Site Analytics

Using Director, you can monitor the health your deployments. You can troubleshoot performance issues by searching for a user, endpoint, or machine across all onboarded sites.

With full administrator permission, when you open Director, the Dashboard provides a centralized location to monitor the health and usage of a site.

If there are currently no failures and no failures have occurred in the past 60 minutes, the panels stay collapsed. When there are failures, the specific failure panel automatically appears.

Note:

Depending on your organization’s license and your Administrator privileges, some options or features might not be available.

Panels on the Director Dashboard

User Connection Failures

Connection failures over the last 60 minutes. Click the categories next to the total number to view metrics for that type of failure. In the adjacent table that number is broken out by delivery groups. Connection failures include failures caused by application limits being reached. For more information on application limits, see Applications.

Failed Single-session OS Machines or Failed Multi-session OS Machines

Total failures in the last 60 minutes broken out by delivery groups. Failures broken out by types, including failed to start, stuck on boot, and unregistered. For Multi-session OS machines, failures also include machines reaching maximum load.

Licensing Status

License Server alerts display alerts sent by the License Server and the actions required to resolve the alerts. Requires License Server Version 11.12.1 or later. Delivery Controller alerts display the details of the licensing state as seen by the Controller and are sent by the Controller. Requires Controller for XenApp 7.6 or XenDesktop 7.6 or later. You can set the threshold for alerts in Studio. Licensing status displayed in Delivery Controllers > Details > Product Editions > PLT indicates Premium and not Platinum.

Grace State

Director displays one of the following grace states. This information is fetched from the Delivery Controller.

1. Not Active: Not in any type of license caching mode. Normal licensing limits apply.

2. Emergency Grace: Comes into effect when the license server is unreachable or the license information cannot be fetched while brokering a connection. Users are not affected. Errors shown in Director cannot be dismissed until the license server is reachable.

3. Grace Expired: Emergency license caching mode has expired.

For more information, see License overdraft and License burst mode.

Sessions Connected

Connected sessions across all delivery groups for the last 60 minutes.

Average Logon Duration

Logon data for the last 60 minutes. The large number on the left is the average logon duration across the hour. Logon data for VDAs earlier than XenDesktop 7.0 is not included in this average. For more information, see Diagnose user logon issues.

Infrastructure

Lists your site’s infrastructure - hosts and Controllers. For infrastructure from XenServer or VMware, you can view performance alerts. For example, you can configure XenCenter to generate performance alerts when CPU, network I/O, or disk I/O usage go over a specified threshold on a managed server or virtual machine. By default, the alert repeat interval is 60 minutes, but you can configure this as well. For details, see the XenCenter Performance Alerts section in the XenServer product documentation.

Note:

If no icon appears for a particular metric, this indicates that this metric is not supported by the type of host you are using. For example, no health information is available for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) hosts, AWS and CloudStack.

Continue to troubleshoot issues using these options (which are documented in the following sections):

• Control user machine power

• Prevent connections to machines

Monitor sessions

If a session becomes disconnected, it is still active and its applications continue to run, but the user device is no longer communicating with the server.

Note:

If the user device is running a legacy Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA), such as a VDA earlier than version 7, or a Linux VDA, Director cannot display complete information about the session. Instead, it displays a message that the information is not available.

Desktop Assignment Rules limitation: Web Studio allows assignment of multiple Desktop Assignment Rules (DAR) for different users or user groups to a single VDA in the delivery group. StoreFront displays the assigned desktop with the corresponding Display Name as per the DAR for the logged in user. However, Director does not support DARs and displays the assigned desktop using the delivery group name regardless of the logged in user. As a result, you cannot map a specific desktop to a machine in Director. You can map the assigned desktop displayed in StoreFront to the delivery group name displayed in Director using the following PowerShell command:

Get-BrokerDesktopGroup | Where-Object { \$\_.Uid -eq \(Get-BrokerAssignmentPolicyRule | Where-Object { \$\_.PublishedName -eq \"\<Name on StoreFront\>\" }).DesktopGroupUid } | Select-Object -Property Name, Uid

Session transport protocol

View the transport protocol in use for the HDX connection type for the current session in the Session Details panel. This information is available for sessions launched on VDAs Version 7.13 or later.

• For HDX Connection type,
  • The Protocol is displayed as UDP, if EDT is used for the HDX connection.
  • The Protocol is displayed as TCP, if TCP is used for the HDX connection.
• For RDP Connection type, the Protocol is displayed as n/a.

When adaptive transport is configured, the session transport protocol dynamically switches between EDT (over UDP) and TCP, based on the network conditions. If the HDX session cannot be established using EDT, it falls back to the TCP protocol.

