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