Best Practice Health Checks for Digital Workspaces
Tracking down the root causes of issues in a digital workspace environment can be a difficult, often very frustrating process. This task is made even more complex in hybrid environments where there are more than one desktop platform at work covering physical, virtual and cloud delivery. A Health Check with Stratusphere UX is an industry best-practice approach that provides a "state-in-time" picture of the resource usage and performance of the digital workspace environment. Health Checks quickly uncover all the issues across all the shared systems and platforms supporting the workspaces. A Health Check utilizes two main parameters: scale (who and how many are being affected?) and time (when and for how long is the incident occurring?).
Because Stratusphere UX trends metrics over time, it supports a forensic analysis of the environment. Time based metrics allow IT staff to answer questions such as “what systems, resources, applications, users, etc. are being affected at what time and for how long?” By answering this question, IT can determine whether an issue is systemic (for example, an event that happens repeatedly to all users all of the time, or isolated (events that happen to only certain groups at specified times and durations.)
The objectives of a Health Check are as follows:
- Provide a 360° view of virtual desktops' resource usage and overall performance.
- Identify ALL issues, both known and unknown.
- Identify and provide analysis of bottlenecks and performance issues with recommendations for remediation.
- Establish real-world performance thresholds as guideposts to gauge normal/abnormal operations in the virtual environment.
- Document the findings to both facilitate communications with internal and external stakeholders and to provide evidence for remediation and resolution.
When Should a Health Check Be Performed?
A Health Check at any time is a good idea. However, there are three key times when a Health Check becomes critical to perform:
- When you are experiencing issues that are seriously impacting user productivity
- When you are planning to make major changes to the digital workspace environment
- When you need a “point-in-time” documented picture of the digital workspace environment
With a Stratusphere UX Health Check, you can:
- Apply a precise and documented methodology to quickly and completely analyze performance and user issues. Health Checks are a recognized and established industry best practice.
- Ensure that digital workspace performance meets or exceeds physical desktop performance; set thresholds to meet organization’s standards of quality and user experience.
- Identify all the issues in the environment -- both known and unknown -- with comprehensive diagnosis and troubleshooting.
- Save significant time in proactive diagnostics to keep systems up and users productive.
- Ensure that the digital workspace environment can support scaling when adding more or different types of users, or adding or upgrading applications or OS.
- Provide highly accurate documentation in order to pursue remediation with outside vendors or to facilitate communication with internal stakeholders.