XenDesktop Monitoring

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Citrix XenDesktop Performance Monitoring, Alerting, and Reporting

Adopting virtual desktop computing by deploying XenDesktop in an organization can be a large undertaking but provides many benefits such as workforce productivity, centralized management, security, and compliance. At the same time, desktop virtualization presents complex challenges to administrators. Citrix XenDesktop simultaneously relies on your XenDesktop infrastructure (Desktop Delivery Controller, Provisioning Server, Web Interface), virtual infrastructure, storage, and network to deliver a good user experience. As a result, administrators face challenges in determining the root cause of problems that impact the virtual desktop experience of users. The following complaints may sound familiar:

  • “It’s taking forever for me to login to Citrix”
  • “My Citrix session crashed and I lost my work”
  • “Citrix is slow or laggy”
  • “The networking team says latency is low and bandwidth is plentiful, but I still have Citrix performance issues”

Identify and Take Action When XenDekstop Performance Issues Occur

MonitorIT for Citrix XenDesktop allows you to quickly:

  • Determine the root cause of problems that impact the experience of users
  • Provide objective evidence as to what may have caused the problem
  • Remediate to ensure the users are able to return to productivity
  • Automate fix actions based on predetermined thresholds

Out-of-the-Box Integration to Citrix XenDesktop

One product that monitors XenDesktop and the entire supporting infrastructure so that root cause can be determined from a single console.

  • XenDesktop Health Check
  • Analysis of current and historical user XenApp sessions
  • XenApp user session dashboards
  • Automatic fix actions
  • Integration with EdgeSight
  • Built in Compliance Management
  • One product to monitor:
    • Virtual hosts and virtual machines
    • Storage
    • Network devices
    • Application and database servers
    • Physical servers

Easy to Use and Deploy

MonitorIT provides out-of-the-box functionality and setup wizards that allow users to quickly begin monitoring XenDesktop deployments:

  • Out-of-the-Box XenApp Monitoring Rules- MonitorIT provides pre-configured rules for monitoring:
    • XenDesktop
      • Desktop Delivery Controller(DDC)
      • Provisioning Server
      • Web Interface
    • XenApp Server
    • Windows Infrastructure
    • SQL
    • Surrounding Infrastructure:
      • Virtual Hosts, VMs, Physical Servers, Applications, Network Devices
  • Built in API Integration to XenApp
    • Automatic Grouping of XenApp inventory and farms
    • Auto Discovery of XenApp Server Farms dynamically created by Provisioning Services
  • Customization without programming
  • No consulting services needed
  • vCenter or XenCenter Plug-in – You can leverage our web interface, or plug directly into vCenter or XenCenter for a single, central console

Key features include:

Remote Site Monitoring

Many distributed enterprises and service providers face challenges in monitoring the virtual environment outside of their core infrastructure. In order to monitor their Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual hosts remotely, administrators often deploy secondary instances of their monitoring solutions, which complicates management or increases cost because proxies or secondary servers are required. With “Master Agent functionality,” the IT professional can designate any agent at a remote site a master agent and it will monitor remote hypervisors and surrounding infrastructure, sending exception based alerts through the firewall when predetermined thresholds are breached.

Intelligent Agents

The “Intelligent Agent” has several unique features that make it worthy of being considered intelligent.

  1. Easy to deploy and configure relative to most agents.
  2. It is able to capture deep diagnostic metrics with little resource utilization, typically only 0.1% CPU / <16MB of Memory.
  3. The “Master Agent” capability negates the need to distribute servers at remote locations. Any agent can be designated a “Master Agent” at a remote site, behind a firewall to monitor any SNMP or Syslog enabled device and VMware or Citrix Virtual Machines, while negating the requirement to deploy an additional monitoring server to each location.

Master Agent Capability
The “Master Agent” feature is a subset of the overall Intelligent Agent functionality. This capability is incredibly powerful because it allows the product to monitor and manage remote locations quickly and easily. Any agent can be designated as a “Master Agent” at a remote site, behind a firewall, and configured to proactively reach out to the central MonitorIT server if a condition is met and triggers an alert. There is no need to deploy a separate server at a remote location to monitor any Syslog, SNMP enabled device, and VMware or Citrix Virtual Hosts and Virtual Machines. The “Master Agent” still retains the capability to initiate automatic fix actions as with any other agent.

Intelligent Agent Video The Master Agent Video

Agentless Integration with EdgeSight, Desktop Director and other monitoring tools

Easily extend the functionality of other monitoring products or EdgeSight by capturing data and combining this with complimentary data captured by MonitorIT.

Comprehensive Infrastructure Monitoring

MonitorIT allows for complete visibility into all aspects of the IT infrastructure, which can impact the performance of your virtual desktop deployment.

