubleshoot issues. For instance, Citrix admins can see a color-coded
geographic map showing the latencies that users are experiencing when they
connect to a Citrix farm. This way, they can easily see if users from a
specific region are seeing issues.
VMblog: What about cloud
monitoring? We see a trend towards deployment of virtual apps and desktops in
the cloud, are you seeing the same?
Ramanathan: Yes, we see that too. Many of our
customers are also looking at cloud deployments too. Cloud deployments reduce
the time to set up and the effort involved in maintenance, patching, upgrades
etc. but they also introduce additional complexity.
Take the case of a Citrix Cloud
deployment.
The control plane which does the
brokering of sessions is hosted by Citrix in their cloud. You can also choose
to have the Citrix gateways hosted by Citrix also. The resource plane which is
your session hosts and desktops are your responsibility. Now, when a user
complains about slowness, where is the issue? Is it on the user end, or is it
an issue with their connectivity, or is it with the resource plane, with Citrix
cloud, or could it be your network connecting you to Citrix cloud?
There are more moving parts here
and hence, troubleshooting performance issues can be more challenging as
compared to an on-prem deployment. At eG Innovations, we have added monitoring
capabilities for Citrix
cloud so that we can provide a single pane of glass from where you get
visibility end-to-end and can quickly troubleshoot issues.
VMblog: Is eG Enterprise
mainly deployed on-premises or do you also offer a cloud hosted option?
Ramanathan: eG Enterprise is now available in
both deployment models. You can choose to deploy it fully on-premise with no
access to the external world, or we can host it as a SaaS service
in the cloud. In the SaaS model, you just deploy our agents or agentless
monitors in your infrastructure, and they communicate with our management
server in the cloud. This makes the cloud deployment very simple - you can be
up and running in minutes.
VMblog: Does eG Innovations
play a role in the current work from home situation that most organizations
find themselves?
Ramanathan: Yes, absolutely. When most
organizations moved their employees to working from home, they had to scramble
to determine how they get employees to access their corporate applications.
No one had planned for a scenario
where they would have 100% of employees working from home. Technology choices
had to be made, licenses purchases, servers put in place, etc. Now we have
moved beyond this first phaseand we know that work from home is not going to be
a short-term thing. The challenge now shifts to how to make employees
productive - how do they get the best user experience possible.
At the same time, organizations
want to be able to track what their employees are up to - are they productive,
what applications do they use, for how long etc. Also bear in mind that IT
admins themselves are remote these days and they are having to deal with an
unprecedented number of remote employees.
This is where eG Enterprise
helps.
We provide the monitoring
insights needed for IT admins to make sure employees get the experience they
need to be productive and we provide the analytics that executives are after to
determine how productive their employees are.
VMblog: What other technologies does eG Innovations monitor beyond Citrix and VDI?
Ramanathan: Citrix and VDI are just a couple
of the technologies we monitor. Our product suite monitors most common
applications that enterprises use. We have specialized monitoring for SaaS
applications like Microsoft
365 and Salesforce. We also support monitoring for the entire SAP suite of
products.
Over the last few years, we have
expanded our coverage of web applications. We realized that monitoring of
infrastructure and database technologies was important, but what we had a blind
spot in was the application itself. What if there is an issue in the
application code? This could cause user experience issues.
We have developed monitors to
monitor Java,
Microsoft .NET and PHP applications at the code level. Now, we can provide
complete insight into what is causing slowness: is it the infrastructure or the
application? We call this a converged approach to application and
infrastructure monitoring. This means organizations do not have to invest in
multiple toolsets - one for application monitoring, another for infrastructure
monitoring.
VMblog: Are there any specific
futures you can reveal?
Ramanathan: Given the situation we find
ourselves in, it would be hard to predict what the future holds for anybody
anymore! This said, at eG Innovations, we expect to maintain our focus in
several key areas.
User experience is growing in
importance and we will be looking at ways to improve our user experience
monitoring insights. Ease of deployment and usability are key drivers for any
technology today and we will continue to invest in this area. AIOps and machine
learning is the way that monitoring tools can offer more value to organizations
- by automating routine tasks and by analyzing volumes of data to predict
trends and forecast problems. These are areas we are investing in.
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