Citrix Monitoring Tools Guide for EUC Professionals

Learn what to consider when selecting a Citrix Monitoring Tool.

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Performance monitoring is integral to the success of any Citrix digital workspace deployment, as many of the world's largest businesses depend on Citrix technologies for providing global 24x7 access to key IT applications and desktops. Therefore, ensuring optimal performance is crucial, as any slowness or unavailability of these services directly impacts employee productivity and business revenue. Citrix administrators must vigilantly monitor their virtual apps and desktops to guarantee users experience the highest level of performance possible.

Citrix performance monitoring tools are needed across the enterprise

Selecting a Monitoring Tool for Citrix

This guide explores key considerations in choosing the right Citrix monitoring tools, from real-time capabilities and scalability to alerts, notifications, and extensibility features. Discover how eG Enterprise addresses these requirements, offering a comprehensive solution tailored to the demands of modern Citrix environments.

Real-time Monitoring

  • Citrix administrators depend on full visibility into user experience metrics and server performance to maintain a high standard of functionality. Real-time monitoring reveals issues with Citrix users, sessions, and the systems that deliver Virtual Apps and Desktops. Choose a tool that provides real-time monitoring capabilities to promptly detect and respond to performance fluctuations or anomalies within the Citrix infrastructure.
  • The ideal monitoring software should be able to provide detailed key performance indicators (KPIs) for users while they have live sessions. This includes Logon metrics, session latencies, active and idle times, and bandwidth usage breakdowns. eG Enterprise includes all of these and more, without any additional scripts or manual triggers.

Scalability

  • When selecting the perfect monitoring solution, it should be able to grow as your IT environment grows. Thoroughly assess the scalability of the Citrix monitoring tools to accommodate growing Citrix deployments without compromising performance. Enterprise-wide monitoring can mean gathering and storing data for tens of thousands of users, desktops, or endpoints.
  • eG Enterprise is purpose-built for scaling out and monitoring thousands of components in a single web console. With built-in dashboards for user experience, the software consolidates data and provides quick views for finding the needle in the haystack.

Alerts and Notifications

  • To prevent downtime and ensure user satisfaction, IT teams must be alerted to performance deviations well before business services are impacted and users notice them. Look for a monitoring tool that allows customization of performance thresholds and alerts to align with your specific business requirements and SLAs.
  • With eG Enterprise, built-in thresholds are available out of the box and can be customized so that IT teams proactively identify and address performance issues before they impact end users.

Extensibility

  • While searching for the ideal monitoring solution, it's possible that even the most comprehensive option may not fully align with your business requirements. Nonetheless, opting for a solution with an extensible interface opens doors to easily tailor and expand its capabilities. With just a modest investment of effort, you can create additional metrics for in-depth analysis, ensuring a perfect fit for your evolving needs.
  • eG Enterprise's Integration Console empowers admins to extend built-in application models effortlessly. It integrates custom applications or network elements seamlessly, treating them like out-of-the-box components. This feature enables creating custom measurements, computing thresholds, and displaying the status of custom applications via eG's web-based monitoring interface.

Five Aspects of Citrix Monitoring

Measure all aspects of the Citrix user experience for truly representative performance monitoring

An ideal Citrix monitoring strategy must focus on five key areas:

  • Citrix admins need to know what experience their users are seeing. Synthetic and real-user monitoring is required for this.
  • When a performance issue is reported, Citrix admins often wonder "Where is the root cause?". To answer this question, it is important to monitor each of the Citrix tiers and the other infrastructure tiers supporting the digital workspace service.
  • Performance metrics from users, servers, and supporting systems have to be analyzed and correlated to help pinpoint the root cause of problems. This can help Citrix admins triage problems quickly.
  • Historical performance metrics can be analyzed over time to make intelligent decisions regarding when and where to add capacity, how to optimize the current infrastructure, and how to right-size the Citrix deployment.
  • Save time by automating critical actions in Citrix, such as registering VDAs, disconnecting idle users, and freeing memory or disk space.
Citrix Director is the monitoring tool built into the Citrix architecture.

User experience dashboard

Citrix Director is the monitoring tool built into the Citrix architecture.

The Top Citrix Monitoring Tool - eG Enterprise

eG Enterprise is a purpose-built monitoring solution for Citrix environments. The distinguishing features of this solution include:

Troubleshoot most common Citrix complaints in minutes 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
about Citrix Monitoring Tools

Customers have to choose between whether to use their existing monitoring tool for Citrix, or to deploy a specialized monitoring tool.

If the ultimate goal is to monitor all of your applications and infrastructure with one tool, you may have to use your enterprise monitoring tool for Citrix as well.

However, if your goal is to be able to monitor Citrix proactively, to detect and resolve issues quickly, you should look for a specialized Citrix monitoring tool like eG Enterprise.

This depends on the monitoring tool you decide to use. Many tools can monitor the session hosts (XenApp servers and VDIs) but not the supporting infrastructure like StoreFront, PVS, WEM Broker, AppLayering, etc.

If you choose a tool like eG Enterprise, you can get complete end-to-end visibility of the Citrix session hosts, the supporting Citrix tiers and also the non-Citrix tiers involved in the digital workspace service.

You do not need multiple monitoring tools in this case.

The licensing policy varies from one monitoring tool to another. Some tools license by concurrent Citrix sessions - so if the same user has multiple sessions, you need to have monitoring licenses for each session.

Monitoring of supporting Citrix tiers may need additional licenses. eG Enterprise is licensed by concurrent users/VMs - so if a single user logs in multiple times, only one license is required for each user.

This again varies from one tool to another. Citrix Analytics is available only as a cloud service. Tools like eG Enterprise provide an option for you to deploy completely on-prem, or you can subscribe to our SaaS service and not have to bother about the management layer which we maintain for you.

Yes, this is a feature that some tools have. Citrix Director has a capability called Application probing that can be used. However, this capability is not as comprehensive as what Citrix EdgeSight used to have.

eG Enterprise provides a number of options for synthetic monitoring to track Citrix availability. There is a logon simulator to check Citrix logon availability, and a full session simulator that includes launching and accessing applications within Citrix sessions.


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  • Works on cloud environments, hybrid cloud setups and on-premises deployments
  • Deploy eG Enterprise using our SaaS platform or on-premises
  • Suitable for monitoring cloud applications, digital workspaces and IT infrastructures
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