Monitoring Citrix Zone Data Collectors (ZDCs)

eG Enterprise presents an exclusive Citrix ZDC monitoring model (see Figure 1), which executes tests on the ZDC at frequent intervals, and reports a wide range of performance statistics which help Citrix administrators accurately guage how well the ZDC manages the servers in its zone.

Figure 1 : The layer model of a Citrix ZDC

Using the metrics reported by each layer of Figure 1, administrators can find quick and accurate answers to the following performance queries:

  • Is the Citrix ZDC available? If so, how quickly does it respond to requests?
  • Is the workload balanced across all servers in the zone?
  • Is license usage across servers in the zone, optimal?
  • Are all servers in the zone available, or has any server been rendered inaccessible?
  • Is any server in the zone unreasonably slow in responding to requests?
  • How is the session activity across servers in the zone? Are there too many disconnected sessions on the zone?
  • Is any application published on a zone server, experiencing overloads?
  • Has any application run out of licenses?
  • Is any application disabled on a server?

Note:

Though eG Enterprise provides both agentless and agent-based monitoring support to Citrix ZDCs, Citrix XenApp 6.0/6.5 servers functioning as ZDCs can be monitored in an agent-based manner only. This is because, the eG agent uses PowerShell SDK to collect metrics from the Citrix XenApp 6.0/6.5 server, and this SDK cannot be accessed in an agentless manner.

Therefore, prior to monitoring a Citrix XenApp 6.0/6.5 server that operates as a ZDC, make sure that an internal agent is installed and configured on that server, and then, follow the steps below:

  1. Login to the agent host.
  2. Download the PowerShell SDK from the following URL: http://community.citrix.com/display/xa/XenApp+6+PowerShell+SDK
  3. Install the PowerShell SDK on the agent host.
  4. Finally, from the PowerShell command prompt, switch to the root directory, and issue the following command:

    Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted