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WHITE PAPER| EdgeSight for XenDesktop

EdgeSight for XenDesktop Best

Practices

The document provides best practices for implementing and utilizing the

XenDesktop Platinum monitoring feature EdgeSight, with focus on

environment specific architecture options and recommendations for

monitoring, troubleshooting and analyzing virtual desktop performance.

www.citrix.com

Table of Contents

Executive Overview .......................................................................................................................................... 3

Product Overview .............................................................................................................................................. 4

EdgeSight ........................................................................................................................................................ 4

XenDesktop .................................................................................................................................................... 4

EdgeSight Architecture Considerations.......................................................................................................... 4

Basic Architecture .......................................................................................................................................... 4

XenDesktop Best Practices for Architecture ............................................................................................. 5

Using EdgeSight Reports .................................................................................................................................. 9

Troubleshooting Issues ................................................................................................................................. 9

Monitoring .................................................................................................................................................... 13

Planning and Allocating .............................................................................................................................. 17

Summary ............................................................................................................................................................ 23

Appendix A - Additional Monitoring Tools & Resources......................................................................... 25

Appendix B - Session Startup & Duration Acronyms ............................................................................... 25

Executive Overview

With XenDesktop 4, and the ability of FlexCast delivery technology to enable desktop virtualization

for every user in the enterprise, the importance of monitoring has never been greater. In order to

proactively maintain the environment, plan capacity, and quickly identify root causes of issues,

XenDesktop 4 Platinum Edition offers EdgeSight monitoring capabilities that provide deep insight

into real-time and historical desktop and application performance.

EdgeSight not only offers insight into performance metrics provided by standard Windows tools,

but also shows metrics based on what the user is actually experiencing. EdgeSight for XenDesktop

can monitor Windows 7, Vista and XP desktops that are either physical or virtualized on any

hypervisor. With a variety of different architecture options, EdgeSight can easily be integrated into

any environment without requiring restructuring of security policies or storage configuration.

EdgeSight can be used to answer a variety of questions, such as:

• What kind of performance are users experiencing right now?

• What was the state of the desktop when an issue occurred?

• How long are the user login times?

• What kind of delays are applications experiencing to the backend databases?

• What are the most resource-intensive or problematic applications?

• What applications are users installing into the environment?

• Do the users have enough memory/processor power/disk space?

• Do the remote users have acceptable performance levels?

• What’s the overall health of the XenDesktop environment?

With hundreds of customizable reports, overviews, and real-time monitoring and alerting, EdgeSight

can provide information at a granular level for help desk staff and Citrix administrators or provide

executives with a complete high level overview of the environment.

EdgeSight for XenDesktop is a special client that has integrated features of both EdgeSight for

EndPoints and EdgeSight for XenApp in order to provide the necessary visibility into the health of

the virtual desktop environment. Incorporating EdgeSight into Citrix XenApp environments has

historically allowed administrators to increase performance and optimize capacity, and now that

same EdgeSight technology is available for Citrix XenDesktop. This document outlines architecture

options and reporting best practices to ensure that implementing EdgeSight into any Citrix

XenDesktop environment can provide the same performance and optimization benefits.

Product Overview

EdgeSight

The Citrix EdgeSight product line provides the real-time visibility necessary to test, deliver and

monitor the performance of web, desktop and virtualized applications with the best user experience.

EdgeSight manages application performance and availability where it matters most—at the business

user level. By providing a direct line of sight across networks, servers, databases and desktops,

EdgeSight goes beyond traditional device and network monitoring tools to improve application

visibility. This consolidated view of application performance as experienced by the user gives IT the

necessary tool set to lower costs, reduce downtime and improve service delivery.

XenDesktop

Citrix XenDesktop is a desktop virtualization system that centralizes and delivers desktops as a

service to users anywhere, reduces desktop total cost of ownership (TCO) up to 40 percent and

improves data security by centralizing desktop lifecycle management in the datacenter. It delivers a

high definition user experience over any connection, including high latency wide area networks. The

open architecture of XenDesktop offers choice and flexibility of virtualization platform and end

points. Unlike other desktop virtualization alternatives, it simplifies desktop management by using a

single image to deliver personalized desktops to users anywhere and enables IT to manage service

levels with built-in desktop performance monitoring.