Central Console

EdgeSight and other metrics captured from infrastructure elements such as networks, servers, and desktops can be viewed in the MonitorIT Reports and the dashboards provide one central view of the entire infrastructure. This mitigates the risk that elements of the IT infrastructure not monitored by EdgeSight, will impact the performance of XenApp or XenDesktop.

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MonitorIT for VDI (Monitoring Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop)

MonitorIT has built-in support for VDI technologies such as XenApp/Desktop. In this brief video, we’ll discuss the common challenges we hear and how you can leverage MonitorIT to manage your VDI deployment.

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Remote Site Monitoring with Master Agent Capability

The “Master Agent” feature is a subset of the overall Intelligent Agent functionality. In this video, we explain how the “Master Agent” monitors and manages remote locations quickly and easily.
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What we Monitor

In this brief video, we’ll talk about the flexibility and comprehensiveness of MonitorIT that allows a user to monitor the entire IT infrastructure from one central console.

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MonitorIT for your VMware Environment

MonitorIT is the only comprehensive VMware monitoring product on the market. MonitorIT provides Intelligent Agent and agentless flexibility to comprehensively monitor the virtual environment, which includes the supporting physical infrastructure, all from a single interface.

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MonitorIT for your Citrix Environment

MonitorIT is the only comprehensive Citrix XenServer monitoring product on the market. MonitorIT provides Intelligent Agent and agentless flexibility to comprehensively monitor the virtual environment, which includes the supporting physical infrastructure, all from a single interface.

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FAQs

Product Functionality

What distributions of VDI do you monitor?

MonitorIT offers out-of-the-box support for Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, and Kaviza. In an upcoming release, we will also offer support for VMware View.

Where does the product gather metrics and what data will I get?

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How does the product compete with EdgeSight?

MonitorIT actually compliments EdgeSight by capturing metrics about end user experience and correlating that with data from the physical environment and virtual infrastructure that EdgeSight doesn’t capture. This prevents silos of visibility that make it difficult to identify and remediate performance issues.

Does the product monitor both XenApp and XenDesktop?

Yes

Do I need to deploy an agent to gather metrics on end user performance?

Yes, the intelligent agent is deployed in the VDI Session. The agent is very easy to deploy and has low resource utilization so it will not impact the performance of the VDI Session.

What is the cost?

MonitorIT is inexpensive compared to other solutions available. See our pricing page for details click here

Key Features and Why They Are Important

Remote Site Monitoring

Many distributed enterprises and service providers face challenges in monitoring the virtual environment outside of their core infrastructure. In order to monitor their Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual hosts remotely, administrators often deploy secondary instances of their monitoring solutions, which complicates management or increases cost because proxies or secondary servers are required. With “Master Agent functionality,” the IT professional can designate any agent at a remote site a master agent and it will monitor remote hypervisors and surrounding infrastructure, sending exception based alerts through the firewall when predetermined thresholds are breached.

Monitors XenApp, XenDesktop, and Supporting Infrastructure

Performance in a XenApp or XenDesktop environment depends on many elements in the infrastructure and therefore it is impossible to determine causality, remediate quickly, or provide objective evidence if the administrator can’t see the elements beyond XenApp or XenDesktop.

Quick to Install & Configure

New installation & configurations wizards include:
  • Auto discovery of systems
  • Auto deployment of basic monitoring rules
  • One click agent install with no reboot necessary
  • Preconfigured MIT PAKs
  • Out-of-the-box reports

Flexible & Easy to Use

MonitorIT’s flexibility and ease of use is driven by:
  • Agent based and Agentless capability
  • Multi-tenant grouping and viewing
  • Custom reports
  • Custom monitoring rules
  • Ability to monitor physical and virtual environments

Enterprise Functionality

MonitorIT can be used cross-organizationally because of its:
  • Deep operating system and application visibility
  • Automated remediation
  • High scalability
  • Consolidated enterprise dashboards
  • Central console for entire infrastructure
  • Remote management
  • Ticketing system integration

Intelligent Agent

Provides data on would expect from an agent without the overhead
  • Push to deploy within minutes
  • No reboot necessary
  • Small footprint – 1MB in size
  • Low resource impact – 0.1% CPU / <16MB of Memory
  • Automated remediation
  • Deep diagnostic data on applications

Comprehensive Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring

MonitorIT gives customers a very comprehensive look into virtual environments. Our approach consists of 4 main components:
  • Hypervisor Integration for metrics on Host, VM Inventory, and Storage
  • Intelligent Agents for application level metrics on VM’s
  • Management Console Plug-in to XenCenter & vCenter for easy access to information
  • Physical Infrastructure monitoring for visibility into the supporting infrastructure such as physical servers, databases, network devices, or datacenter components.

 

 

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