Site Details Test

Deployment of XenDesktop in a single geographical location may be called as a site. A site therefore typically comprises of one/more brokers that point to the same database, a database server, a license server, a Citrix Studio, Citrix StoreFront, hypervisors, virtual machines, and XenApp servers on the server-side, and receivers at the client side.

This test promptly alerts administrators to the following anomalies related to the monitored site:

The sudden non-availability of the license server in the site;
Poor responsiveness of the license server;
Are the active sessions, desktop sessions and application sessions adequate?;
Are there any brokers that are currently inactive in this site?

Target of the test : A Citrix Delivery Controller 7.x

Agent deploying the test : An internal agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for the XenDesktop 7 server site that is to be monitored.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter	Description
Test Period	How often should the test be executed.
Host	The IP address of the host for which this test is to be configured.
Port	Refers to the port at which the specified host listens to.
Username	In order to monitor the target Delivery Controller 7, eG requires a special user with the following privileges; The All scope and read-only privileges The Allow log on locally security privilege on the Delivery Controller host The steps for assigning such privileges to a user are discussed in the Pre-requisites for monitoring the Citrix Delivery Controller 7.x. Specify the name of such a user, here.
Password	Specify the password for the user specified in the Username text box, here.
Confirm Password	Confirm the Password by retyping it here.
Domain	Here, specify the domain to which the user specified in the Username text box belongs to.
Detailed Diagnosis	To make diagnosis more efficient and accurate, the eG Enterprise embeds an optional detailed diagnostic capability. With this capability, the eG agents can be configured to run detailed, more elaborate tests as and when specific problems are detected. To enable the detailed diagnosis capability of this test for a particular server, choose the On option. To disable the capability, click on the Off option. The option to selectively enable/disable the detailed diagnosis capability will be available only if the following conditions are fulfilled: The eG manager license should allow the detailed diagnosis capability Both the normal and abnormal frequencies configured for the detailed diagnosis measures should not be 0.

Measurements made by the test

Measurement

Description

Measurement Unit

Interpretation

License server availability

Indicates the availability of the license server in this site.

Percent

If the license server is available, a value of 100 is shown and if the license server is not available, a value of 0 is shown.

Since the license server is responsible for managing the licenses for all the components of XenDesktop, the non-availability of the license server, should have serious repercussions on the performance of the XenDesktop site. However, such adversities are averted by the 90-day grace period that XenDesktop embeds; this allows the system to function normally for 90 days if the license server becomes unavailable.

Moreover, if this measure reports that the license server is unavailable, then you may instantly want to know which license server the XenDesktop is communicating with. At this juncture, you can use the detailed diagnosis of this measure (if enabled) to ascertain the name of the license server and the port at which it listens.

License server response time

Indicates the time taken by the broker to establish a connection with the license server.

Secs

Ideally, the response time should be low.

Active sessions

Indicates the total number of sessions that are currently active on this site.

Number

This measure is a good indicator of the load on this site.

Is DNS resolution enabled?

Indicates whether the DNS resolution is enabled or not on this site.

The values and their corresponding numeric values that this measure could report are:

Measure value	Numeric Value
No	0
Yes	1

Note:

By default, this measure reports the values Yes or No while indicating whether DNS resolution is enabled or not on this site. However, in the graph of this measure, the same will be represented using the corresponding numeric equivalents of 0 and 1 only.

Is secure ICA required?

Indicates whether/not a secure ICA is required for this site.

By default, client-server communications are obfuscated at a basic level through the SecureICA feature, which can be used to encrypt the ICA protocol.

Plug-ins use the ICA protocol to encode user input (keystrokes and mouse clicks) and address it to a server farm for processing. Server farms use the ICA protocol to format application output (display and audio) and return it to the client device.

You can increase the level of encryption for the ICA protocol when you publish a resource or after you publish a resource.

In addition to situations when you want to protect against internal security threats, such as eavesdropping, you may want to use ICA encryption in the following situations:

You need to secure communications from devices that use Microsoft DOS or run on Win16 systems
You have older devices running plug-in software that cannot be upgraded to use SSL
As an alternative to SSL/TLS encryption, when there is no risk of a “man-in-the-middle” attack

The values that this measure can report and their corresponding numeric values are:

Measure value	Numeric Value
No	0
Yes	1

Note:

By default, this measure reports the values Yes or No while indicating whether a secure ICA is required for this site or not. However, in the graph of this measure, the same will be represented using the corresponding numeric equivalents of 0 and 1 only.

Are trust requests sent to the XML service port?

Indicates whether/not trust requests were sent to the XML service.

Trusting requests sent to the XML Service means:

Smooth Roaming works when connecting with the Web Interface using pass-through or smart card authentication, and when connecting with the online plug-in using smart card authentication or the Kerberos pass-through option.
For example, you can use workspace control to assist health-care workers in a hospital using smart cards, who need to move quickly among workstations and be able to pick up where they left off in published applications.
XenApp can use the information passed on from Access Gateway (Version 4.0 or later) to control application access and session policies. This information includes Access Gateway filters that can be used to control access to published applications and to set XenApp session policies. If you do not trust requests sent to the XML Service, this additional information is ignored.

