Citrix SCOM Management Pack

Ensuring Successful, Fast and Uninterrupted Citrix Delivery

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop are among the most performance sensitive applications in enterprise networks today. Even a small performance problem can result in loss of productivity and frustration for users.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is widely used by organizations to get visibility into the Microsoft Windows servers hosting the Citrix services, and other infrastructure services like Active Directory and profile servers. However, SCOM does not have native monitoring support for Citrix technologies:

• Natively SCOM has no visibility into Citrix worker servers and their user logons, sessions, latency, failures etc.
• SCOM also does not have built-in support for monitoring other Citrix tiers including StoreFront, NetScaler, Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer) and so on.
• SCOM also does not have out of the box monitoring support for virtualization platforms (VMware vSphere, Nutanix, etc.) and other storage, network and cloud tiers.

Multiple SCOM management packs have to be deployed for monitoring the different Citrix tiers (XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer, NetScaler, etc.), virtualization platform, databases, storage etc.

Citrix Management Pack Options

To extend Microsoft SCOM's monitoring capabilities for Citrix tiers, administrators had the option of using the Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenApp and XenDesktop (formerly Comtrade) that was bundled with Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum edition. However, these management packs have now been deprecated. So organizations can no longer rely on them.

The eG Universal Management Pack for SCOM augments Microsoft SCOM with the ability to monitor, alert and report on the Citrix tiers of the infrastructure. Organizations can use this Microsoft SCOM add-on to enable monitoring, diagnosis and reporting of all of the Citrix stack and the supporting infrastructure from the Microsoft SCOM console itself.

Why Choose the eG Universal Management Pack for Citrix Performance Monitoring?

• 

  In-Depth Monitoring for All Citrix Tiers

  Developed based on years of experience working with many of the largest deployments of Citrix technologies, eG Enterprise embeds the domain expertise to collect and report the most critical performance metrics from all the Citrix tiers (XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, XenServer, NetScaler, StoreFront, Licensing Server, Provisioning Server, etc.), and makes them available directly within the SCOM console.

  From the SCOM console, administrators can track whether:

  • Citrix logons are working well
  • Citrix user latency is within acceptable limits
  • Any of the Citrix servers is having unusually high number of sessions
  • Any application running on the server is causing a CPU/memory shortfall and more

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• 

  Auto-Discover Citrix Topology within SCOM Console

  • The eG Universal Management Pack automatically discovers your entire Citrix infrastructure and generates intuitive topology diagrams on the SCOM console
  • Easy drill-downs allow administrators to look at the health of each Citrix component and further delve into individual layers and metrics
  • Health explorer views in the SCOM console provide insights into the value of each performance metric and recommendations for problem resolution

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• 

  End-to-End Monitoring of Citrix and Non-Citrix Infrastructures

  Investing in multiple vendor-specific management packs (such as one for Citrix, one for VMware, one for Oracle, etc.) exponentially increases the cost and complexity of managing and deploying individual management packs.

  • The eG Universal Management Pack is the only SCOM management pack that delivers complete monitoring for heterogeneous and multi-platform environments
  • Administrators can see the real-time state of all the Citrix supporting infrastructure, including VMware, Nutanix, storage, databases, networks, etc.—all directly from the SCOM console itself

  See supported applications »

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• 

  Correlated Citrix Performance Alerts in SCOM

  Correlated Citrix performance alerts from eG Enterprise within the SCOM console enable you to focus on troubleshooting the root cause of problems.

  • Alert severity levels in SCOM reflect the priorities of problems
  • Bi-directional integration allows administrators to close eG Enterprise alerts from inside the SCOM console
  • The self-learning auto-baselines in eG Enterprise ensure that triggered alerts are intelligent and actionable, thus eliminating false positives
  • In a single click on the SCOM console, you can easily drill down into the eG Enterprise console for context-relevant monitoring, detailed diagnosis, and advanced reporting

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• 

  Infrastructure-Wide Automatic Root Cause Diagnosis

  • eG Enterprise discovers interdependencies between infrastructure tiers, correlates performance data, and automatically pinpoints the root cause of performance problems
  • Extensive pre-built Citrix and VDI reports are available in eG Enterprise for trend analysis, capacity planning, infrastructure optimization, auditing and management reporting

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Benefits

• Make the SCOM console a truly unified solution for performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosis and reporting
• Monitor Citrix, Microsoft and other applications together using a single management pack
• Eliminate the cost and complexity of deploying and managing multiple management packs from different vendors
• Streamline IT operations and achieve faster problem diagnosis and resolution
• Citrix administrators can quickly access eG Enterprise for deeper performance analysis and root cause diagnosis

Comparison with Citrix-Provided SCOM Management Packs

Capabilities		Deprecated Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenApp and XenDesktop		eG Universal Management Pack for SCOM
End-to-End Infrastructure Monitoring		Enables SCOM to monitor the Citrix tiers of the infrastructure. However, to obtain an end-to-end view, additional management packs are necessary for the non-Citrix tiers (e.g., VMware, Oracle, Nutanix, storage, etc.).		Single management pack that consolidates monitoring of heterogeneous infrastructures (Citrix and non-Citrix tiers) within SCOM. No need to invest in multiple management packs from different vendors.
Citrix User Experience Monitoring		Focused on exposing just the available Citrix metrics on the SCOM console. Does not offer any simulated user experience monitoring capability.		Provides real user experience monitoring and synthetic monitoring (includes logon simulation and full lifecycle simulation of a Citrix session).
Built-in Correlation Intelligence and Root Cause Diagnosis		Reports raw metrics in the SCOM console, relying on SCOM to perform any analysis of the metrics.		Applies intelligent baselining, correlation and root cause diagnosis to the metrics before they are passed to SCOM. This allows for more reliable and trustworthy alerts in SCOM.

Need More Information?

• Read how to use Microsoft SCOM for end-to-end performance monitoring
• Find out how to use Microsoft SCOM to Monitor Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop
• Learn more about Microsoft SCOM monitoring

Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.

• eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor
• Gain actionable answers to performance issues, wherever they originate, from application code to bare metal
• Understand the impact of infrastructure issues on application performance and user experience
• Unify IT performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosing, reporting, and capacity planning in a single console
• Ensure a great user experience and dramatically improve IT efficiency
• Benefit from flexible deployment options (on-premises and SaaS) and IT monitoring approaches (agentless and agent-based)