For more information about adaptive transport configuration, see Adaptive Transport.

Export reports

You can export trends data to generate regular usage and capacity management reports. Export supports PDF, Excel, and CSV report formats. Reports in PDF and Excel formats contain trends represented as graphs and tables. CSV format reports contain tabular data that can be processed to generate views or can be archived.

To export a report:

1. Go to the Trends tab.
2. Set filter criteria and time period and click Apply. The trend graph and table are populated with data.
3. Click Export and enter name and format of the report.

Director generates the report based on the filter criteria you select. If you change the filter criteria, click Apply before you click Export.

Note:

Export of a large amount of data causes a significant increase in memory and CPU consumption on the Director server, the Delivery Controller, and the SQL servers. The supported number of concurrent export operations and the amount of data that can be exported is set to default limits to achieve optimal export performance.

Supported export limits

Exported PDF and Excel reports contain complete graphical charts for the selected filter criteria. However, tabular data in all report formats is truncated beyond the default limits on the number of rows or records in the table. The default number of records supported is defined based on the report format.

You can change the default limit by configuring the Director Application Settings in Internet Information Services (IIS).

To change the limit of the number of records you can export:

1. Open the IIS Manager console.
2. Go to the Director website under the Default website.
3. Double-click Application Settings.
4. Edit or add a setting for the fields UI.ExportPdfDrilldownLimit, UI.ExportExcelDrilldownLimit, or UI.ExportCsvDrilldownLimit as required.

Adding these field values in Application Settings overrides the default values.

Warning:

Setting field values greater than the max number of records supported can impact the performance of Export and is not supported.

Error Handling

This section gives you information on dealing with errors that you might encounter during Export operation.

• Director has timed out

This error can occur due to network issues or high resource usage on the Director server or with the Monitor Service.

The default timeout duration is 100 seconds. To increase the timeout duration of the Director Service, set the value of Connector.DataServiceContext.Timeout field in Director Application Settings in Internet Information Services (IIS):

1. Open the IIS Manager console.

2. Go to the Director website under the Default website.

3. Double-click Application Settings.

4. Edit the value Connector.DataServiceContext.Timeout.

• Monitor has timed out

This error can occur due to network issues or high resource usage with the Monitor Service or on the SQL server.

To increase the timeout duration of the Monitor Service, run the following PowerShell commands on the Delivery Controller:

asnp Citrix.*
Get-MonitorConfiguration
Set-MonitorConfiguration -MonitorQueryTimeoutSeconds <timeout value>

• Max concurrent Export or Preview operations ongoing

Director supports one instance of Export or Preview. If you get the Max concurrent Export or Preview operations ongoing error, try the next Export operation again later.

It is possible to increase the number of concurrent Export or Preview operations, however this can impact the performance of Director and is not supported:

1. Open the IIS Manager console.

2. Go to the Director website under the Default website.

3. Double-click Application Settings.

4. Edit the value UI.ConcurrentExportLimit.

• Insufficient disk space in Director

Each Export operation requires a maximum of 2 GB hard disk space in the Windows Temp folder. Retry Export after clearing space or adding more hard disk space on the Director server.

Monitor hotfixes

To view the hotfixes installed on a specific machine VDA (physical or VM), choose the Machine Details view.

Control user machine power states

To control the state of the machines that you select in Director, use the Power Control options. These options are available for Single-session OS machines, but might not be available for Multi-session OS machines.

Note:

This functionality is not available for physical machines or machines using Remote PC Access.

If power control actions fail, hover the mouse over the alert, and a pop-up message appears with details about the failure.

Prevent connections to machines

Use maintenance mode to prevent new connections temporarily while the appropriate administrator performs maintenance tasks on the image.

When you enable maintenance mode on machines, no new connections are allowed until you disable it. If users are currently logged on, maintenance mode takes effect as soon as all users are logged off. For users who do not log off, send a message informing them that machines will be shut down at a certain time, and use the power controls to force the machines to shut down.

1. Select the machine, such as from the User Details view, or a group of machines in the Filters view.
2. Select Maintenance Mode, and turn on the option.

If a user tries to connect to an assigned desktop while it is in maintenance mode, a message appears indicating that the desktop is unavailable. No new connections can be made until you disable maintenance mode.

Application Analytics

The Applications tab displays application-based analytics in a single, consolidated view to help analyze and manage application performance efficiently. You can gain valuable insight into the health and usage information of all applications published on the site. It shows metrics such as the probe results, number of instances per application, and faults and errors associated with the published applications. For more information, see the Application Analytics section in Troubleshooting Applications.