In case you missed my last blog post, I explained just how useful and powerful Smart Check can be for your on-premises Virtual Apps and Desktops environments. The summer heat must have gotten to me because I failed to publish any highlights for July and August, therefore, let me help catch you up on all the improvements we’ve engineered during the last couple months.
- Improved “Add Site” user experience — Based on your feedback, we’ve improved the “Add Site” UI to clearly state where the Smart Tools agent should be installed and provide straightforward instructions to download and install the Smart Tools agent. We’ve also used more clear notification messages during the agent upgrade process.
- Automatic publishing of all Smart Checks — In the June blog post, I mentioned that we were starting to automatically publish Smart Checks by default. As of July 2018, all Smart Checks are published this way, including License Server Checks and StoreFront Checks.
- Automatic discovery of site components — We’ve enhanced Smart Check to automatically discover components of a Virtual Apps and Desktop site. For those components that cannot be discovered automatically, the system will ask you for help. A banner will appear on top of the site’s main page to remind you to add the missing component(s), and an “Add Server” link will also be added to the missing component’s tile in the site’s logical diagram (e.g. example shown below).
- Enhanced UI to manage site components within the “Site Details” page — We’ve added all auto-discovered and user-added components of the site to “Site Details” page, including component name and server FQDN or IP. You can use this page to add and delete components from Smart Check. Furthermore, based on your feedback, we’ve also added the Smart Tools Agent version to this page.
- Automatic selection of Delivery Controller as a target — To further simplify user experience, if a particular check only runs on a Delivery Controller, the system will automatically select a Delivery Controller to execute the check – saves you an extra mouse click or two 🙂 . This applies to Delivery Controller Configuration Checks and Product Lifecycle Checks.
- Optimization of Smart Tools Agent-to-Cloud Service communication — We’ve improved the communication efficiency between the Smart Tools Agent and the Smart Check Cloud Service by using a better version check algorithm and a local caching mechanism. This results in less network bandwidth consumption and faster check execution.
- LTSR Compliance Check and Lifecycle Check updated – Within the past month, Citrix has released CU6 for XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6 LTSR, as well as the latest and greatest Current Release of Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 1808. Both the LTSR compliance and lifecycle checks have been updated to account for these new releases.
Based on your feedback, we continue to evolve and enhance Smart Check to provide the value and experience you expect. Stay tuned for the next post, where we will highlight improvements in the upload process to support environments where components may not have direct access to the internet. We will also talk about improvements involving the automatic scheduling of checks that will simplify the site on-boarding process and help you maximize the value beginning from day one.