EdgeSight Architecture Considerations

EdgeSight functions using an agent-server architecture model. Using a data-collecting agent that

gathers information regarding its host’s performance, EdgeSight aggregates the data along with the

other agents at a single master server. This data can then be manipulated and output in many

standard reports, and additional customized reports can be created using Microsoft’s Report Builder.

Basic Architecture

XenDesktop XP/Win7 Machine EdgeSight SQL DatabaseEdgeSight Server

Client Device

(Laptop/Desktop/Thin Client)

EdgeSight Agent EdgeSight Agent

Database

ICA

Figure 1: EdgeSight Architecture

EdgeSight is composed of two primary components (Figure 1):

• EdgeSight Agent: The EdgeSight Agent resides on the virtual desktop that is being

monitored. The EdgeSight Agent requires a software agent and a database to store agent-

specific data. The following two options are available for the agent database:

o EdgeSight Agent Database: When installing the software agent a Firebird database (a

lightweight relational database) is automatically installed on the local virtual desktop.

o EdgeSight Agent Database Server: In some highly-specific configurations (discussed

below), it may be beneficial to host the Agent Database on an external server rather

than on the local virtual desktop based on the desktop storage configurations.

• EdgeSight Server: The EdgeSight Server aggregates all the data reported from each

individual agent and collectively presents the data. The collective data requires a dedicated

database known as the EdgeSight Database.

o EdgeSight Database: The EdgeSight Database is a central Microsoft SQL Server with

Reporting Services used to aggregate all the information from the smaller agent

databases.

The EdgeSight Agent runs on the host (XenDesktop) machine, collects information and stores it in

a local EdgeSight Agent database. At set intervals (the XenDesktop default is 90 minutes), data is

taken from the local Agent database, packaged, and uploaded through the EdgeSight Server to the

EdgeSight SQL Database1. Once the collective data for all agents is in the EdgeSight SQL Database,

it can be accessed from the reporting interface on the EdgeSight Server.

When using a non-persistent disk (as in most XenDesktop deployments using Provisioning

Services), additional considerations need to be made as to where to store the local agent data since

the EdgeSight Agent temporarily stores information on the local host before packaging it and

sending it to the main EdgeSight Server.

XenDesktop Best Practices for Architecture

In most XenDesktop environments, there are additional considerations for an EdgeSight

deployment. Since many XenDesktop architectures utilize non-persistent disks through Provisioning

Services to drastically reduce storage space requirements and ease management of desktops, a

default EdgeSight Agent installation may not capture all monitoring data given that desktop reboots

would purge the data. In order to rectify this, there are additional deployment options that will

provide data retention across reboots. This section describes three possible options along with the

positive and negative impacts of each.

1 Upload times, as well as length of data retention and max database sizes are settings that can be configured depending on company requirements and storage availability.

The following section provides a high level overview of the three possible types of configurations,

which will be described in further detail:

• EdgeSight Agent Direct with Attached Local Disk. This configuration is generally

considered best practice, as the Agent Database is stored on an attached disk considered to

be local to the desktop and is persistent across desktop reboots.

• EdgeSight Agent Brokered without Attached Local Disk. A Brokered EdgeSight Agent

means that the Agent Database (used to temporarily store local data) resides on an external

EdgeSight Agent Database Server and that server holds the information until it is uploaded.

• EdgeSight Agent Direct without Attached Local Disk. If the EdgeSight Agent

installation is completed with default settings, the resulting configuration will be to have the

Agent Database stored in non-persistent disk. While this is the simplest to configure, if non-

persistent disks are used, then agent data can be lost across desktop reboots.

The three architecture options are briefly illustrated in Figure 2 and described in greater detail in the

following sections.

