Citrix Monitoring: What, Why and How

Organizations in all verticals and sizes are deploying digital workspaces to offer secure, remote access to employees and partners – in many cases, across a wide area of networks. Citrix workspace technologies are the most popular form of digital workspaces. In this blog, we discuss what is Citrix performance monitoring, why it is important, and what tools you need to monitor Citrix performance effectively and ensure optimal Citrix digital employee experience (DEX).

What is Citrix Monitoring?

Citrix technologies have come a long way in the past two decades. Monitoring the Citrix worker host or session server (virtual apps server) is no longer sufficient because there are many different tiers supporting the Citrix service. Citrix ADCs, StoreFronts, Provisioning services, License servers, WEM, etc. are other Citrix tiers involved in supporting the service, and if there are glitches in any of these tiers, this can impact users’ experience.

Some administrators believe that any system monitoring tool can be used for monitoring Citrix as well. Read our blog “The biggest Citrix performance monitoring misconceptions” to learn why specialized monitoring tools are needed for Citrix.

The focus of many Citrix administrators is often on monitoring resources. However, over the years, it has become clear that what Citrix administrators need to focus on is user experience. Monitoring of Citrix services needs to be set up to support both synthetic and real-user monitoring and should cover all the key user experience metrics, including Citrix logon time, application launch time, screen refresh latency, and so on. Read more about Citrix user experience monitoring here.

What Monitoring Capabilities are Built-into the Citrix Stack?

Citrix virtual apps and desktops has several tools for Citrix performance monitoring. The most popular is Citrix Director, which monitors Citrix sessions, brokering of Citrix connections, and has integration with Citrix ADM. Learn more about Citrix Director here.

To monitor Citrix ADCs (NetScalers) and application flows through them, Citrix Application Delivery Management – ADM (formerly Citrix NetScaler Insight) is available. You can find details of Citrix ADM’s capabilities here.

The latest tool in Citrix’s stack is Citrix Analytics for Performance. This cloud-based service builds on metrics from Citrix Director and ADM to provide additional insights for admins. You can learn about Citrix Analytics for Performance here.

Why do you need End-to-End Monitoring of Citrix?

When users call the helpdesk about performance issues, the complaints are always “Citrix is slow” or “Citrix is not working”. The problem gets directed to the Citrix team who then spend hours trying to determine where the problem lies.

There can be several reasons why Citrix access is slow:

• Active Directory issues can cause slow logon times. Read our blog on the importance of Active Directory for fast Citrix logons.
• Citrix Delivery Controllers play a key role in mediating Citrix access and slowness or bottlenecks in the Citrix brokering process can result in user perceived slowness. Read our blog on how to monitor Citrix Delivery Controllers.
• Bottlenecks in Citrix StoreFront, the virtual app servers, etc. can also affect Citrix performance.
• Issues with connectivity and bandwidth from users’ home networks also often makes Citrix access slow.
• Bottlenecks in the storage, cloud and virtualization tiers also impact Citrix performance.

Hence, what you need is centralized visibility into all of the Citrix tiers as well as the supporting non-Citrix tiers. When looking at the Citrix tiers, make sure you are tracking the top Citrix metrics that matter to detect Citrix slowness issues quickly.

eG Enterprise: Delivering Total Citrix Performance Visibility

eG Enterprise addresses all the key monitoring needs of Citrix admins. In doing so, it acts as a virtual assistant that Citrix admins need to simplify their daily duties. Instead of spending over 25% of their time troubleshooting routine issues (source: Digital workspace monitoring survey by eG Innovations and xenappblog), Citrix admins can now spend less time troubleshooting and more time on enhancing the capabilities of the Citrix infrastructure.

Key capabilities of eG Enterprise include:

• Tracking all aspects of Citrix digital experience (e.g., logon time, application launch time, screen refresh latency, bandwidth available, etc.)
• Tracking the health of every layer and every tier of the Citrix delivery infrastructure including all the Citrix tiers and the supporting infrastructure tiers
• Pinpointing the root-cause of Citrix slowness: is it Citrix, is it VMware, is it storage, or Citrix Cloud?
• Utilizing empirical data for right-sizing, optimization and capacity planning.