Monitoring the Citrix Access Gateway on Windows

Figure 1 depicts the Citrix Access Gateway – Windows model.

Figure 1 : Layer model of the Citrix Access Gateway

Every layer in the layer model of Figure 1 is attached to a wide variety of tests that explore one/more performance aspects of the Access Gateway. With the help of the results reported by these tests, the following performance queries can be easily answered; in the light of these answers, probable issues with the Access Gateway can be instantly detected.

• Is there a processing bottleneck on the Access Gateway?
• What are the type of requests that are being processed, and how quickly is the Access Gateway able to respond to them? Which requests are taking too long?
• Are the context pools adequately sized, or are too many requests waiting for contexts?
• Is the Access Gateway able to create/load sessions quickly upon request, or is there a bottleneck there that requires investigation? 
• Is the session cache hit ratio optimal, or do more sessions need to be allocated to the cache?

The sections below discuss the top 3 layers of the layer model only, as the other layers have all been discussed thoroughly in the Monitoring Unix and Windows Servers document.