Excalibur: best practices for virtual desktop operations leveraging Citrix Director with EdgeSight
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The document discusses upcoming enhancements to Citrix Director and EdgeSight products. It highlights how the products are being integrated to provide a unified monitoring console for XenDesktop environments. Key updates include performance management features in EdgeSight for long-term trend analysis, and network inspection capabilities for troubleshooting connection issues. Real-world examples are provided on how Citrix internal IT uses the products to monitor their environment.
Excalibur: best practices for virtual desktop operations leveraging Citrix Director with EdgeSight
- 1. Intro: Good a&ernoon and thanks to everyone for being here. I’m Lisa Berlin, Product Manager for Director and EdgeSight. I want to talk to you about Citrix Director and EdgeSight and where we are taking it. This is a great innovaGon of our product roadmap! Having formerly been a Citrix customer and then customer facing as a manager in the Citrix Technical Support team, this has given me some great insight as we have developed this product. I’m here with Chris Roberts, Sr. Manager of our Citrix IT, who will take you through some real life scenarios of how our internal IT uses this product. Today we’d like to lead a conversaGon dedicated to the product roadmap of Citrix Director and EdgeSight, what it is and share some insights and best pracGces on how to use this tool to monitor your XenDesktop 7 environment. In doing so, we will address: Key Points: • Why organizaGons like yours need this type of troubleshooGng and monitoring. • What Citrix has learned, based upon discussions with customers, reviewing internal support cases, real-‐life experiences from Citrix IT transformaGon soluGon. • How Director with EdgeSight can help your organizaGon reduce Gme to resoluGon and monitor the health and performance of a Citrix delivered applicaGon and desktop virtualizaGon soluGon 1
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- 4. Key points: Intro: The ability to properly troubleshoot and monitor your environment are the important factors to enable: • Expanding deployments, end users are accessing from all geographic locaGons • Need to ensure the experience is good • With XD, there are many moving parts so it’s important to indicate where the problem is • Proving value through reporGng -‐ Customers need to know usage, how has the health been trending • Do I have enough capacity available for future load? 4
- 5. What do we know? It is our product, we know it beWer than anyone else. With Director and EdgeSight you will see how we use our knowledge to provide 5
- 6. Key points: Next generaGon Director rearchitected on the XD 7 plaYorm Unified console provides the real-‐Gme troubleshooGng along with integraGon of new EdgeSight features, Performance Manager and Network Inspector Scales with the plaYorm Most common problem – “I can’t connect” Instrumented XD to provide various failure causes for connecGon and machine failures to determine root cause End user experience starts with logon Director breaks the logon into each of the steps, providing the analysis so the admin is able to pinpoint exactly where the slowdown is occurring 6
- 7. Key points: Driving Evolu=on EdgeSight evolves from a standalone product into an integrated soluGon expanding the value proposiGon of exisGng products such as Director Providing a holis=c view Instead of focusing on product silos, this new approach allows Citrix to provide a more comprehensive and holisGc experience 7
- 8. Key points: Pla=num customers get the EdgeSight features EdgeSight performance management Longer trending data allows the admin to assess his environment over Gme Auto-‐baselining – comparison of current performance based from the customer’s own environment EdgeSight network analysis IntegraGon of NetScaler HDX Insight provides a unified console to troubleshoot network issues 8
- 9. With XenDesktop 7, we have expanded the role of the Help Desk to provide the L2 Admins addiGonal troubleshooGng and environment health metrics 9
- 10. Add in the EdgeSight performance management feature, customers get extended historical data retenGon which provides the longer term capacity analysis and health and performance trending over Gme. Helps admin understand if a problem is occurring every Monday at 9:00a Enables comparison of previous quarters’ capacity over current quarters capacity through the concurrent sessions analysis Assessment of health -‐ connecGon and machine failures Capacity – history of usage based on sessions enable projecGon for future capacity Performance – trending of App load evaluators and logon performance provide visibility into historical performance indicators enabling administrators to adjust environment as needed 10
