Configuring Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure monitoring

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The Citrix VDI agent provides a central point of monitoring for your Citrix XenDesktop or XenApp resources, including delivery groups, catalogs, applications, desktops, users, and sessions. Before the agent can be used, you must configure the agent to collect data through the delivery controller.

Before you begin

  • The product version and the agent version often differ. The directions here are for the most current release of this agent. For information about how to check the version of an agent in your environment, see Agent version command. To access the documentation for earlier agent releases, see the Table 1 table.
    Table 1. Agent versions
    Agent version Documentation
    8.1.4 Cloud APM 8.1.4
    8.1.3.1, 8.1.3.2 IBM Performance Management 8.1.3 1
    1 The link opens an on-premises Knowledge Center topic.
  • Make sure that the system requirements for the Citrix VDI agent are met in your environment. For the up-to-date system requirement information, see the Software Product Compatibility Reports (SPCR) for the Citrix VDI agent.
  • Ensure that the following information is available:
    • Host name of the delivery controller to which you plan to connect.
    • OData user name, password, and domain.
    • PowerShell user name, password, domain, PowerShell port, SSL verification type, and authentication mechanism if you enable Windows Event Log Event and PowerShell metric retrieval.
  • Ensure that an agent operator user account has at least Citrix read-only administrator privileges. See Enabling Citrix read-only administrator privileges.
  • Starting with Citrix VDI agent version 8.1.3.1, the ability to retrieve Windows Event Log Events became available. To retrieve Windows Event Log Events from all Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC) and Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) machines, remote PowerShell access needs to be enabled for the user account that is specified during the agent instance configuration. Follow these steps to ensure that the agent can perform this function:
    1. Log in to a Windows computer as the user specified in the agent instance configuration.
    2. Run the following PowerShell command, where vda_system is the name of a VDA machine that is powered on:
      Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{ProviderName='Citrix*';LogName='Citrix*';StartTime=((Get-Date).AddDays(-10))} -ComputerName vda_system
  • Ensure that the following load balancing policies are enabled for the monitored environment:
    • CPU Usage
    • Disk Usage
    • Memory Usage
    These policies can be configured through the Citrix Studio application.

About this task

The Citrix VDI agent is a multiple instance agent. You must create at least one instance, and start the agent instance manually.

The configuration for XenApp servers is the same as for XenDesktop servers. If a configuration parameter name or description mentions only XenDesktop, it is also for XenApp.

Procedure

  1. Configure the agent on Windows systems with the IBM Performance Management window or the silent response file.
  2. Configure the agent on Linux® systems with the script that prompts for responses or the silent response file.

What to do next

In the Cloud APM console, go to your Application Performance Dashboard to view the data that was collected. For information about using the Cloud APM console, see Starting the Cloud APM console.

If you are unable to view the data in the agent dashboards, first check the server connection logs and then the data provider logs. The default paths to these logs are listed here:
  • Linux/opt/ibm/apm/agent/logs
  • WindowsC:\IBM\APM\TMAITM6_x64\logs
For help with troubleshooting, see the Cloud Application Performance Management Forum.