Citrix Health Check

A financial services company with approximately 300 users across two offices in Berkshire and the City of London had been running a Citrix environment for several years. Over time, performance had steadily degraded to the point where it was seriously impacting daily operations. Login times had crept up to 45 seconds or more, with some users reporting waits of over a minute during peak morning hours. Applications would freeze mid-session without warning, forcing staff to disconnect and reconnect - sometimes losing unsaved work in the process. The IT team had attempted various fixes but lacked deep Citrix expertise, and the issues persisted. With no comprehensive monitoring in place, they had limited visibility into what was causing the problems. The firm operated under strict FCA regulatory requirements, meaning system reliability and data access were not just productivity concerns but compliance obligations. Leadership recognised that a specialist assessment was needed to get the environment back to an acceptable standard.

Coffee Cup Solutions carried out a comprehensive Citrix Health Check over a two-week engagement. Our certified Citrix engineers performed a systematic review of every component in the environment, including the Citrix ADC (NetScaler) appliances, StoreFront servers, Delivery Controllers, licensing configuration, and VDA images. We used Citrix Director and additional diagnostic tools to gather performance baselines and identify patterns behind the intermittent failures. The assessment uncovered 23 distinct configuration issues. Key findings included misconfigured load balancing policies on the ADC that were causing uneven session distribution, outdated VDA versions with known performance bugs, oversized user profiles that were inflating login times, and StoreFront servers that had not been updated since initial deployment. We also identified that the SQL database hosting the site configuration had grown without maintenance, leading to slow query responses from the Delivery Controllers. Our team remediated all critical and high-priority issues during the engagement, applying Citrix best-practice configurations, optimising profile management with Citrix Profile Management, tuning ADC policies, and updating VDA images to the latest LTSR release. We also implemented Citrix Monitor for ongoing performance visibility. Finally, we delivered a detailed report with a prioritised 12-month optimisation roadmap covering capacity planning, disaster recovery improvements, and a recommended upgrade path for the ADC appliances.