- 11. Key points: For plaGnum customers -‐ EdgeSight network analysis Provides ICA packet visibility enabling the admin to view the latency and throughput (bandwidth) uGlizaGon Drill down into per user ICA network uGlizaGon ApplicaGon/desktop launch metrics – number of launches, launch duraGon 11
- 12. 12 How Director has helped us last two years Some of the pracGcal applicaGons of the features coming in Director with EdgeSight
- 13. • In IT, we’ve moved on from the era of rebooGng and reimaging • Standardized corporate laptop becoming the past • Our service desk team is virtual, not physical 13
- 14. • 8800 employees • 90 Offices Across 35 Countries • Number of remote employees • Those based in offices are on the move and working from home outside of business hours 14
- 15. • 7,100 desktops deployed in four corporate datacenters around the world • Offer a mix of Pooled, Dedicated, and now PvD, based on job funcGon • Keep their desktop next to their user data – Exchange, home folders, etc for best performance • Secure corporate data in the datacenter, while providing a great desktop experience on any device 15
- 16. • 3 Gered IT team • Level 1 & 2 teams use Director exclusively to assist users • Costs increase and saGsfacGon declines with each escalaGon • User saGsfacGon drives adopGon • Business will find alternaGve soluGons on their own • At Citrix for five months of this year – 84% of XenDesktop issues resolved on first call 16
- 17. • Very Gme intensive to find events and correlate to issues • Probably also have a change management system, but again Gme intensive doing detecGve work • Series of smaller changes can lead up to a big impact, the Gming of which doesn’t always correlate to the incident • Director puts the data in an easy to consume format • Distributed, follow the sun operaGons team • Everyone sees the same, making conversaGons easier 17
- 18. • What is normal? • Trending is key to providing context, Director with Edgesight provides that. • User workloads vary by department, region and Gme. What’s going on now may be twice your normal of last week (end of quarter, etc). • Use Director to see and understand these trends • End of quarter period, increased acGvity Sales, Services, Finance, Customer Care • Found that our India employees were using Pooled desktops out of Miami, not Singapore, because the data they were accessing most o&en was there 18
- 19. • First reacGon to seeing something going wrong is figuring out how to fix it • O&en however, ‘work’ gets in way. It’s not a problem yet… storage, hypervisors, other metrics sGll look good, and users aren’t complaining. • Is this a cyclical, but normal occurrence? • If it keeps happening, will it get worse? • Decide on acGon and be confident with it, using all the informaGon 19
- 20. • Make it easy for your employees on day one with XenDesktop • Citrix has acquired a number of companies, onboard them with XenDesktop • Gives a great first day experience, relives some of the worry of integraGon • Procurement doesn’t happen overnight, even in the cloud, need budget • Go to the business before capacity becomes a problem, don’t need to keep large excess numbers in reserve • Pilot, get real numbers from Director, expand 20
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- 22. Key points: Customer interviews, sat with Help Desk personnel to observe their day L1 did 3 things: Restarted the user’s machine Shadowed in to bring up Windows Task Manager and look for the hung applicaGon or process consuming CPU or memory Reset profile (if allowed and varied company to company) Citrix created the AcGonable Help Desk page to resolve issues at first touch Benefits Opportunity to reduce operaGng costs Industry standards – 32% of customers call back because their issues wasn’t resolved on their first call Industry call center average is 1.4 calls to resolve a customer’s problem Improve customer saGsfacGon For every 1% FCR, you get a 1% improvement in customer saGsfacGon FCR is the highest correlated metric to customer saGsfacGon (opposite can occur for dissaGsfacGon) 22
- 23. Key points: Expanded User Details adds AcGvity Manager, Logon duraGon, comparing current session to same user in the last 7 days to that user’s delivery group – easy to determine where the problem may be Details on Microso& and Citrix profiles – ability to reset the profile Add in EdgeSight network analysis to bring key network performance measurements, example – can determine if it is client side (WAN) or server side (LAN) problem 23
- 24. Key points: Expanded User Details adds AcGvity Manager, Logon duraGon, comparing current session to same user in the last 7 days to that user’s delivery group – easy to determine where the problem may be Details on Microso& and Citrix profiles – ability to reset the profile Add in EdgeSight network analysis to bring key network performance measurements, example – can determine if it is client side (WAN) or server side (LAN) problem 24