Figure 2: EdgeSight Architecture Options

EdgeSight Agent Direct with VM-Local Secondary Disk

As a XenDesktop best practice, it’s often recommended to store the Provisioning Services write

cache on a drive local to the VM to improve performance, reduce network traffic, and improve the

Provisioning Services server scalability. This VM-local storage can also be utilized to store the

EdgeSight agent database –persistent storage will allow data to be retained across reboots and

potential crashes, preventing loss of critical information. This method also has the benefit of not

having any additional components or configurations to manage and will fit into most XenDesktop

architectures.

EdgeSight Agent Brokered without Attached Local Disk

Some environments mandate that user accessible machines do not have any local storage attached to

them in order to prevent loss of secure data or administrators may be required to purge all data after

shutdown to prevent any information from being stored persistently. For such environments, the

EdgeSight Agent can be configured to point to an external Firebird database to prevent loss of

reporting information. Requirements for this solution include:

• A file share accessible by virtual desktops. This file share will store static configuration

files for the agent startup.

• An EdgeSight Agent Database Server. This server will host an external Firebird database

that requires virtually no management. One Firebird database server is necessary for every

802 desktops in a pool.

Each Agent and Agent Database Server is tied to a XenDesktop pool, and each registers with the

EdgeSight Server on startup. When the Agent service starts, the Agent will contact the EdgeSight

Server, which will then return the address of one of the Agent Database Servers assigned to the

pool. Assignments will be load-balanced so that no one Agent Database Server is overloaded. This

solution allows data to constantly be saved to a persistent database, and from this point the

information will be uploaded to the main EdgeSight Server.

2 80 desktops per Agent Database Server is recommended for Windows Server operating systems. If the database is installed on a Windows Desktop operating system, 40:1 is the recommended ratio. Testing should be conducted to confirm the client’s specific environment ratio performs as expected and that the Agent Database Servers are not being overloaded.

EdgeSight Brokered Startup Process

During Agent

Database Installation

A XenDesktop desktop pool is specified.

During Agent

Installation

A XenDesktop desktop pool is specified.

Step 1 Agent Database services start up and register with the EdgeSight

Server, passing along the pool name specified during installation.

Step 2 Agent services startup on the XenDesktop and register with the

EdgeSight Server, passing along the pool name specified during

installation.

Step 3 EdgeSight Server chooses the least loaded Agent Database server for

that pool and passes the information to the Agent.

Step 4 Agent connects to the Agent Database and begins delivering metrics as

it would to a local Agent Database.

Figure 3: EdgeSight Brokered Startup Process

EdgeSight Agent Direct with Attached Local Disk

If the EdgeSight Agent is installed on the XenDesktop machine with default settings and on a non-

persistent disk, such as one provided by Provisioning Services, the database will reside in the vDisk

write cache. The write cache stores all changes made to a disk while the machine is online, and

during reboot the information stored in the write cache is flushed. As a result, any data collected by

the EdgeSight Agent that has not been uploaded to the EdgeSight Server will be lost.

This loss of data can have a high cost in terms of information retention, if users are often logging in

and out and desktops are set to reboot after each logout. Additionally, information immediately

preceding a desktop crash will also be irretrievable, leading to difficulty in troubleshooting and

forensics activity.

This deployment option can be used for deployments where information regarding the desktop

performance and activity is not critical and reboots are not frequent.

Additional Considerations

In order to reduce the number of Agent Database servers, it is possible to set up the environment so

that only a certain percentage of desktops are monitored – essentially a sampling of the

environment. Since in many XenDesktop deployments, each desktop is provisioned through

Provisioning Services and is identical to the next, there is less of a need to watch over each

individual desktop. Monitoring a small subset of desktops may be enough to provide necessary

insight into the environment’s health and note any major issues. However, intermittent issues on

unmonitored desktops or issues tied to a particular user may go unnoticed in this scenario. Whether

sampling should be utilized depends on the goals and requirements of the company and a decision

should be made during the planning phase of a deployment.

