Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop Monitoring
Overview
Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop monitoring covers three components:
- The DDC. The Desktop Data Collectors (also known as Brokers). These DataSources provide information about the state of their services, connections to their datastores, and hypervisors.
- The Farm. Provides information for farm-level entities such as applications, desktop groups. VDA registrations, etc. All farm monitoring is done through the DDCs.
- VDA. Enhanced session monitoring for metrics such as RoundTripTime and Throughput are performed if Virtual Delivery Agents have been added to LogicMonitor.
| DataSource | Coverage | Description |
| Citrix_XenApp_Machines | Farm | Monitor machines (VDAs) belonging to the Farm |
| Citrix_XenApp_LogonPerformance | Farm | Monitor logon performance; logon performance is aggregated per delivery group |
| Citrix_XenApp_Troubleshooter | DDC | Find issues that might impede monitoring |
| Citrix_XenApp_ConnectionFailureTrends | Farm | Breakdown of connection failure trends by the reason for failure |
| Citrix_XenApp_MachineFailureTrends | Farm | Breakdown of machine failure trends by reason for failure |
| Citrix_XenApp_DatastoreStatus | DDC | Monitor a DDC’s data connection to the datastore |
| Citrix_XenApp_ApplicationUsage | Farm | Monitor application launch data |
| Citrix_XenApp_MachineCatalogs | Farm | Monitor machine catalog utilization |
| Citrix_XenApp_UserExperience | VDA | User experience metrics such as RoundTripTime, Bandwidth and latency |
| Citrix_XenApp_HypervisorConnections | DDC | Verify that the DDCs have control of the configured hypervisors |
| Citrix_XenApp_DeliveryGroups | DDC | Monitor delivery group utilization and availability |
Setting Up Monitoring
- Create or identify a XenApp user account that has read-only administrator privileges that LogicMonitor will use to access XenApp/XenDesktop.
- Within LogicMonitor, define the properties xenapp.user and xenapp.pass on the global, group, or DDC device level, matching the XenApp user account name and password. These properties must be set in order for collection to work, even if the Collector service account has the same access. For more information on setting authentication credentials as properties, see Defining Authentication Credentials.
- To enable PowerShell SDK-based collection methods (the Citrix_XenApp_DatastoreStatus and Citrix_XenApp_HypervisorConnections DataSources rely on PowerShell), make sure that the Collector account has Farm credentials (these can be the same credentials used for the xenapp.user and xenapp.pass properties).
- Import the DataSources and PropertySources.
- All of the Citrix DataSources start with Citrix_XenApp_*.
- The addCategory_CitrixMonitorServiceV2 PropertySource must also be imported.
- Because we should only collect FARM information from one of the DDCs, we have to determine which one that will be. This is done by setting “CitrixBrokerActive” as the value for the system.categories property on the DDC from which data collection will take place.