System - OS Test

This test monitors key system-level performance indicators to assess the workload, responsiveness, and stability of the desktop. The reported metrics help administrators evaluate how actively application processes are interacting with the desktop’s operating system and whether the system is experiencing a heavy load. Additionally, the test enables detection of abnormal registry growth that could cause configuration errors or login issues, and provides insights into how efficiently the memory buffer is being used. By analyzing these metrics, administrators can proactively identify performance bottlenecks, memory overuse, registry space depletion, and application-level inefficiencies.

This test is disabled by default. To enable the test, go to the enable / disable tests page using the menu sequence : Agents -> Tests -> Enable/Disable, pick the desired Component type, set Performance as the Test type, choose the test from the DISABLED TESTS list, and click on the << button to move the test to the ENABLED TESTS list. Finally, click the Update button.

Target of the test : A Citrix Desktop Group

Agent deploying the test : A remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for every citrix desktop being monitored

Configurable parameters for the test

Parameter	Description
Test Period	How often should the test be executed.
Host	The nick name of the Citrix Desktop Group component for which this test is to be configured.
Port	Refers to the port at which the specified host listens to. By default, this is NULL.
Report Powered OS	If this flag is set to Yes (which is the default setting), then the 'inside view' tests will report measures for even those physical desktops that do not have any users logged in currently. Such desktops will be identified by their name and not by the username_on_physicalmachinename. On the other hand, if this flag is set to No, then this test will not report measures for those physical desktops to which no users are logged in currently.
Report By User	This flag is set to Yes by default. This implies that the physical machines in environments will always be identified using the login name of the user. In other words, this test will, by default, report measures for every username_on_physicalmachinename.

Measurements made by the test

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Context switches	Indicates rate at which the CPU switches from one process or thread to another.	Switches/sec	The high value for this measure indicates that the CPU is spending more time in switching tasks than processing the requests, which in turn leads to potentially degrading performance.
Interrupt time	Indicates the percentage of CPU time spent handling hardware interrupts.	Percent	A consistent increase in the value of this measure may indicate hardware or driver issues that can degrade overall system performance.
Pin read hits	Indicates percentage of times a process running on this desktop finds the required data block already pinned in memory.	Percent	Ideally, a high value is preferred for this measure. A low value for this measure indicates that the requests are frequently accessing data from disk rather than serving it from pinned memory (buffer cache). This signals inefficient memory usage and can lead to performance degradation.
Pin read rate	Indicates the rate at which data blocks are pinned and read into memory.	Reads/sec
Processes count	Indicates the number of active processes currently running on this desktop.	Number
Registry quota in use	Indicates the percentage of memory currently used by the Windows registry.	Percent	A high value for this measure indicates rapid depletion of the memory allocated for registry usage. This may suggest that applications or services are excessively writing to the registry, leading to potential performance issues or system instability.
System calls rate	Indicates the number of system calls made per second by application processes running on this desktop.	Calls/sec
Threads count	Indicates the number of threads that are currently running on this desktops.	Number	A high value for this measure indicates high workload on the desktop or potential thread leaks.