TEAMAS

Recently I had to perform some performance testing for a Citrix XenApp environment as part of an upcoming upgrade to our Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement application.  We wanted to ensure that this CE upgrade didn't affect the user density on our Citrix servers. This workload is for our Customer Service Advisors who use Aspect Unified Agent Desktop (UAD) to receive calls integrated into Microsoft Unified Service Desk (USD) to present caller information and a method of completing workflows through Dynamics 365 CE. We would usually complete this task with LoginVSI.  It is a tool we have available to us and have used in the past.  We even have a basic custom workload for the above scenario. We were having a problem with a licence lapsing with the product and also, I wanted a bit more control over the workload and some of it's outputs. So the next best option was creating a set of PowerShell Scripts to complete these tasks. At a high level, I had a single launcher V...

Azure seemingly has endless possibilities and options. Sometimes it is difficult to see the wood through the trees.  The capabilities for techies are mouthwatering but the cost control (or lack thereof) is a constant headache for managers or those who hold the purse strings. It is very easy to accumulate spend if resources are not being managed in the correct way e.g. keeping VMs on when they are not required, having resources set to the incorrect scale or resources being created for testing and never being deleted. There are some quite in depth solutions to cost control in Azure but at an organisation which isn't cloud native, you need to learn to walk before you can run.  Quota management for Enterprise Agreements can help, but this will just report on issues after the problem has occurred. Whilst transitioning support for some Azure Subscriptions to an internal IT team, an IT manager asked me whether there was a way to simple see the resources created, updated or...