- 25. Key points: Expanded User Details adds AcGvity Manager, Logon duraGon, comparing current session to same user in the last 7 days to that user’s delivery group – easy to determine where the problem may be Details on Microso& and Citrix profiles – ability to reset the profile Add in EdgeSight network analysis to bring key network performance measurements, example – can determine if it is client side (WAN) or server side (LAN) problem 25
- 26. Key points: Expanded User Details adds AcGvity Manager, Logon duraGon, comparing current session to same user in the last 7 days to that user’s delivery group – easy to determine where the problem may be Details on Microso& and Citrix profiles – ability to reset the profile Add in EdgeSight network analysis to bring key network performance measurements, example – can determine if it is client side (WAN) or server side (LAN) problem 26
- 27. Key points: Expanded User Details adds AcGvity Manager, Logon duraGon, comparing current session to same user in the last 7 days to that user’s delivery group – easy to determine where the problem may be Details on Microso& and Citrix profiles – ability to reset the profile Add in EdgeSight network analysis to bring key network performance measurements, example – can determine if it is client side (WAN) or server side (LAN) problem 27
- 28. Key points: TroubleshooGng dashboard (click) Shows errors with connecGon and machine failures, now can see errors in real Gme, allowing IT admins to proacGvely prevent failures causing a major business impact (click) All charts show the last 60 min., updated every minute Concurrent session connected over the past hour (click) # of logons compared to the average logon duraGon – shows impact of a logon storm to the end users, indicated by extended logon Gmes (click) Infrastructure panel provides hypervisor alerts, delivery controller service alerts -‐ noGficaGon on key DDC services Click on numbers, takes you to a drill down view (next slide) 28
- 29. The drill down view brings the failure context from the dashboard Shows all informaGon on who was affected and why, Gme of failure, etc Enables global acGons for power control, maint mode, send messages, etc. 29
- 30. Clicking on the chart in the dashboard workflow brings admin to the connecGon failures trends page for further invesGgaGon ConfiguraGon logging which tracks admin acGons, is brought into the Trends failure charts to provide the context and correlaGon of why failures are happening. In this case, the admin enabled maintenance mode, and as users started to login, they weren’t able to because the machines were not available 30
- 31. Key points: Trends view provides logon performance Comparison of duraGon Gmes with previous baseline 31
- 32. Key points: New trend report for load evaluaGon Those from XA world understand this metric. Shown here, able to beWer understand how the load evaluaGon if affecGng the logged on users Can choose Gmeframe. Export. Show delivery group 32
- 33. Key points: Historical trending with providing environment capacity and performance and analysis Trending over 7 days, last month, last year, custom date ranges enabled Auto-‐baselining – baselines built from the customer environment 33
- 34. Key points: Brings the network aspect to the desktop and apps administrator Breaks down the ICA packet for analysis Provides key network performance metrics such as jiWer, to enable admins to understand what may be affecGng voice or video performance Provides the ICA RTT compared to the network latency – enables determinaGon if it something in the network or XD applicaGon server 34
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- 36. The Monitor Service is a new XenDesktop service for collecGon and managing the historical data shown in Director. It collects session usage, logon performance details, and connecGon and machine failure informaGon. InstrumentaGon in the VDAs and the Broker service is collected by the Monitor Service as events. The events are pieced together onto a data model that can answer quesGons like “Where is all the Gme being spent during the logon process?”. The data is stored in a logical monitor database which can either be in the XenDesktop site database for small deployments or a separate database for larger enterprise deployments. Customers can pull data from ODATA API to put into CSV format. This will be publically documented For large deployments, recommend separate broker, monitoring, configuraGon DBs with SQL. 36
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- 38. Director and EdgeSight provides: A comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooGng soluGon allowing the customer to understand every aspect of his Citrix environment The ability to correlate end-‐user experience with Citrix desktop and applicaGon delivery through ICA protocol level parsing A single pane of glass soluGon for troubleshooGng and monitoring Capacity management and health/performance trending 38
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