Blogbrew538

• Citrix Cloud Monitoring Service
• Citrix Monitoring Software
• Citrix Cloud Connector Monitoring

Whether you host your applications and content on premises, in the cloud or in content delivery networks (CDNs), Citrix Intelligent Traffic Management allows you to globally load balance all traffic, dynamically optimizing the user experience and lowering service costs. Easily monitor your Internet traffic while delivering the best user experience. In order to access the monitoring data from Citrix Cloud, we need to authenticate ourselves. Citrix uses token-based authentication for this purpose. So, the first thing we need is to request a so-called bearer token. We can utilize PowerShell and the Citrix Cloud APIs to request the token. Goliath Performance Monitor is a network monitoring tool that can monitor Citrix servers and applications. The tool has been designed to provide end-to-end visibility of virtualized infrastructure right down to end-user experience.

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.

• 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:

Citrix Cloud Monitoring Service

• 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

Citrix Monitoring Software

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

Citrix Cloud Connector Monitoring