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Xangati announced the rollout of AppMonitor for Virtualization Management, an addition to its AppMonitor suite that gives users the ability to monitor activity of virtualized and cloud applications associated with their network. That ability, combined with the company’s Virtual Trouble Ticket portal, allows either a help desk or cloud provider to view and assess any performance issues with a particular virtualized or cloud application, and resolve the issue.
Specifically, those IT administrators at a help desk or with the cloud provider can view the past 15 minutes of end-user activity, allowing them to hopefully pinpoint the specific performance issue affecting an application. Executives at Xangati refer to this 15 minutes of playback as a “DVR-style recording.” The added transparency could potentially boost the problem-solving efficiency of help desks for SMBs (small and midsize businesses) and the enterprise that support a variety of on-premises and cloud-based solutions.
“The new AppMonitor we’ve designed for the virtual world not only allows a power user to do their own self-help,” Alan Robin, CEO of Xangati, said in a statement, “but shrinks the IT visibility gap by giving a more complete understanding of the interactions of applications and resources – seeing straight through to where a performance problem resides, helping to bound the problem and resolve issues 50 percent faster.”
The AppMonitor offers two dashboards: one that displays individual end-user application activity and performance, and one that shows the bandwidth usage by applications. The latter, apparently, can be utilized to record cloud application usage, for billing purposes.
Rising IT incident volumes within the enterprise can often lead to inefficiencies, as they force IT administrators to spend increased amounts of time on issues ranging from resetting passwords to fixing device blunders. Extending simple tips to workers – such as exercising caution when opening email attachments and being proactive about managing inboxes – can save IT much wasted effort and time, as can introducing tools that streamline the ticket process for IT help-desk workers.
In an effort to stem the amount of help-desk resources being wasted on everyday issues, many IT administrators will enact practices such as having all customized enterprise applications run on a single “approved” browser rather than risk potential issues with alternates. However, such restrictions may prevent the enterprise from adopting more effective browsers and other tools.