Improving the user and admin experience with Citrix ITSM Adapter

The Citrix ITSM Adapter for ServiceNow is a cloud-enabled service used to automate the provisioning of Citrix resources and employee self-services. It also provides a centralized dashboard for monitoring alerts and notifications and creates corresponding incidents for admins to follow up on.

This integration helps to free an IT team from spending time on manual and one-off processes, making it easier to manage Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service environments.

The Citrix ITSM Adapter operates on a release cadence that is approximately six-to-eight weeks. In the past several releases, the Citrix ITSM team delivered many new features and enhancements, including:

• Integration with ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent, enabling user self-service through Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Now Mobile
• New features such as MCS provisioning, deprovision, and VDA power management
• Enhancements to existing desktop and app request workflows, such as the ability for an admin to configure the desktop and app visibility on the end-user request page
• A centralized alerts and notifications dashboard, integrated with ServiceNow incident management flow, for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service alerts, Citrix Cloud notifications, and Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) events
• The first release of custom activities and a developer guide, enabling additional customization options

Integration with ServiceNow Virtual Agent

In August, we announced a new integration for the Citrix ITSM Adapter with ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent (directly available to ServiceNow customers by downloading the Citrix ITSM Connector via the ServiceNow Store), enabling admins to automate resolution of virtual session resets.

The new ServiceNow Virtual Agent integration builds upon the existing Citrix ITSM plug-in with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service to deliver always-on, automated, AI support that reduces the burden on IT organizations and to speed session reset/authentication issues for employees and authorized contractors. Many virtual session reset incidents can now be resolved in moments rather than requiring manual IT support and intervention

Learn more about how Citrix and ServiceNow integrations can simplify IT and improve productivity.

New workflows

We also made enhancements to the Citrix ITSM Adapter solution itself, focusing on providing new workflows for both admins and end users.

• Admin service workflow – Add MCS-created machines: Sometimes when processing an end user’s desktop requirements, there aren’t enough resources available. By adding this admin workflow, we have extended our service options to let you add MCS-created machines when a requested machine catalog is short on machines. This feature saves time for admins, who don’t have to create more resources in another manual IT flow.
• Admin service workflow – VDI deprovisioning service: When people join or leave an organization, the assigned VDI desktops may stay idle for a long period without a proper reclaiming process. This will result in the wasting of DC/cloud resources and a desktop license. Now Citrix ITSM provides VDA deprovisioning service, which allows an IT admin to set up a deprovisioning policy based on idle days. Every day, the ITSM connector generates a deprovisioning list. The IT admin or operator can check each record and execute a deprovisioning task if necessary.

• End user and admin service workflow – VDI power management: ServiceNow admins and end users can now apply the following power actions on a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) desktop: Start; Shut down; Force shutdown; Reboot; and Force reboot. This gives end users and IT admin an alternative VDI power management method in addition to the Citrix Workspace app and Citrix Studio.

Enhancements to existing request desktop/application features

Citrix ITSM connector provides a request desktop/application workflow to end users, and IT admins can process end user requests within ServiceNow. This enables IT admins to allocate resources based on and end user’s real requirements easily and get a smoother experience than a general, user-created ServiceNow ticket.

With the recent enhancements, admins can set the which desktops and applications are available for end user requests. By customizing the available desktops and applications list, administrator can shortlist preferred desktops and applications to end users, reducing unnecessary noise.

Alerts and Notifications management features

Alerts are one of the most important information sources for running any IT system. They notify and inform the admin team about ongoing critical events, incidents that might threaten your business, or information such as service upgrades and business quality insights.

There are multiple alerts and notifications resources in Citrix environments, and admins can view them in different portals, such as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops alerts in Citrix Director, Citrix Cloud notification in ccdashboard, Citrix ADM events on the ADM management page. Email notifications are also available for timed targeting and follow ups.

With all these alerts available, there’s a need to bring the information together into ServiceNow for centralized management and improved follow-up.

Now Citrix ITSM Adapter provides alerts and notifications management capability for the Citrix components below.

• Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops alerts
• Citrix Cloud notification
• Citrix ADM events

Custom Activities

The Citrix ITSM connector plugin was developed over the ITSM SaaS environment provided by ServiceNow. Citrix currently provides workflows such as reset a session, request desktop and applications, MCS provisioning, desktop deprovisioning, and VDA power management. We will continue to develop new workflows and improve existing workflows to provide more benefits to our customers. However, we understand that the ITSM workflow in each organization might be different. For example, the native workflow won’t be suitable to all customers, and customers have unique customization requirements.

So, Citrix continues to invests resources on developing Citrix ITSM Custom Activities, which provide a set of orchestration activities to customers who want to create or customize some workflows. By installing Citrix ITSM connector plugin for ServiceNow, the Citrix Custom Activities are natively included. Then Citrix customers can reuse these Custom Activities for saving development time and cost.

See our developer cloud documentation for more information.

Resources

See the what’s new in Citrix ITSM documentation for more information. Also, after you install Citrix ITSM connector plugin in ServiceNow instance, you will find helpful information on the home page.