Using EdgeSight Reports

EdgeSight reports provide an in-depth view into an environment’s current performance and long-

term health as well as offer different groups in IT access to report generation abilities. Reporting in

the EdgeSight console is divided into three main categories:

• Troubleshooting

• Monitoring

• Planning and Managing

Each section of these reports can be used by a different team to ensure that the environment is

running at optimal levels and that users are receiving the best possible experience. The following

sections will look at each of these categories in more detail and describe several common scenarios

where EdgeSight can assist.

Troubleshooting Issues

EdgeSight is a powerful, highly detailed tool when it comes to troubleshooting user issues and can

save time in pinpointing causes of problems. Common complaints, such as “My desktop is slow!” or

“Application XYZ keeps crashing!”, can be diagnosed for specific causes and appropriate actions

can be taken to remedy the situation. By having access to information such as high-level overviews

of the user’s device, detailed application crash information, and process-related statistics, a help desk

representative or Citrix administrator can discover where most issues are occurring, including those

not related to the virtual desktop itself or the XenDesktop environment.

Users Complain of General Application or Desktop Slow Performance

A common occurrence for help desk representatives is getting a call or email explaining that their

XenDesktop isn’t working, with little additional detail to explain the situation. In order to resolve

this issue, a help desk representative can use EdgeSight to look at the user’s environment in real-

time.

Using the Device Troubleshooter under the Troubleshooting section, the administrator can connect

directly to the device to get current system metrics. In the example below (Figure 4), a quick glance

at the overview shows a jump in activity in the last few minutes.

Figure 4: Real-Time Device Status

In this case, the desktop’s CPU seems to be very active, so clicking on Total Processor Time

presents a more detailed view (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Device Total Processor Time

Drilling down on the peak displays the details of the environment at that moment in time (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Total Processor Time by Process

A look at the processes reveals the problem application, and a glance at the total processor time

shows that the CPU was averaging over 70%, and switching to the peak time (in this instance)

displayed the desktop reaching 100%. Using the Counter dropdown in the top right, the display can

be switched to view other counters that may provide insight into application behavior, such as

memory, paging, and thread queues.

Now that an issue has been identified, additional steps can be taken. If the application is behaving

improperly and should not be consuming these kinds of resources, then additional investigation into

the application can be performed. However, if the application is acting as expected (such as a

software compiler during builds), virtual desktops who utilize it can be assigned additional resources,

or users can be educated to expect slower performance while that application is running.

Latency Issues

Another common help desk occurrence is users calling in to say that “My XenDesktop is slow,” and

will mention issues such as screen painting, the mouse cursor moving slowly, or menus taking a

longer than expected time to appear.

In order to analyze this issue and determine the cause, one useful report to look at is the ICA

Session Round Trip Time. This report provides information on both network round-trip time (from

server to client) and ICA round-trip time (from initial client request to completion of screen-

drawing). ICA round-trip time is a better measure of user experience than network round-trip time

as it more closely reports what a user actually experiences as it relates to the virtual desktop

rendering.

As seen in the figure below (Figure 7), different users can experience different response times.

ESUser1 has almost 600 ms of perceived latency, although his network latency is almost non-

existent. This would point to an issue on the XenDesktop delivering the information across ICA,

such as a lack of CPU or memory resources (this information was gathered while ESUser1’s

XenDesktop was undergoing a CPU stress test).

Figure 7: Network & ICA Latency by User

The report can then be drilled down into detailed information regarding ESUser1’s sessions and

provide data as to when the user was experiencing these issues. An administrator can then correlate

those times with the device’s data (using the Device Troubleshooter) to find out the root cause.

Figure 8 shows us an example of detailed latency information.

Figure 8: Detailed Network Latency

In contrast, ESUser2 experiences approximately 400 ms of latency, but about half of this is caused

by network latency; whereas ESUser3 only experiences about 200 ms of perceived latency in the

same environment. If additional information is needed to find where network latency is being

caused, EdgeSight offers the ability to run a remote traceroute and identify which network hop is

causing issues. Disclaimer: Latency numbers shown here are a product of testing in a heavily utilized test

environment and are not reflective of typical XenDesktop LAN performance.

