Health Checks & Optimisation

Many customers first engagement with Centralis is through health checks and troubleshooting, often as the result of a referral by another customer or vendor consulting services. 

The Centralis Health Check offers:

• Best Practise Audit - Comparison of all key settings by server against best practise

• Standards Audit - Cross-server analysis of printer drivers, service packs, hot-fixes, drivers etc.

• Stress Evaluation - Application & server load balancing, testing and evaluation

• Usage Assessment - Farm usage reports by application, user and client version

• Security Audit - Assessment of key settings for data, access and systems security

• DR / BC / HA Audit - Assessment of systems resilience and fault tolerance

• Executive Summary - Strengths, weaknesses, risks and recommendations, all clearly laid out and easy to understand

• Detailed Content - Tables comparing current settings with best practice plus commentary explaining the findings and rationale for any suggested changes

Based on the findings of the Health Check you may wish to engage Centralis to troubleshoot and resolve the issues, or you can use the findings to resolve the issues yourself - the choice is yours.

If you would like to discuss our health check service or would like a sample report, please click here and we'll contact you

How much do you know about your end users' experience of your computing environment? 

Standard server, system and network management solutions in use in most businesses today do not adequately identify issues before users are adversely affected. Many monitoring tools do not provide the visibility or granularity to enable administrators to spot performance problems before the users report them, and most users don’t contact the helpdesk until they have a problem several times or can no longer do their job - leaving the I.T. department to deal with unhappy and unproductive users.

Our User Experience Benchmarking can identify:

• Performance - How long it takes users to log in or launch key applications

• Consistency - Variations in performance at different times of the day, days of the week or from different locations

• Application Errors - Tracking errors reported to users, even if they don't report them to you

• Network Issues - Long round trips, latency and bottlenecks

• Resource Issues - Client device and server and server utilisation for memory and CPU

Overall, the service allows you to profile your environment, identify any issues and set a benchmark.  This can be particularly helpful when planning an upgrade in order to target a group of users who will benefit most and to be able to measure the improvement delivered.

If you would like to discuss benchmarking your end user experience, please click here and we'll contact you.

Centralis recommends AppSense to customers seeking to get the best value from their application and desktop delivery solutions.  AppSense is the leading optimisation software for Windows servers, user profiles and desktop security and is used by Centralis on most of our major projects.

Whether you are looking to migrate to Windows 7, virtual desktops or virtual applications, performance, user profiles, personalisation and security will be issues you need to overcome.  AppSense has developed an invaluable toolset which not only helps to overcome these issues, it decreases the amount of infrastructure needed, leading to a rapid and provable return on investment.

AppSense Management Suite is the first User Environment Management (UEM) solution for the enterprise. The Suite is comprised of four fully integrated products that provide policy and personalization management, including application and resource entitlement, across desktop delivery mechanisms such as Citrix XenApp™, Microsoft Terminal Services™, VMware VDM, Citrix XenDesktop™, and streamed and local applications.

 The value of virtualised desktop environments is proportional to the number of users in the virtualized environment.  The Management Suite has therefore been designed with the enterprise in mind.  From mass-scalability to system redundancy capabilities to full lifecycle management of the user personality, AppSense technology has been proven enterprise-robust in many large scale implementations.

Centralis can arrange trials and production deployments of one or more elements of the AppSense Management Suite:

• AppSense Environment Manager - personalisation and policy management, enterprise profile management, user migration, dynamic personalisation

• AppSense Application Manager - application entitlement, Microsoft licence management, security

• AppSense Performance Manager - Resource entitlement, server consolidation, consistent quality of service

If you would like to discuss an AppSense optimisation trial and ROI exercise, please click here and we'll contact you.