The values that this measure can report and their corresponding numeric values are:

Measure value	Numeric Value
No	0
Yes	1

Note:

By default, this measure reports the values Yes or No while indicating whether/not trust requests were sent to the XML service. However, in the graph of this measure, the same will be represented using the corresponding numeric equivalents of 0 and 1 only.

Total controllers on this site:

Indicates the total number of brokers that are configured for this site.

Number

Use the detailed diagnosis of this measure to know which controllers are part of the site.

Is connection leasing enabled?

Indicates whether/not connection leasing is enabled for this site.

To ensure that the Site database is always available, Citrix recommends starting with a fault-tolerant SQL Server deployment by following high availability best practices from Microsoft. However, network issues and interruptions may prevent Delivery Controllers from accessing the database, resulting in users not being able to connect to their applications or desktop. The connection leasing feature supplements the SQL Server high availability best practices by enabling users to connect and reconnect to their most recently used applications and desktops, even when the Site database is not available. Although users may have a large number of published resources available, they often use only a few of them regularly. When you enable connection leasing, each Controller caches user connections to those recently used applications and desktops during normal operations (when the database is available). The leases generated on each Controller are uploaded to the Site database for periodic synchronization to other Controllers on the Site. In addition to leases, each Controller’s cache holds application, desktop, icon, and worker information. The lease and related information is stored on each Controller’s local disk. If the database becomes unavailable, the Controller enters leased connection mode and “replays” the cached operations when a user attempts to connect or reconnect to a recently used application or desktop from StoreFront. Connections are cached for a lease period of two weeks. So, if the database becomes unavailable, the desktops and applications that the user launched in the previous two weeks remain accessible to that user through StoreFront. However, desktops and applications that have not been launched during the previous two-week lease period are not accessible when the database is unavailable.

Connection leasing is enabled by default.

You can turn connection leasing off or on from the PowerShell SDK or the Windows registry.

This measure reports the value Yes if connection leasing is enabled for a site and the value No if connection leasing is not enabled for a site.

The numeric values that correspond to these measure values are as follows:

Measure value	Numeric Value
No	0
Yes	1

Note:

By default, this measure reports the values Yes or No while indicating whether/not connection leasing is enabled for the site. However, in the graph of this measure, the same will be represented using the corresponding numeric equivalents of 0 and 1 only.

Is license in grace period?

Indicates whether/not the license for this site is in the grace period.

In previous versions of XenApp and XenDesktop, if the correct licenses are not installed, users will get session rejections via the license policy engine. To avoid this limitation, Citrix introduced a new concept called Supplemental Grace Period (SGP) in XenApp/XenDesktop 7.6. During the SGP, the license policy engine will grant unlimited connections, for about 15 days to allow for fixing the issue. An alarm is activated when the grace period expires, and the Delivery Controller can not checkout licenses to launch sessions from license server. After the expiration of SGP, regular license limits are enforced.

If the license for the site is in the grace period, then the value of this measure will be Yes. If the license has not entered the grace period, then the value of this measure will be No.

The numeric values that correspond to these measure values are as follows:

Measure value	Numeric Value
No	0
Yes	1

Note:

By default, this measure reports the values Yes or No while indicating whether/not the site license is in the grace period. However, in the graph of this measure, the same will be represented using the corresponding numeric equivalents of 0 and 1 only.

Is license in out of box grace period?

Indicates whether/not the license grace period for this site has expired.

If the license for the site has lived out its grace period, then the value of this measure will be Yes. If the license grace period has not expired, then the value of this measure will be No.

The numeric values that correspond to these measure values are as follows:

Measure value	Numeric Value
No	0
Yes	1

Note:

By default, this measure reports the values Yes or No while indicating whether/not the grace period of the site license has expired. However, in the graph of this measure, the same will be represented using the corresponding numeric equivalents of 0 and 1 only.

License grace hours left

Indicates how much time (in hours) is left for the grace period to expire.

Hours

This measure will report a value only if the value of the 'Is license in grace period?' measure is 'Yes'.

If the value of this measure is low, then you may want to quickly install additional licenses on the site to ensure that your users receive uninterrupted access to their critical applications and desktops. Because, upon the expiry of the grace period, the Delivery Controllers in the site can not checkout licenses to launch sessions from license server.

The detailed diagnosis of the License server availability measure displays the name of the License server in the site and the port at which it listens. Alongside, the detailed diagnosis displays the desktop model, desktop edition, application model and application edition that is compatible with the license. The date on which the license would finally expire/the last date for renewal of the license is provided in the REQUIRED SA DATE column. This information enables administrators to effectively troubleshoot issues with the availability of the License server.

Figure 1 : The detailed diagnosis of the License server availability measure

The detailed diagnosis of the Total controllers on the site measure displays the names of the delivery controllers on this site. For each controller, the detailed diagnosis additionally reveals the machine on which that controller is installed, the total number of desktops managed by the controller, the state of the controller, the version of the controller, the type of operating system, the version of the operating system, the last time at which the controller was active, and the zone to which the controller belongs. This information helps you to identify the controllers that are inactive.

Figure 2 : The detailed diagnosis of the Total brokers for this site measure