Together Login VSI and IGEL deliver deep application test and availability monitoring for the digital workspace

Guest Blog: Blair Parkhill, Director of Products at Login VSI

Last week we announced a partnership with IGEL that enables Login PI integration in a radical new way, giving our joint customers the ability to deploy our synthetic user technology to endpoints around the world. (View the announcement here.) What I am amazed by is the simplicity of this solution and the ability to reduce cost by leveraging IGEL software-defined endpoints. Let’s take a quick look at what this means and how it works.

HEALTHCARE USE CASE

First let’s start with a use case. We aren’t limited to healthcare with this solution, but since it is one of our largest markets, let’s just use it as an example. In this scenario we have several clinics that are all operated by the same enterprise, therefore they share an electronic medical record (EMR) system. Typically, these clinics all start with a practice management system, the one the front desk admin uses to get patients checked in and records updated. If this isn’t ready in the morning when doors open, then the practice will see fewer patients, customer experience goes down and so does revenue. In many practices, the doctors try to see as many patients a day as possible.

The office admins will typically show up just before work starts. They’ll fire up their system and get it ready to check in the first patient. But, what if that system isn’t available at that clinic, or what if the practice management interface is extremely slow? Well, this all could have been prevented. By running Login PI Launchers at each of these clinics, the virtual users will consistently login to the desktop, open the application, run queries, update records, etc.… When this happens 24×7, any availability or performance issues will be alerted to the operations team, who can remediate the issue, before the staff starts to show up for work. The same method can be applied to any practitioner workflows as well. You wouldn’t want your doctors or nurses to have to wait for their EMR apps to start up or update, which again reduces the volume of patients which can be seen in a day.

The moral of this story is that you don’t have to wait for your real users to show up to identify an issue. The synthetic virtual user is sensitive to any change in lag or latency at the endpoint and will report any changes in user-experience within the application workflow.

THE BENEFITS OF USING LOGIN PI WITH IGEL

Ease of use

When it comes to performance testing and monitoring, typically there are some steps that need to be followed to setup the solution. Agents, software, databases, servers, network configurations, discovery, etc.… are all common steps in deployment. What is so amazing about this solution with IGEL software-defined endpoints is that you can take one of their thin-clients or an unused laptop (after running their UDC), assign the Login PI profile to it, reboot it, and voila… your Login PI launcher is up and running and reporting metrics back to the virtual appliance about logon success, logon timing, protocol latency, application start times and application interaction times.

Cost

The idea of being able to double-duty an existing end-point at a remote site, or converting a decommissioned piece of hardware to use as a Login PI launcher is phenomenal. With Login PI and IGEL you don’t need a virtual or a physical machine dedicated to the function of being a launcher. This means that there is no additional hardware cost and due to IGEL being completely a Linux based solution, there is no cost to license another Windows instance.

HOW THE SOLUTION WORKS

Without going too far into the weeds, this solution is enabled by a couple different features. The first is the ability for an IGEL end-point to be able to run software from a custom partition. The second is the small amount of Login PI software that sits on this partition and enables the launcher to run. After these two things are done, all you simply do is create a profile and assign it to an end-point. Of course, you’ll need to have the pre-requisites of IGEL UMS, Login PI and the proper licensing. If you want any help or further details on this implementation, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at www.loginvsi.com.

STAY TUNED

There will be much more to come regarding this partnership and the many great ways to use Login PI with IGEL.

FUN FACT

I.G.E.L., the company’s name, is an acronym for a series of German words I cannot understand, but did you know that the word Igel in German means hedgehog? Hence their brilliant logo!