GPM sees all, and is an essential monotoring tool for a clinical Citrix enviroment, since Great Performance Matters !!
August 08, 2018
GPM sees all, and is an essential monotoring tool for a clinical Citrix enviroment, since Great Performance Matters !!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Goliath Performance Monitor
GPM is used throughout our healthcare organization and is specifically used to monitor Citrix end-to-end performance metrics at our 27 Acute Care hospitals, 3 large scale clinics and 2 hospital facilities that we provide Cerner application support to. The GPM product (MonitorIT) allows us to monitor Citrix latency, user logon times and a host of other internal Citrix traffic metrics and measurements on our remote hosted Citrix farm. In addition we are able to monitor the performance and availability (including services and system resources) of our remote backend Linux systems (10 nodes), and our 6 internal rsync Linux servers The MonitorIT agent is also used to perform logon simulation at end-user facilities which allows us to solve the problem of knowing whether our applications running on the Citrix farm are operating within standards and alerts us whenever there is a breakdown in connectivity or performance. We also use MonitorIT to check on the availability and correct functioning of our patient portal websites to ensure our customers/patients have a good experience.
- GPM does exceptionally well at gathering and presenting deep metrics from our Citrix servers and storing them in the GPM database server. This is a vital strength for any system monitoring tool and allows administrators to address almost any system related performance question.
- The MonitorIT front end console does a great job of providing graphical views the summarize data from a multitude of locations. This is particularly important in that it allows administrators to focus in on the reasons for performance issues in a proactive manner before hearing from the end users, especially given the large volumes of detailed data captured by the system
- The MonitorIT product is also very adept at gathering metrics across the processing continuum, providing metrics for system resources, service availability and end-to-end user activity. This is a great strength of the system and allows us to develop Tableau visualizations in addition to the extensive reports and dashboarding capabilities of the GPM product.
- From a purely personal level I would like to see MonitorIT be able to consume data from our clinical/operational databases instead of relying only on taking data in via the agent, log files and scripted sysoutput.
- I think some improvements are possible in the area of custom monitoring of file systems, especially for the detection of missing file scenarios and file volume/rates. GPM only monitors traditional file system metrics like I/O, availability and space utilization, but custom scripting is possible within the design of the system.
- Improvements in documenting the data model of the GPM database schema would also be very useful to advanced users of the system especially when additional external reporting tools are used to extend the GPM usefulness
- GPM has had a decent positive ROI particularly in terms of identifying systemic issues and prevention of system downtimes or resource depletion etc. The GPM product shines a spotlight on configuration and design flaws and as a result makes the systems more stable and responsive, saving us time and effort in diagnosing and reporting on system problems. unfortunately these are quite intangible but nevertheless invaluable business objectives for us, but we can say that downtimes and slowness events have dropped consistently year on year since we deployed GPM.
- Our overall objectives with the GPM project was to deploy a system that could be deployed centrally in our Corp datacenter while monitoring devices and users out in the facilities across the East, Central and West geographic regions. The cost of the endpoint agents was quite modest and provided great functionality at this price point. In this respect our business objectives are well satisfied and the system has been a complete success.
- An important aspect of our business objective was to have a monitoring system that didn't require constant maintenance and babysitting, and as such the GPM system has worked out fantastically in that we only use 1-2 staff resources to monitor all the systems mentioned earlier in this review.
We eventually settled on GPM because of its very obvious strength and depth with Citrix monitoring. Our entire clinical system is deployed over a Citrix infrastructure so it was essential to choose a system whose key focus was Citrix monitoring. GPM's functionality is unrivaled when it comes to Citrix monitoring which is immediately apparent when one witnesses the deep internals of the Citrix platform being collected and reported on, in close to real-time.