1. Citrix Cloud Services
2. Citrix Monitoring Software
3. Citrix Monitoring Tools

With most of the world on lockdown due to the COVID-19 virus, many aspects of IT services and digital transformation have been put into the fast lane. There are reports of massive surges in the use of tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Office 365, etc. in order to communicate and collaborate. At the same time organizations are required to scale up access to their internal applications. We automatically think of technologies like VPN to provide network connectivity to corporate networks from a remote location such as our home offices.

With Citrix monitoring With Citrix server monitoring, you can quickly determine which host servers are under the greatest strain, and which ones are not being used to capacity. A highly-strained server affects the performance of all the virtual machines running on it. Proactively detect and resolve security threats To guard sensitive data, you need to keep assets and employees secure in real time. Citrix Analytics for Security gives you proactive security protection without complicating your employee experience.

The digital workspace platform Citrix has been particularly popular, not only for its ability to deliver applications and content within internal networks but also to securely and efficiently deliver apps and content to remote devices/locations. Recently I have seen organizations massively scale up capacity of their Citrix environments in order to accommodate an increase in their user base due to remote access requirements to company resources via Citrix. With an increasing need to work remotely and to fast track the transformation of how we work, these services and technologies become business-critical, hence an increased importance for monitoring and observing them.

Questions? Answers!

How do you start onboarding data from your Citrix environment? How can Splunk as the as it is meant to be customized for your environment. As with all things Splunk, there are many options to adapt, expand, and to go above and beyond.

Going the Extra Mile

Monitoring the performance of Citrix Cloud services is challenging for several reasons: The Citrix Cloud architecture is distributed and involves several domains of control. There may be multiple administrators responsible for elements in the Resource Plane. While built-in Citrix tools are good enough for monitoring individual parts of the Citrix delivery infrastructure, you need to look beyond Citrix built-in tools if: You want to monitor Citrix as a service (take an end to end view, so when a user says Citrix is slow, you can tell if the problem is one of the Citrix tiers, or VMware, or storage.

You may notice that both add-ons also use PowerShell scripts to collect data from Citrix components. The Universal Forwarder then sends the output of these scripts to Splunk. Hence, there is the possibility to customize as much as you want with your own PowerShell scripts. As you may know, you are able to get any piece of information about your Citrix environment via SDKs and APIs.

The other layers of ‘Hosts’ and ‘Management’ can also be integrated into Splunk to give you a complete picture of your entire stack from end-to-end. Given that ‘Hosts’ could be anything from bare metal to hypervisors or private or public cloud, this would go beyond the scope of this blog post. Have a browse on our app store to find add-ons and apps for other shared Infrastructure of your IT environment on splunkbase.com and discover for yourself that Splunk is, in fact, the Data-to-Everything Platform.

uberAgent for an OOB Experience

On Splunkbase you will discover that users in the Splunk community, as well as technology partners, publish their own apps and add-ons. An app that I would like to mention is the uberAgent from “vast limits GmbH”. In the context of Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, the uberAgent helps you collect all relevant metrics and information. It also helps visualize it with their Splunk App, giving you an out-of-the-box experience and addressing the most important use cases in monitoring Citrix environments. Vast limits recently announced on their blog that they are going to provide 2 months of uberAgent for unlimited users for FREE to monitor #WFH. Visit their blog and website for more detailed information about the uberAgent and what else it can do beyond Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop monitoring. :)

In case you were wondering: Yes, there is going to be part 2 which will cover more of the Citrix Cloud topics, including hybrid environments.

So stay tuned and happy Splunking!

Christian

----------------------------------------------------
Thanks!
Christian Radeke

The evolution of cloud computing has transformed all aspects of the IT landscape – how applications are deployed, how data is consumed and stored, how security is managed, and so on. A recent Forbes survey reports that in the span of 15 months, about 80% of all IT funds will be committed to cloud solutions. Cloud adoption has also started in the end-user computing (EUC) world. From Citrix’s latest financial update, we can see that Citrix Cloud accounts for over 10% of their annual revenue and is growing at over 40% year on year.

32% of organizations are using virtual desktops or virtualized applications in the cloud, while 48% are considering this in the future.

