The Best Citrix Director Alternative

Go Beyond Citrix Director: Get End-to-End Citrix Monitoring and Manage User Experience

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What is Citrix Director?

Citrix Director is the monitoring and troubleshooting built into the Citrix stack. With Citrix Director, administrators can:

Get visibility into Citrix connection brokering: Connection failures, machine failures, unregistered VDAs, etc. can be tracked by administrators proactively.
Get real-time monitoring of Citrix logons: User logon times and breakdown of logon time by stages is provided, so administrators can easily determine why a Citrix logon is slow.
See Citrix session performance metrics: Administrators can view performance statistics for any user session including session latency, applications running in the session and their resource usage, etc.
Control Citrix sessions remotely: From the browser console, administrators can also initiate actions such as shadow a session, send a message to a user, logout or disconnect a user, get a screenshot of the user's session, etc.

Citrix Director supports on-premises and Citrix Cloud deployments. Monitoring of Microsoft Windows and Linux VDAs is supported.

What are the Limitations of Citrix Director?

Synthetic Monitoring capability is very limited: Synthetic monitoring, by emulating user interactions with a Citrix service is a very important way to monitor Citrix services. Citrix Director supports application probing but this feature can be used only when using Citrix StoreFront and does not perform a true end-to-end simulation of a user interaction.
Monitoring is limited to specific Citrix tiers only: A typical Citrix deployment consists of many Citrix tiers (such as Citrix ADCs, Citrix Delivery Controllers, Citrix VDAs, StoreFronts, PVS, License servers, WEM servers, and so on) and other non-Citrix tiers (network devices, endpoints, virtual servers, cloud, etc.). Citrix Director only monitors some of the Citrix tiers - mainly the Citrix Delivery Controllers and Citrix VDAs/VDIs. Therefore, administrators need additional tools to get a complete end-to-end view of their Citrix deployment.
Citrix Director is mainly a Citrix helpdesk tool, not a multi-tenant MSP solution or an enterprise class integrated solution: While it allows administrators to connect to a user session and shadow it and troubleshoot problems, Citrix Director does not have granular access control rights needed by any large enterprise/service provider. Since it does not have multi-tenancy built-in, Citrix Director cannot be used by Citrix service providers and MSPs to monitor multiple client deployments from one console. It also does not have wide or deep integration with ITSM tools - another need for MSPs and large enterprises.

It must be noted that to avail all the features of Citrix Director, platinum licensing is needed. Also, if additional analysis of the metrics is required, an additional Citrix product - Citrix Analytics for performance - is needed.

Who does Citrix use to monitor Citrix?
eG Innovations.

Since 2014, eG Enterprise has been the exclusive performance monitoring solution for the on-site infrastructure running Citrix's major user and partner events, Citrix Summit and Citrix Synergy. Citrix Monitoring - Xenapp Performance Report

Citrix Monitoring - Xenapp Performance Report

State-of-the-art Citrix monitoring solution for end-to-end performance analytics

Why eG Enterprise is the Go-To Citrix Monitoring tool for Hundreds of Citrix Customers

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Developed and fine-tuned based on over a decade of experience working with Citrix technologies, eG Enterprise is a comprehensive, end-to-end, proactive monitoring, diagnosis and reporting solution for Citrix environments. It's embedded domain expertise is a key reason why Citrix customers rely on eG Enterprise.

eG Enterprise is Citrix Ready certified and is being used by Citrix themselves to monitor their cloud environment that is used for global demos, events and analyst briefings.

eG Enterprise is the monitoring tool of choice for Citrix Director

Key Citrix Monitoring Capabilities of eG Enterprise

Monitor all aspects of user experience: eG Enterprise embeds synthetic and real user monitoring capabilities that allow it to monitor all aspects of Citrix user experience: logon times, application launch time, screen refresh latency, bandwidth available and so on.
Monitor every layer and every tier: Get deep visibility into every tier supporting Citrix including all the Citrix tiers and the non-Citrix tiers. Tie in with Citrix Director ensures that eG Enterprise is truly a single pane of glass solution for Citrix administrators.
Pin-point the root-cause of problems: Citrix administrators no longer have to take the blame for all issues reported by users. Our patented root-cause diagnosis technology makes troubleshooting very simple. With one click, you can identify where the problem lies and prove that it's not Citrix.

Get Insights for right-sizing and planning: You no longer need to throw hardware at every performance problem. eG Enterprise provides recommendations for how you can optimize and right-size your Citrix deployment to increase the user density. Its capacity prediction reports provide the what-if analysis necessary for efficient capacity planning.

Key Features	Citrix Director	eG Enterprise
Flexible Deployment (Both On-premises and Cloud)	Yes	Yes
Visualization	Intuitive, simplistic screens with limited diagnostics and drill down options. No topology views.	Intuitive and customizable dashboards; intelligent color-coded stack models to report anomalies; topology views make it simple for helpdesk staff to triage problems.
Historical performance monitoring data	Limited. Platinum version - 1 year, Enterprise version - 1 month Other versions - 7 days	Unlimited (depending on the storage capacity)
Synthetic logon monitoring and application availability testing. Full session simulation including logon to Citrix and further launch and access of applications	No	Yes
Real user logon monitoring	Director only looks at real user logon from brokering to interactive session. No visibility into other areas that impact user logon performance.	eG Enterprise provides detailed visibility of real user logon processing. Easily identify if slowness is due to large user profiles, GPO processing, logon script execution, client network latency, AD authentication, etc
Citrix Storefront monitoring	No	Yes
Provisioning Services monitoring	No	Yes
Citrix ADC monitoring	Integration with NetScaler MAS provides HDX Insight. No other ADC metrics are natively available in Director.	Yes
Citrix Sharefile monitoring	No	Yes
Citrix Endpoint Management monitoring	No	Yes
Citrix Cloud monitoring	Yes	Yes
Citrix Hypervisor monitoring	No	Yes
Monitoring of network, AD, virtualization, storage, cloud and other tiers supporting Citrix	No	Yes
Monitoring of other digital workspace technologies from the same console	No	Yes
Monitoring of applications accessed through Citrix (e.g., SAP, CRM, O365 etc.)	No	Yes
Automatic self-learning baselines for proactive alerting	No	Yes
Automated Root-cause analysis	No	Yes
Multi-tenancy support	No	Yes
Multi-mode alerting capability	No	Yes
Configuration and change tracking capabilities	No	Yes
Extensive reports for different stakeholders	Minimal	Yes

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Works on cloud environments, hybrid-cloud setups and on-premises deployments
Deploy eG Enterprise using our SaaS platform or on-premises
Suitable for monitoring applications, digital workspaces and IT infrastructures