Once an understanding has been reached as to where the user’s perceived latency is occurring,

resources can be focused on investigating the correct area, whether it’s within the Citrix

infrastructure, in the network infrastructure, or elsewhere.

Disconnection Issues

If users are calling in and complaining about disconnection issues, identifying the groups and

locations where these disconnects are occurring is important in troubleshooting the problem. If

auto-reconnect is enabled in the farm, the Session Auto-Reconnects report will allow break-down of

disconnections by user, device, date or hour.

If only certain users are having an issue, it may be that their network connection has high packet loss

– this can happen at sites with remote users or branch locations connecting over a WAN. In a

branch office situation, a network investigation may be beneficial, whereas for remote users it would

be good to ask what kind of an internet connection they have, and ensure that it’s not a dial-up or

satellite/wireless connection with high packet loss. If disconnects are only happening at certain

times, such as the morning or right after lunch and other heavy traffic periods, it may be that the

network connection does not have enough bandwidth to support the branch location.

If disconnects are happening across the board, then checking the physical network connections

closer to the datacenter would be the ideal path, or look at the components inside the datacenter to

ensure that there are no NIC issues, or software issues occurring on the machines themselves.

With disconnection issues, the location and breadth of disconnects should be determined first, and

then additional investigations can be taken to confirm the problem. Once the root cause has been

determined, additional actions such as increasing bandwidth, integrating a Branch Repeater or

replacing faulty hardware can be completed.

Monitoring

Proactive monitoring can identify issues before they become major outages, and help fix problems

users are experiencing before they get frustrated enough to call the help desk. Monitoring can be

used by Citrix administrators to get an instant, real-time overview of farm health and launch

automated actions to either notify admins or repair common issues.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting Application Crashes and Service Failures

Using alerts can give crucial real-time information regarding a wide array of events, including service

and application failures. Automatic actions can be performed, such as passing the alerts via email,

sending SNMP traps or running custom executables that can perform any scriptable action such as

restarting a service or rebooting a server.

In the example below (Figure 9), the desktop ESXP1B is having issues with the application named

Crasher. EdgeSight gathers information around application crashes, such as other processes and

modules running, system performance and user behavior at and immediately prior to the crash, and

details of the crash itself. This information could be used to diagnose and perform forensics on the

crashing application without requiring the user to call the help desk or even participate in the

investigation.

Figure 9: EdgeSight Real-Time Alerts

Another situation where alerting can be extremely beneficial is in case of a service failure. If a service

occasionally fails, EdgeSight can be configured to automatically restart that service, reducing the

amount of human intervention required to maintain a functional environment.

The range of alerts that can be configured include a large number of events, including: system

reboots, disk failures, system performance issues, application crashes, hangs and high resource

usage, high network latency, XenDesktop registration failures, print services failures, and agent start

failures.

By configuring alerts to show critical and actionable items, problems can be realized and corrected in

real-time, and may prevent major outages or help desk calls before they occur.

Average & Worst Logon Times

Using the Session Startup Duration Details report, the average and longest logon times can be found

and broken down to the components that are causing the time consumption (not including desktop

boot time, if applicable). Based on this information, changes can be made to the environment to

improve profile loads, printer creation, or other aspects that require optimization. Problem users,

who may have extremely large profiles or unique printer configurations, can also be identified.

Investigation can start with the Session Client and Server Startup report to get an overview of user

(or device) startup times. The Server Startup Duration includes: Credential Authentication, Profile

Load, Logon Scripts, Printer Creation, Device Mapping and Session Creation. Client Startup

includes: Config File Download, Name Resolution, Ticketing and Session Creation. Since the

XenDesktop portion includes much more intensive activity then that required on the client, it’s

expected that Server Startup Duration will be significantly longer. The chart below (Figure 10)

shows the example environment:

Figure 10: Session Logon Time by User

In this environment, users average between 32 and 42 seconds for a logon (Disclaimer: Logon times

shown are from a heavily utilized test environment with large profiles, and may not be indicative of real-world

performance). In order to understand better where this time is being spent, the Session Startup

Duration Details report can be used to break down the logon into its component pieces. Pulling up

the details of one of ESUser1’s sessions gives the following information (Figure 11):

Figure 11. Detailed Session Logon Time

For a load time of almost 42 seconds, 10 seconds went to Profile Load times (PLSD), and 24

seconds went to logon scripts (LSESD). In this case, no time was spent on printer creation (PCSD)

and only about 2.6 seconds were spent on creating the session. For a full description of each of the

monitored startup portions see Appendix B, or hover over the acronym inside the EdgeSight

console.

