With an objective to provide deeper insights into ever-critical user logon duration, Director 1808 had drilldowns of two of the most important logon phases — Interactive Session and Group Policy Processing (GPO). These drilldowns provided granular level details related to Interactive Session and GPO processing, which assisted in finding out the precise point of trouble.

In addition to these two phases, profile load is one of the most critical phases for logon duration. Profile load is the time it takes to load a user’s profile, which includes registry hive (NTUser.dat) and the user files.

Starting with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 1811 and the latest Virtual Apps and Desktops service, Citrix Director displays detailed insights related to user profiles.

When hovering over the Profile Load bar in the Logon Duration chart on the User Details page, a tool-tip displays the summary of the user profile. When you click on the Detailed Drilldown button on the tool-tip, you get further insights about the user profiles.

Let’s have a look at what information is available and how it can assist in troubleshooting high profile load-related issues.

This feature is available in the Logon Duration chart on the User details and Endpoint details page. When you hover over the Profile Load bar, a tool-tip with the following information is displayed.

This tool-tip provides profile statistics such as the total number of files in the user profile, overall profile size, and number of large files. The number of large files is based on the default threshold of 50 MB. When you click the Detailed Drilldown button, you get a drilldown into each of the folders in profile root.

Here, the size and number of files in each individual folders in the profile root are displayed. These statistics include the nested folders in the calculation. The files inside the root profile are included in the Files in Root Folder entry. These details can be used to gain insights into the user profile and fix high-profile load issues. For example:

• An administrator can use the Send Message feature on the User Details page to notify users about abnormal file count and size and advise them to clean up the profile by removing unwanted files.
• The Reset Profile panel in the Personalization panel can be used in the case of humongous profiles.
• The Number of Large Files metric can be used to recommend users to reduce large files in their user profile.

These insights can be used to determine if the organization should use features such as profile streaming and folder redirection.

By default, folder names are visible in the detailed drilldown. For user privacy, these can be disabled via a registry key on the VDA machines. Check out this document for more information

For more details about logon duration, please refer to the Citrix documentation on diagnosing user logon issues or leave a comment below!