The Citrix SCOM Management Pack release cycle is aligned with the XenApp and XenDesktop release. This ensures support for the newly released product versions – XenApp and XenDesktop 7.13, StoreFront 3.9, Provisioning Services 7.13, and License Server 14.0.1 — from day one. In Q1 2017, we also support XenServer 7.1, its latest release. See the Citrix SCOM Management Pack documentation for more details.
In particular, noticeable enhancements have been made in the Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenApp and XenDesktop:
- It has been localized for five languages.
- Performance improvements have been made to enable monitoring of bigger XenApp and XenDesktop environments.
Localization
To boost adoption of the Citrix SCOM Management Packs in non-English markets, we have localized the most widely used management pack, the Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenApp and XenDesktop.
It is localized for the following languages: French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish.
A single installation package supports English and all the localized languages. The language used in the product is determined at runtime based on the system locale.
Performance improvements
Over last two quarters including Q1 2017, we have made incremental performance improvements in the Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenApp and XenDesktop (MPXAXD), enabling monitoring of large XenApp and XenDesktop environments with lesser impact on the monitored system.
With the latest release, data intensive XenApp and XenDesktop PowerShell SDK calls of the management pack agent, used to retrieve machine and session data, are now replaced by calls to the Monitoring Service using the OData interface. By default, MPXAXD collects data every five minutes, resulting in a large amount of data for all the machines and sessions in large environments. The XenApp and XenDesktop PowerShell interface is ideally intended for administration use. It is not an optimal interface for frequent reading of large number of objects (machines, sessions). It can impact the XenApp and XenDesktop environment and can result in the XenApp and XenDesktop database becoming slow or failing to respond (database timeouts).
Usage of the Monitoring Service instead of the PowerShell interface, to collect the data is faster and reduces load on the Delivery Controller and the database. Also, the Monitoring Service enables reading data only for sessions whose state changed since the last discovery interval, compared to reading all sessions on each discovery interval using PowerShell interface. With this change, the volume of data transferred from the XenApp and XenDesktop environment to MPXAD is significantly reduced.
The following table summarizes important results of the MPXAXD performance improvements. Note that the numbers documented here are not hard limits, but figures verified during testing. However, they serve as good indicators of the relative performance (scale) improvements.
| . | Q3 2016
MPXAXD 3.8 |
Q4 2016
MPXAXD 3.9 |
Q1 2017
MPXAXD 3.11 |
| Number of Desktop OS machines | 4,400 | 7,050 | 20,000 |
| Number of concurrent sessions (Server OS and Desktop OS) | 10,000 | 13,930 | 33,400 |
| MPXAXD agent average CPU usage | 23.82% | 3.42% | 4,79% |
Note:
- MPXAXD collects most of the data only on one Controller in a site. MPXAXD agent average CPU usage data documented in the table above is relevant for this Controller. MPXAXD agent CPU usage on the other Controllers in the site is negligible.
- The Monitoring Service in XenApp and XenDesktop 7.5 does not expose all the necessary data. So, MPXAXD still uses the XenApp and XenDesktop PowerShell interface for monitoring XenApp and XenDesktop 7.5 and earlier versions. Therefore, the scale supported in monitoring XenApp and XenDesktop 7.5 and earlier is lower than XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6 and later.
For more details on the performance results for latest release, see MPXAXD 3.11 performance overview document.
If you are still using MPXAXD version 3.8 or earlier, we recommend that you to upgrade to latest MPXAXD release, even if you don’t have to monitor a large environment. You will benefit from a reduced load of the MPXAXD agent on the Controller CPU and the XenApp and XenDesktop database.
With this release, an important step was taken to achieve a better MPXAXD performance. Stay tuned to hear about more performance improvements in future releases.
Download
If you need a localized Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenApp and XenDesktop, or you want to leverage the performance improvements or the support for new product versions, download the latest release of the Citrix SCOM Management Packs here.
