| Category |
Requirements |
| Server Monitoring |
- Monitor key server status and performance parameters, including server hardware status, operating system resource usage (CPU, memory, disk, handles, page files), Windows event logs
- Support both physical and virtual machines equally well
- For physical machines, also monitor server hardware status
|
| HDX Session Monitoring |
- Monitor all user sessions on a XenApp server or the user session for each virtual desktop
- Monitor the bandwidth usage of each HDX session
- Drill down into which virtual channel is taking up bandwidth for each user
- Track application usage within each user session and report re-sources used by each application
- Monitor GPU usage on each virtual desktop
- For browser applications, provide the URLs being accessed
- Monitor performance of sessions using the new EDT protocol
- Measure user's connection quality between the user terminal and Citrix server farm
- Track session login and logoff times and active and idle times for audit reporting
- Monitor EDT performance
- Track client-receiver version, subnet etc.
- Ability to search by user, and drill down into that user's session statistics
- Report active/idle time for each session
- Support monitoring of virtual desktop sessions, even when the virtual desktops are in different Windows domains
|
| Published Application Monitoring |
- Track concurrent accesses to each application
- Report resource usage level of each application
- Track which users are accessing an application at any particular time
|
| XenApp Server Monitoring |
- Report resource usage on the server: Is the server sized correctly? What are peak usage times?
- Track session disconnects on the server: Is there resource waste because of disconnects?
- Monitor if the XenApp server is connected to its license server and the data store
- Monitor user profile sizes in order to identify users with large profiles
|
| User Experience Monitoring |
- Support synthetic and real user monitoring
- Monitor real user logon times, provide breakdown of logon time – GPO, Profile loading, authentication etc.
- Track launch times for different applications
- Monitor HDX screen refresh latency for all HDX sessions
|
| NetScaler Monitoring |
- Track user sessions active through NetScaler
- Track network latencies for user sessions, to distinguish HDX slowness from network slowness
- Monitor resource usage levels on the NetScaler device
- Validate SSL certificates in use on the NetScaler devices
|
| Citrix Delivery Controller Monitoring |
- Track the state of Delivery Controllers in the Site and report failures
- Verify status of all key Controller services – Broker Service, Machine Creation Service, AD Identity, etc. – on each controller
- Ensure time synchronization with the Windows domain controller
- Track registration status of desktops/servers in desktop/delivery groups
- Monitor connection attempts and failures to different machines
- Track desktops in use and alert when utilization levels are too high or unusually low
- For a virtual desktop environment, check the connectivity between the DDC and the hosting infrastructure
|
| Provisioning Services Monitoring |
- Monitoring the availability and responsiveness of the Provisioning (PVS) server
- Check the connection between PVS and its license and database servers
- Ensure that the provisioning server is able to stream the OS images to clients
- Monitor the I/O activity on each target device connected to the PVS server, so that if any target device has too many retries, it can be detected
- Track the write cache size and usage of the write cache
- Monitor vDisk status
- Monitor boot times for PVS targets
|
| License Monitoring |
- Track licenses installed and used, to detect potential license limits
- Monitor license checkout times to determine times when the license server is slowing down
|
| StoreFront Monitoring |
- Check availability and responsiveness of each store configured on StoreFront
- Monitor synchronization status of StoreFront server groups and the synchronization duration
- Track the time taken to enumerate applications/desktops for clients
- Scan StoreFront logs for errors/warnings
|
| Citrix Data Store Monitoring |
- Monitor availability and responsiveness of the data store
- Check Database and transaction log growth
- Monitor locking activity on the data store
- Monitor session activity and user activity on the data store
- Report top I/O causing queries
|
| Citrix Cloud Monitoring |
- Monitor the resource plane components (XenApp servers, XenDesktop VMs) wherever they are hosted – in the on-premises datacenter or in the public cloud
- Monitor the infrastructure supporting the resource plane components
- Track availability and performance of the Cloud Connectors
- Get visibility of the control plane components hosed and managed by Citrix
- Map dependencies between all the control plane and resource plane components on topology maps – for root cause diagnosis
|
| Monitoring of other Citrix tiers |
- In-depth monitoring of other Citrix tiers including Citrix XenMobile, ShareFile, CloudBridge, XenServer, and others
|
| Hypervisor Monitoring |
- Monitor IOPS on different storage LUNs
- Monitor CPU, memory utilization on the server
- Monitor data store availability and IOPS on each data store
- Check the resource usage of the control domain/service console
- Track I/O errors, discards, read/write times and queueing on each of the storage LUNs
- Monitor Live Migration across VM clusters
- Report VMs powered on and in use
- Report key VM performance metrics including physical CPU used, VM CPU ready time, active memory in use, IOPS for each VM, etc.
- Support common hypervisors – VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix Acropolis
|
| Storage Monitoring |
- Monitor hardware status
- Track storage controller status and resource usage
- Monitor all components of the storage system – device ports, physical disks, disk groups, LUNs
- Check if any physical disk is slower than others
- Monitor storage network statistics
|
| Network Monitoring |
- Receive SNMP traps from network devices
- Track network latency and bandwidth usage
- Deploy monitoring from different locations in the network to understand if a specific network location is seeing poor performance
|
| Endpoint Monitoring |
- Allow an agent to be deployed on end points for additional visibility into performance from the end point
|
| Backend Application Monitoring |
- Able to be extended to monitor backend enterprise applications if true end-to-end visibility is required
|
| Thresholds and baselines |
- Out of the box thresholds based on best practices
- Multi-level thresholds for alert escalation
- Ability to auto-baseline the infrastructure, including time of day and day of week analysis to understand usage patterns
- Support for blackout periods
|
| Automatic Correlation and root Cause diagnosis |
- Automatically discover the Citrix infrastructure and dependencies
- Analyze dependencies in real-time to prioritize alerts
- Is virtualization-aware: Correlates virtualization and application performance to identify root cause
|
| Alerting |
- Multi-modal alerting – email, SMS, pager
- Integration with service desk/incident management systems (ServiceNow, PagerDuty, RemedyForce, etc.) for automatic ticket opening/closing
- SNMP integration with any SNMP-management tool
|
| Trending and Reporting |
- Trend analysis of all metrics – hourly, daily, monthly
- Executive and operations reports
- Capacity planning reports
- Performance prediction reports
- Comparison and Top-N reports
- Citrix user reports, session activity reports, logon performance reports
- Ability to export as PDF/CSV/Excel
- Ability to auto-schedule reports
|
| Dashboards |
- Pre-built dashboards to view performance metrics
- Customizable dashboards to match each user's needs
- Publish dashboards for executives to access
- Self-help capabilities to enable Citrix users to track their own session usage and performance
- Dashboards providing cumulative metrics of a server-farm, not just individual server metrics
|
| Licensing |
- Support user-based licensing – named and concurrent user options
- Can be extended to monitor other application tiers
|
| Deployment and Access |
- Deploy in minutes
- Supports Citrix provisioning services
- If agent-based monitoring is used, agents do not listen on any TCP ports
- Can be deployed across geographically distributed sites
- Web-based access, mobile access
- Supports role-based access (admins, helpdesk, architects), etc.
|
| Integration |
- Integrate with existing management systems/frameworks for unified monitoring (e.g., SNMP traps, native management packs, etc.)
- Integrate with Citrix Director and Citrix NetScaler MAS to leverage existing Citrix investments
|
| Control actions |
- Automatically initiate control actions where appropriate (e.g., reboot failed desktops, restart services that have stopped, etc.)
- Allow administrators to remotely connect to the monitored servers and initiate actions to remedy a problem (e.g., logoff a user who is taking too many resources)
|