In order to reduce logon times in this scenario, looking at the profile and the logon scripts would be

most beneficial. If all users have long profile load times, confirming that folders like My Documents

are being redirected or ensuring that the file server is not being overloaded would be helpful, as well

as maintaining a small roaming profile size. If only one user has long profile load time, their profile

should be inspected for any unusual characteristics, such as large size or a high quantity of files, and

then the user can be educated, additional redirects could be enabled, or another solution can be

found, such as a profile management solution like Citrix Profile management. If credential

authentication is taking a long time, it may suggest that the authentication server is overloaded. Long

printer creation time may suggest that users have too many printers assigned to them.

By monitoring the logon times, Citrix administrators can see when and where users are having

issues, and fix them before help desk calls go out. They can also see if the logon problems are

endemic to the entire environment or only to certain users in unique circumstances, and identify

problem components that may be affecting not only the XenDesktop environment but other aspects

of IT as well.

Installation of Unknown Applications

Many IT departments have to deal with users installing unauthorized applications into their

environment, which then become business critical unbeknownst to the IT department. Using the

New Processes report (Figure 12), administrators can note whenever a new application enters into

usage.

Figure 12: New Processes Report

Application inventory can also be taken using the Process Usage report, which will report not only

the processor time taken by each application, but also the unique number of users utilizing each

application (Figure 13).

Figure 13: Process Usage Report

Knowing the application usage and composition in an environment can greatly benefit

administrators, and prevent unknown applications from becoming critical to the business without

documentation or IT support.

Event Log Maintenance

Informational messages are often posted to a desktop's event log regarding the health of the

operating system and application performance. Event logs can be routinely reviewed to note if

common issues occur that can easily be rectified, or if a particular user has a high number of event

log issues that can be traced to a root cause such as a corrupted profile. The Event Log Report can

provide a summary of event log issues (Figure 14).

Figure 14: Event Log Report

Monitoring these logs for issues may provide additional insight into problems that may be affecting

the environment. Looking at machines and users with high numbers of event log alerts and warnings

can help in identifying problems before they become serious outages.

Planning and Allocating

EdgeSight for XenDesktop can also provide a high-level overview of the state of the environment,

and help administrators plan for when additional resources are required. The summaries can be

presented to higher-level management to give them a visual picture of the state of the environment.

If the summaries indicate some problems or areas of concern, additional information can be

gathered by drilling down into the details, and issues can be resolved before they result in major

service outages.

XenDesktop Environment Summary

XenDesktop reports, such as user logons, resource utilization, ICA latency and logon time at various

points of the day, week and quarter can greatly assist in capacity planning and setting of XenDesktop

idle pool values.

Figure 15: XenDesktop Summary

These reports can give a high-level insight into the health of the environment. If the average logon

time increases drastically for one day, an issue may have occurred that requires investigation. If

logon times, network/ICA round-trip times, or CPU/Memory Usage are trending upwards, then

additional resources may need to be brought into the environment.

Drilling down into the Average Login Time by Day and Active Sessions by Day reports can give

more detailed indications of what time of the day users are most likely to login and when they

experience poor logon performance, thereby allowing better preparation through Idle Pool settings

or better resource planning. Drilling into the ICA session latency can also give indications if the

network is becoming overloaded, or if groups of users are having problems at certain locations, or at

certain times during the day. Similarly, drilling into the Average CPU and Memory by day can

indicate if all users or only certain departments are over or under-utilizing the resources given to

them.

