Split-screen-image

Achieving "Zen" while monitoring Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop ...

April 11, 2018

...using HYCU OBM Management Pack for Citrix.

 

Administering multiple sites, managing thousands of VDIs and ensuring a flawless user experience is quite a demanding and stressful job. The consequences of failing to provide this can be quite severe.

But is there a way to ease your Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop administration?

Being one step ahead sounds like one of those things, right?

Ok, ok I know, we can't predict the future and HYCU OBM Management Pack for Citrix doesn't come with a magic crystal ball. This is all true but bear with me.

What if staying one step ahead can be achieved by proactive monitoring of your XenApp & XenDesktop environment?

Automatically detecting problems which can in turn prevent more serious problems and prevent disasters is what should be the mission for any monitoring solution. Additionally, if you were able to monitor all layers of your Citrix architecure, you'd be even more than one step ahead. Being able to check on user logins, sessions, VDIs machine loads, hypervisor connections... all in real-time, puts you well ahead. And there's more, being able to generate reports based on data collected that could help you determine if there is a need to scale and how to handle spikes in your environment should be part of any monitoring solution you are using for your Citrix environments. With all this information at your disposal, you'll be many steps down the right path.

Let's take a look at how you can stay one step ahead with HYCU OBM Management Pack for Citrix.

To make things easy to understand, we will divide XenApp & XenDesktop monitoring into a few logical groups:

Environment discovery

After initial discovery, the user is presented with a topology view of their Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop environment. The view consists of five layers for easier grouping and managing very large environments.

  • Layer 1: Sites
  • Layer 2: Delivery Controllers
  • Layer 3: Delivery Controller Services
  • Layer 4: Delivery Groups, Hypervisor Connections, Applications
  • Layer 5: Server OS machines

Discovered objects in the topology view will also provide a user with their health states and propagate it to the root element. This is extremly useful for drilling down into problems directly from the topology view.

 

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop topology view

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop topology view

 

 

 

Dashboards

On the Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop monitoring »home page« you are provided with out-of-the-box dashboards along with a topology view and event browser. With just a glance you are able to see if there are some issues with Delivery Controllers, number of problematic events grouped by severity, historic representation of events and overall health status. Dashboards are very useful for quickly summarizing the health status of your Citrix environment. They can be also customized so Citrix administrators can have a single pane of glass for all their monitoring needs.

 

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop dashboard

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop dashboard

 

 

Events

HYCU OBM Management Pack for Citrix comes with more than 70 different monitoring policies that measure different aspects of your Citrix environment. Policies range from monitoring user logon, authentication, user connections, interactive session, VM start times, Delivery Controller services, availability of Delivery Groups to Desktop and Server OS machines and their performance. Policies are grouped in pre-defined Management Templates that provides administrators quick and easy deployment. This means it takes just a few clicks to start monitoring. Nevertheless you always have the option to deploy individual policies and fine tune thresholds so they best suit your needs and your environment.

 

resolving-citrix-issues

Instruction texts for resolving Citrix issues

 

 

 

Performance monitoring

Two items we hear the most about are slow logons and inadequate performance of applications and desktops that you deliver. Sound familiar? Based on recent research, more than 60% of Citrix users face these two issues. But fret not, help is on the way. All this can be avoided with HYCU OBM Management Pack for Citrix.

Our monitoring is not just about sending alerts when thresholds are exceeded but also sampling different metrics for performance monitoring. Based on the collected data a Citrix administrator can not only monitor CPU and memory utilization of VDIs, network performance and their disk activity, but also expand performance monitoring beyond just VDIs. Administrators can also easily monitor Delivery Groups and Sites which shows them the number of sessions and their types, how many desktops are in use and the duration of logons. This is done via synthetic transactions which is another cool feature HYCU OBM Management Pack for Citrix uses.

 

storefront-performance

Citrix StoreFront Store performance

 

 

If you are planning to upgrade to Citrix XenApp & Xen Desktop 7 or are already using it, and you are tired of multiple consoles to do your monitoring, take a look at HYCU OBM Management Pack for Citrix. But don't just take our word for it -> Try a 45-day free trial.

eclipse
Follow us

Get started today

Seriously, you really need to experience HYCU to believe it.