Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

Monitoring policy settings

The Monitoring section includes policy settings for process, resource monitoring, and application failure monitoring.

The scope of these policies can be defined based on the following:

  • Site
  • Delivery group
  • Type of delivery group
  • Organizational unit
  • Tags

Policies for process and resource monitoring

Each data point for CPU, memory, and processes is collected from the VDA and stored on the Monitoring database. Sending the data points from the VDA consumes network bandwidth and storing them consumes considerable space in the monitoring database. Consider that you do not want to monitor either resource data or process data or both for a specific scope. For example, a specific delivery group or organizational unit. In this case, it is recommended to disable the policy.

Enable process monitoring

Enable this setting to allow monitoring of processes running on machines with VDAs. Statistics such as CPU and memory use are sent to the Monitoring Service. The statistics are used for real-time notifications and historical reporting in the Director.

The default for this setting is Disabled.

Enable resource monitoring

Enable this setting to allow monitoring of critical performance counters on machines with VDAs. Statistics (such as CPU and memory use, IOPS, and disk latency data) are sent to the Monitoring Service. The statistics are used for real-time notification and historical reporting in the Director.

The default for this setting is Enabled.

Scalability

The CPU and memory data is pushed to the database from each VDA at 5-minute intervals. Process data (if enabled) is pushed to the database at 10-minute intervals. IOPS and disk latency data is pushed to the database at 1-hour intervals.

CPU and memory data

CPU and memory data is enabled by default. The data retention values are as follows (Platinum license):

Data granularity Number of Days
5 Minute Data 1 Day
10 Minute Data 7 Days
Hourly Data 30 Days
Daily Data 90 Days

IOPS and disk latency data

IOPS and disk latency data is Enabled by default. The data retention values are as follows (Platinum license):

Data granularity Number of Days
Hourly Data 3 Days
Daily Data 90 Days

With the data retention settings, approximately 276 KB of disk space is required to store the following for one VDA over a period of one year:

  • CPU
  • Memory
  • IOPS
  • Disk latency data
Number of machines Approximate storage required
1 276 KB
1K 270 MB
40K 10.6 GB

Process data

Process data is Disabled by default. It is recommended to enable process data on a subset of machines on a need basis. The default data retention settings for the process data are as follows:

Data granularity Number of Days
10-minute Data 1 Day
Hourly Data 7 Days

If process data is enabled with the default retention settings, process data would consume approximately 1.5 MB per VDA and 3 MB per Terminal Services VDA (TS VDA) over a period of one year.

Number of machines Approximate storage required VDA Approximate storage required TS VDA
1 1.5 MB 3 MB
1K 1.5 GB 3 GB

Note:

The numbers provided earlier do not include the Index space. And all the calculations are approximate and vary depending on the deployment.

Optional Configurations

You can modify the default retention settings to suit your needs. However, this configuration consumes extra storage. By enabling the settings below you can gain more accuracy in the process utilization data. The configurations which can be enabled are:

EnableMinuteLevelGranularityProcessUtilization

EnableDayLevelGranularityProcessUtilization

These Configurations can be enabled from the Monitoring PowerShell cmdlet: Set-MonitorConfiguration

Policies for application failure monitoring

The Application Failure tab, by default, displays only application faults from Multi-session OS VDAs. Settings of Application failure monitoring can be modified with the following Monitoring policies:

Enable monitoring of application failures

Use this setting to configure application failure monitoring to monitor either application errors or faults (crashes and unhandled exceptions), or both. Disable application failure monitoring by setting the Value to None. The default for this setting is Application faults only.

Enable monitoring of application failures on Single-session OS VDAs

By default, failures only from applications hosted on the Multi-session OS VDAs are monitored. To monitor Single-session OS VDAs, set the policy to Allowed. The default for this setting is Prohibited.

List of applications excluded from failure monitoring

Specify a list of applications that are not to be monitored for failure. By default this list is empty.

Policy for collecting data for Analytics

VDA Data Collection for Analytics

Use the policy to enable or disable the Monitor service from collecting performance and security related metrics of the VDAs for Performance and Security Analytics. By default, the policy is Allowed. Set the policy to Prohibited to stop the collection of data from the VDAs.

Clipboard place metadata collection for Security monitoring

Use the policy to enable or disable the clipboard place metadata collection by Broker service for Security monitoring, auditing, and compliance. By default, the policy is Enabled. Set the policy to Disabled to stop the collection of data from the VDAs.

Storage planning tips

Group policy. If you are not interested in monitoring the Resource Data or Process Data, either or both can be turned off using the group policy. For more information, see the Group Policy section of Create policies.

Data grooming. The default data retention settings can be modified to groom the data early and free up storage space. For more information on grooming settings, see Data granularity and retention in Accessing data using the API.

Monitoring policy settings