We all know Citrix Director is the monitoring and troubleshooting web console for Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop. It helps administrators managing XenApp and XenDesktop environments monitor and troubleshoot machines/infrastructure, applications, and sessions.
But what about Citrix Cloud? Can administrators monitor and troubleshoot their applications and sessions deployed on Citrix Cloud?
In fact, we can!
Citrix Director is available on Citrix Cloud for administrators to monitor and troubleshoot their machines, applications and sessions deployed using Xenapp and Xendesktop service on Citrix Cloud.
Log in to Citrix Cloud and navigate to XenApp & XenDesktop service profile by selecting a particular customer and you can see “monitor,” which is nothing but Citrix Director on XenApp & XenDesktop Service in Citrix Cloud.
This includes all the functionalities supported by Director for Cloud deployment
Here is the concise view on the features supported on Citrix Cloud and how to use them
Dashboard: Dashboard allows administrators to see real time graphical representation of the health and usage of the site they are monitoring. Administrators can view data over the past hour for user connection failures, machine failures for both VDI (Desktop OS) and RDS (Server OS), as well as number of connected sessions and average logon duration of all connections that occurred in the last hour.
Further Details on Dashboard can be found here.
Trends: Trends page gives an overview of the different parameters of the deployment over time. This helps in analyzing and predicting issues.
Further Details on Trends can be found here.
Filters: Using Filters we can analyze, drill down and focus on monitoring and troubleshooting things that matter. It also helps you analyze with ease and helps customers solve issues in a jiffy. Filters are explicitly divided into Machines, Sessions, Connections, and Applications
Session Details: Session Details provide details of user sessions including Logon Duration, HDX Channels, Applications and Processes running under the session and details of machine where the session is running. Administrators can troubleshoot user sessions by referring to these details.
Further Details on Session Details can be found here.
Proactive Alerts and Notifications: Capability of configuring policies, rules and conditions that will alert you when the configured threshold has reached in the environment. We can configure and manage proactive alerts and notifications through the Director.
Further Details on Proactive alerts and notifications can be found here.
Power Operations: Shut down/restart, Force Shutdown/restart (Only for managed machines via MCS), Maintenance mode are available in Machine Details and Session Details page.
Session Operations : Logoff, Disconnect, Shadow, Send Message ,End Application/Process, Profile reset, PvD reset are available in Session Details page.
Note: Shadowing a session will work only if Citrix Cloud is accessed from the same network where your machines are deployed.
Export: Data within the range of Last 2 hours/ Last 24 hours to Last one year from trends page can be exported to PDF, CSV and Excel format.
Note: All features available for Onprem Platinum Edition are available on cloud.
Note : Data retention is for 90 Days
So, what is different in Citrix Director on Cloud?
The features listed below are not available for Cloud:
HDX Insight: HDX Insight monitoring is not available for cloud
Infrastructure: Infrastructure details (state of the services running on the controllers that are part of the site) present in Dashboard and Machine Details page are not available for Cloud
PowerShell configuration of Proactive Alerts and Notifications: We cannot configure policies via PowerShell in cloud. We have to use Alert Policies in Director to configure Alert policies.
Delegated Administrator: Delegated Administrator is not available for Director in Cloud. All administrators will have full administrator permissions
Note:
- Third party Cookies should be enabled in Browser to load Director(“Monitor”)
- If Ad Blocker is installed for the browser ensure its disabled for citrix.cloud.com
- Custom report after upgrade: Custom Report queries saved in Director are not available after a Cloud upgrade.
For more details please refer to
http://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-cloud/xenapp-and-xendesktop-service/director.html
Summary: Monitoring and Troubleshooting of XenApp and XenDekstop on Citrix Cloud is as easy as it can be. “Monitor” in XAXD Profile Service helps you do just that
