IT admins need to know if their cloud environment is healthy or unhealthy to properly maintain performance expectations. A healthy Citrix Cloud environment is one where Cloud Connectors are online, up to date and scaling to meet peak workload and solution performance. An unhealthy environment is one with connectors offline, outdated or unable to deliver on performance, scale and functionality expectations.
Citrix Cloud customers can now take advantage of new health monitoring insights and alerts for the Citrix Cloud Connector. New features rolled out this week help customers:
- Deploy and maintain a healthy hybrid cloud solution
- Monitor and ensure solution operations over time
- Become informed and react quickly to changes in the resource location
- Understand connector load and scalability in order to size solutions appropriately
The Connector provides a simple approach for connecting your cloud(s) to Citrix Cloud
The Cloud Connector is a critical component in a Citrix Cloud based hybrid architecture, running in a customer or partner ‘Resource Location’ — rather than in Citrix Cloud. As a common component across multiple Citrix Cloud services, the Connector is a key piece of most Citrix Cloud solutions. The Connector runs on a domain joined windows server machine in your datacenter or cloud resource location, so aspects of deploying it and keeping it operational fall under your (customer or partner) purview.
Newly released health monitoring and alerting features will help keep your Connectors online, reliable and sized correctly for your solution workload.
Benefit from regular and automated connector health checks and alerts
Citrix Cloud will now regularly check in on Cloud Connectors to ensure they remain connected and healthy. In the past, Connectors were contacted to update their connectivity status in real time when admins used the Citrix Cloud UI. Now, Citrix Cloud will regularly check in on all Cloud Connectors at least once per hour to ensure they are online, connected and healthy.
When admins visit the Resource Locations and Connector UIs in Citrix Cloud today they’re presented with the most recent Connector health monitoring data and alerts. Admins can refer to the last health check timestamp to determine when the data was last updated. This improves admin experience and efficiency with faster confirmation of a healthy or unhealthy environment – no longer needing to wait for Connectors to be contacted in real time to update status.
Leverage on-demand health monitoring checks to validate solution changes and performance
Admins who are actively making changes or adjustments to their solution can take advantage of on-demand health checks to validate connector status in real time. Triggering immediate execution of Connector health checks will execute a battery of tests and data collection routines that allow admins to validate environment changes and confirm connectivity and health in just seconds. On completion, the timestamp is adjusted to indicate when the data was last updated. Admins can quickly trigger health checks across all of their connectors in a single place, simplifying solution management by avoiding the need to interact with each individual machine.
Stay online with regular and automated connectivity checks
It’s critical to ensure that networking, domain or other environmental changes occurring in the customer environment do not impact uptime or connectivity of the Cloud Connectors. Citrix Cloud now checks each connector every hour and will alert customers if a disruptive change is detected. Connectivity issues are often introduced by networking changes, firewall or proxy settings changed in the customer environment. With these additional health and connectivity checks, admins can be proactive in confirming and resolving environmental changes or issues that impact their Citrix Cloud solution.
Act on Connector health warnings and alerts
Citrix Cloud aims to help customers as much as possible with their solution, including managing upgrade and maintenance of the Cloud Connector automatically. However, sometimes issues or errors exist that require help from customer administrators to resolve. When this occurs, Citrix Cloud provides warnings and alerts in the UI that describe the issue and detail guidance in the form of a Knowledge Base article. These articles include additional details that outline why a specific alert was triggered, what may be causing the issue and the recommended resolution. One example from customer deployments is system clock drift from UTC time. The Connector machine needs to be in sync with the correct global UTC time in order to securely communicate with Citrix Cloud.
Monitor resource location health
A ‘Resource Location’ in Citrix Cloud describes where customer or partner resources (such as compute, storage and identity) reside. Citrix Cloud customers can create and manage as many resource locations needed to support solutions that span multiple geographies, datacenters or clouds — allowing for consolidated cloud based management.
When a health or connectivity alert is triggered by a specific Cloud Connector, that alert and status will bubble up to the resource location level — allowing for administrators to quickly confirm status across resource locations at a glance. If an alert is found, admins can easily drill in for more detail on which Connector(s) are triggering the alert and learn more about the root cause of the alert and recommended resolution. This management view assists admins with keep their solution online and performant across multiple Connectors and resource locations.
Check in on your Citrix Cloud connectors right now!
Citrix Cloud customers can take advantage of these new features today with no updates, patches or deployment steps required! Simply log into Citrix Cloud and navigate to the Resource Locations UI. These new features come with your existing Citrix Cloud service subscriptions and entitlements, making it available to all customers at no additional cost. If you’re new to Citrix or haven’t yet accessed your Citrix Cloud account, get started today at citrix.cloud.com.
Let us know what you think…
These features help a lot with existing deployments and solutions, and it’s just the beginning! Chime in on the comments section with your feedback and suggestions for additional health checks, alerts and insights that would benefit your Citrix Cloud solution.