Citrix Cloud services offer a simple, fast, and flexible way of delivering digital workspaces. These are rendered as hybrid cloud services where Citrix provides cloud-based management while customers decide where workloads are located. In the hybrid deployment model, Citrix implements and manages the Citrix Delivery Controller, StoreFront, ADC Gateway, SQL Server, License Server, etc. This is called the Citrix Control Plane. On the other hand, the Citrix customer or service provider is required to implement the Virtual Apps and Desktop VDAs in their datacenters (or private/public cloud). The Citrix components in the datacenter are referred to as the Resource Plane. To enable connectivity between these two planes, one or more Citrix Cloud Connectors need to be installed (usually installed in pairs for HA) and managed in the resource plane.

The Performance Monitoring Challenge: On-prem vs. Citrix Cloud

Monitoring the performance of Citrix Cloud services is challenging for several reasons:

• The Citrix Cloud architecture is distributed and involves several domains of control. There may be multiple administrators responsible for elements in the Resource Plane. The Control Plane is hosted and managed by Citrix, and organizations do not have visibility into its operation and performance.
• Some organizations may deploy the Resource Plane in a public cloud – AWS, Azure, etc. Performance of the public cloud can also affect the user experience.
• Network connectivity between the Resource Plane and Control Plane is also important. Slowness in the inter-connecting network will affect the quality of Citrix services.
• At the same time, end users are not aware of or interested in knowing the complexity of the Citrix Cloud architecture. They will still expect the performance of Citrix services to be on-par with that of physical apps and desktops.

Therefore, performance monitoring of Citrix Cloud is challenging, and when users complain about slowness, Citrix administrators have to be able to determine what is causing the problem – is it to do with the Citrix Resource Plane and its components, or the public cloud, or the Citrix Control Plane, or the network interconnecting the resource and control planes?

Requirements for Citrix Cloud Monitoring

From the above analysis, it is clear that the built-in tools from Citrix are not sufficient for monitoring Citrix Cloud environments effectively. Organizations deploying Citrix Cloud need to be able to:

Built-in Tools from Citrix: Do They Suffice for Citrix Cloud Monitoring?

There are several tools available for monitoring the availability and performance of Citrix Cloud services:

• Citrix admins can check the Citrix Cloud portal – status.cloud.com. Citrix posts updates if they have known problems that are impacting their cloud services. Typically, only significant outages that are affecting many customers are reported here.
• Citrix’s SLA for Citrix Cloud is based only on availability. So, if there are performance issues, they are mostly attended to reactively. Often customers must report issues to have them investigated.
• As part of your Citrix Cloud subscription, you have access to Citrix Director in the cloud. This gives you insights into session usage, activity, logon times, and such. But you don’t get end-to-end insights to troubleshoot the cause of slowness – i.e., whether it is in your infrastructure, with a hypervisor or storage, with your PVS server, or with your network connectivity to the cloud, or in the cloud.
• Finally, Citrix has just introduced Performance Analytics. This is mainly a way to easily interpret aggregate metrics collected by Citrix Director into a single metric that indicates if your users are happy or not. Analytics does not provide you any additional insights for troubleshooting performance issues. Plus, this is a paid tool that must be purchased additionally.

Citrix Cloud Services

Citrix Monitoring Software

• No performance SLAs: Only availability guaranteed
• Monitoring is reactive: Issues are reported only when many customers are impacted
• Performance issues need to be reported to Citrix support and wait for their response and resolution

• Mainly session-level data
• No visibility into the infrastructure and cloud-connectivity issues
• Limited root cause diagnosis
• Limited historical data retention (only 90 days)

• Focuses only on some UX metrics: logon, latency, failure, reconnects
• Aggregates data across multiple sites
• Licensed and priced separately
• Limited historical data retention
• Not very helpful for troubleshooting

In summary, the built-in Citrix monitoring tools:

• Lack the ability to monitor user experience end to end
• Do not provide monitoring to all the Citrix and non-Citrix tiers of the Citrix Cloud service delivery chain
• Force organizations to use several monitoring tools to troubleshoot performance issues
• Do not provide the analytics that organizations need to right-size, optimize and plan their Citrix Cloud deployment

eG Enterprise: Enabling Four Best Practices for Citrix Cloud Monitoring

eG Enterprise addresses the performance monitoring needs of organizations that are deploying Citrix Cloud. Using eG Enterprise organizations can:

Citrix Monitoring Tools