These reports can easily be included into weekly, monthly, or quarterly status reports to give

indications of the environment’s current health, or into progress updates on dealing with issues of

latency or long logon times. Subscriptions can be configured to have this information be

automatically delivered to a file share, email mailbox, SharePoint, or another location.

Device Performance

Knowledge of how VMs are being utilized can be helpful in ensuring that users have the resources

they need. The Device Summary report gives information regarding average CPU and Memory

usage. Breaking this down by users and user groups can ensure that departments and power users

are not throttled by lack of computing resources, and that hardware is also not being underutilized

by less resource intensive groups.

Figure 16: Device Summary

The Device Summary (Figure 16) provides a high-level overview of device performance. What

percentage of devices were over or under-utilized on CPU or memory, average network delays,

event log alerts, and application related alerts are available. Alerts can also be helpful in pinpointing

hardware failures or other known, actionable items.

Application Faults and Performance

Applications may have unexpected behavior from time to time, such as crashing or taking up a large

share of memory/CPU. Understanding how applications work in a XenDesktop environment is

critical to the health of the environment and user satisfaction. Information regarding applications

can be seen in Process Stability and Process Summary reports - problem applications can then be

identified and actions can be taken. Application crashes result in crash dumps that can then be

passed along to application teams for additional troubleshooting, without requiring interaction from

the end user.

As mentioned in previous sections, looking at memory and CPU utilization will assist in better

understanding the costs of the application, and whether users who require access to those need

more resources allocated to them (Figure 17 and Figure 18).

Figure 17: Average Memory Utilization by Process

Figure 18: Average CPU Utilization by Process

Understanding what the most active applications are on the network (Figure 19), and which ones

have the longest delay in response across the network (Figure 20) can also help administrators plan

and manage their environment appropriately. Long applications round trip times may suggest that

backend database servers do not have the capacity to serve them or simply have a large amount of

processing to do before a response can be returned, and if these issues can’t be rectified, then users

may need to be educated to expect delays with these applications, rather than assuming problems lie

with the infrastructure.

Figure 19: Average Network Volume by Process

Figure 20: Average Network Delay by Process

Finding out which applications crash or hang and become unresponsive can also give an idea of

what applications users are having issues with, even if they don’t report problems to the help desk.

The Process Faults, Process Errors and Process Not Responding alerts can give a good overview of

the issues. The chart below (Figure 21) is an example of the Process Faults report details.

Figure 21: Process Fault Details Report

Additional information can be accessed by clicking the “i” next to the fault, revealing dump

information and surrounding environment details (Figure 22).

Figure 22: Available Crash Information

Information regarding the crash dump and additional surrounding details can then be forwarded to

the appropriate application teams or support staff for troubleshooting.

Network Performance

Ensuring the network is performing as expected is a critical task for maintaining a healthy

XenDesktop environment. Reporting on internal web errors, long transaction times, and other

network related factors can reveal bottlenecks, bad hardware, or misconfigurations that detract from

a positive user experience and an efficient environment.

In addition to reports detailing network round-trip times by device and by process (as detailed in the

previous section), EdgeSight also provides details on network errors and web errors through the Site

Network Errors and Transaction Web Errors reports, which can indicate misconfigurations, security

and permissions issues, or blocked firewall ports (Figure 23).

Figure 23: Site Network Errors Report

Monitoring these kinds of issues can ensure that the environment is performing as expected, and

critical services are able to contact the required backend connections.

Summary

EdgeSight for XenDesktop is a powerful tool for understanding your environment, troubleshooting

issues that arise, and assisting in planning and managing. Once an educated decision regarding the

EdgeSight for XenDesktop implementation architecture is determined based on the guidance in this

document, a proper deployment can be made and data can be gathered. After deployment,

EdgeSight can be used as a diagnostic tool to understand user issues, a forensics tool to understand

crash situations, and a monitoring tool to allow administrators to be proactive in fixing problems

before they disrupt services.

In addition to having significant benefits for your XenDesktop environment, EdgeSight can also be

deployed to your XenApp servers, your endpoint clients, and other servers in your environment as

well. Customized reports exist specifically for a XenApp environment, and there are many additional

reports that can be used to provide details on virtually any environment.

