Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops administration is a vital part of your daily activities as a Citrix administrator. Knowing the tools and how to take advantage of them will provide you with information to be proactive or reactive, depending on the case.
During our Ask the Cloud Experts (ACE) Meetup in July, we discussed Manage and Monitor consoles as part of your administration tools for your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops infrastructure. We covered all the features on each console and how you can use them to administer your infrastructure. We started with an overview of the consoles and took a deep dive, showing how to create custom reports, to validate the health of your infrastructure, to monitor user sessions, and to deploy virtual apps and desktops, all from a single pane of glass.
If you didn’t have a chance to join us for the live session, you can check out questions (and answers) from the session below. You can also find a recording of the session at the bottom of the ACE registration page. And while you’re there, be sure to register for our next meetup on Wednesday, August 21.
Can we pull in alerts to Cloud Director from on-premises components?
Citrix recently announced this capability. Citrix Cloud Director can pull information in from Citrix Hypervisor and vSphere. With that information, you can monitor different parameters like hypervisor health and CPU and memory usage.
What is needed to configure Cloud Director alerting?
By default, the alerts are already configured as part of the console. You can also create custom alerts depending on the type of monitoring and alerts you want to receive, filtering by machine catalog, delivery group, user type, and more. With a simple and intuitive process, personalized monitoring can be set from the console.
What’s your favorite new feature?
Last June, Citrix released a great feature customers have been waiting for called “Tagging.” This allows you to tag machines to complete certain tasks to specific machines or delivery groups. A great use case for this feature is scheduled reboot, where you can schedule depending on the tag.
How can Citrix Cloud Monitor help me proactively understand the health of my environment?
You have different ways in the console to monitor your infrastructure from a single pane of glass. Director enables you to retrieve information that will help you to analyze the behavior of your servers, network, performance, user sessions, and more. With all this information, you’ll be able to make decisions around maintenance windows, profile administration, scheduled reboots, and capacity planning.
My customers are complaining about slow logon. How can Citrix Cloud offer visibility into this problem?
This Citrix documentation will help you diagnose user logon issues.
Users are reporting intermittent problems with a critical application we host with Citrix Cloud. How can I stay proactive in maintaining the availability of this application?
Check your VDAs first. Validate whether they are registered or on maintenance mode. Also, you can go to the monitor console and check if the issue is impacting the same location or somewhere specific. This will help you to identify whether the problem is with a few VDAs or if there’s a bigger outage in your infrastructure.
Which view in Director will give a Citrix admin a list of current policies applied to the user session?
Customers can use the “user search” capability to list all active sessions for that user. By clicking on the user session, it will show all the active policies applied to that user.
What options are there to search for a user session?
You have three options. You can find a user session from the Dashboard page. There, you just click on the user session number and it will automatically show you all user sessions; you can filter and find the user you are looking for. Also, you can use “Search User” to directly go to the user’s information. Finally, you can go to the Trends tab and filter by user.
When trying to create a new Machine Catalog trough MCS, it’s greyed out. What do I do?
Look at the permissions you have on the console. Validate that you have access to create Machine Catalogs. If not, request to change your permissions to become a Citrix admin with full access.
Can I access Configuration Logging DB?
By default, Configuration Logging DB is not available to customers because it is administered in the cloud. You can create a support ticket to analyze information on this DB as part of a troubleshooting session.
Can I have multiple host connections (for example, three Azure and two AWS)?
Yes! In Citrix Cloud we have the concept of resource location, which is a zone created on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. Our recommendation is to have a resource location for each hypervisor you have to manage host connection between Citrix Cloud and your hypervisor types (cloud or on-premises).
I heard TLS 1.2 is now required for Citrix Cloud. How does that impact my environment?
Please reference the following Citrix Docs.
Can I provide access to the Studio console to Citrix Consultants even if they don’t have a corporate account?
Yes! From the Citrix Workspace administration console, you can send the admin invitation to any administrator you want to provide access to you console. There you can specify if the new administrator will have full access or custom access. As part of these custom permissions, you can provide granular access depending on admin role and scope.
Citrix Studio in the Cloud appears/behaves like the MMC version. Launching Studio can be hit or miss, where it just spins Loading (to the point of needing to use a different browser). Clicking the “Do not show again” for the welcome screens at each section may take three or four clicks to register. Is there a plan to update this?
Yes, this is currently in our road map, and we are working on it. At the moment you probably see the HTML5 receiver and connect to a Studio console. We plan to replace this experience with the native web Studio. This will remove the spinning time while it loads and will give you a faster user experience.
Can we integrate on-prem Citrix environments with the cloud instances of Studio and Director for greater analytics?
Unfortunately, this is not a capability we have right now. But at the Workspace level, you can aggregate both your cloud and on-premises sites to get users access to their applications and desktops from a single pane of glass.
Do the cloud instances of Director offer greater capabilities around end-user experience monitoring without having to resort to third-party tools?
The Cloud Director monitor tab is planned to provide the same experience as the on-premises version, and the cloud version has components to administer the Cloud. We added the Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) capability to have visibility from the network perspective through the Citrix ADC so you can have end-to-end information.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to register for our August 21 ACE Meetup, which will cover authentication.
— Amir Trujillo, Customer Success Engineer