With its ability to integrate into virtually any environment and close integration with XenDesktop

and XenApp, it can greatly improve the user experience and ease the administrator’s workload

without disrupting the environment configuration.

For more about EdgeSight, please explore some of the following resources:

EdgeSight home page: Product page with information regarding the entire EdgeSight product line,

including demos and purchasing information.

EdgeSight Installation and Admin Guides: These guides provide detailed information on setup

and management of an EdgeSight environment, and serve as great resources.

EdgeSight Custom Reporting: A blog post discussing how to get started on creating EdgeSight

custom reports, which are a powerful way to expand and customize EdgeSight to your needs.

Integration with Microsoft’s Report Builder 2008 will help create new reports quickly and easily.

Additional monitoring tools and knowledge resources can be found in Appendix A.

Appendix A - Additional Monitoring Tools & Resources

HDX Monitoring Tool: If interested in detailed information and troubleshooting regarding HDX

for XenDesktop beyond what EdgeSight offers, the HDX Monitoring Tool provides additional

troubleshooting and performance information.

XenCenter: XenCenter is a powerful tool to manage and monitor XenServer hypervisors as well as

the virtual machines running on them. XenCenter allows for configuration of workload high-

availability, storage, XenMotion, and other features available in XenServer 5.5.

XDPing: The XDPing tool is a command-line based application which automates the process of

checking for the causes of common configuration issues in a XenDesktop environment. The tool

can be used to verify configuration settings on both the XenDesktop Broker and VDA machines,

both from the console and remotely.

Citrix Port Check Utility: The Citrix Port Check Utility is a command-line utility that tests

connectivity to a host on a specified port. It can be used to test basic ICA connectivity against Citrix

XenApp and XenDesktop machines; however, it is not Citrix specific and it can be used to test any

machine that listens on a port for incoming connections.

Citrix Knowledge Base: A variety of white papers, hotfixes, documentation and other information

can be found at the Citrix KB.

Ask the Architect: The source for detailed technical information, best practices and technology

discussion regarding Citrix products and product integration.

Appendix B - Session Startup & Duration Acronyms

Server Startup Details

CASD: Credentials Authentication Startup Duration

CONSD: Credentials Obtention Network Server Duration

PNCOSD: PN Classic Credential Obtention Server Duration

PLSD: Profile Load Server Duration

LSESD: Login Script Execution Server Details

PCSD: Printer Creation Server Details

DMSD: Device Mapping Server Details

SCSD: Session Creation Server Details

SSD: Server Startup Duration

Client Startup Details

CFDCD: Config File Download Client Duration

BUCC: Backup URL Client Count

AECD: Application Enumeration Client Duration

IFDCD: ICA File Download Client Duration

NRWD: Name Resolution Web Server Duration

TRWD: Ticket Response Web Server Duration

LPWD: Launch Page Web Server Duration

SCCD: Session Creation Client Duration

NRCD: Name Resolution Client Duration

SLCD: Session Lookup Client Duration

CSD: Client Startup Duration

Revision Change Description Updated By Date

0.1 First draft Michael Bogobowicz March 2010

0.2 QA Carisa Stringer March 2010

0.3 QA Stevan Bloom March 2010

1.0 Final Version Michael Bogobowicz April 2010

About Citrix

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the leading provider of virtualization, networking and software as a service

technologies for more than 230,000 organizations worldwide. It’s Citrix Delivery Center, Citrix Cloud Center (C3)

and Citrix Online Services product families radically simplify computing for millions of users, delivering applications

as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device. Citrix customers include the world’s largest

Internet companies, 99 percent of Fortune Global 500 enterprises, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses

and prosumers worldwide. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies worldwide in more than 100 countries.

Founded in 1989, annual revenue in 2008 was $1.6 billion.

©2010 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix®, Access Gateway™, Branch Repeater™, Citrix Repeater™,

HDX™, XenServer™, XenApp™, XenDesktop™ and Citrix Delivery Center™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc.

and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office

and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.