Monitor historical trends across a site

The Trends view accesses historical trend information of each site for the following parameters:

• sessions
• connection failures
• machine failures
• logon performance
• load evaluation
• capacity management
• machine usage
• resource utilization
• network analysis for each site.

To locate this information, click the Trends menu.

The zoom-in drill down feature lets you navigate through trend charts by zooming in on a time period (clicking a data point in the graph) and drilling down to see the details associated with the trend. This feature enables you to better understand the details of who or what is affected.

To change the default scope of each graph, apply a different filter to the data.

Choose a time period for which you require the historical trend information. Time period availability depends on your Director deployment as follows:

• Trend reports of up to Last year (365 days) are available in Premium licensed sites.
• Trend reports of up to Last month (31 days) are available in Advanced licensed sites.
• Trend reports of up to Last 7 days in non-Premium and non-Advanced licensed sites.

Note:

• In all Director deployments, sessions, failures, and logon performance trend information are available as graphs and tables when the time period is set to Last month (Ending now) or shorter. For the time period chosen as Last month with a custom ending date or as Last year, the trend information is available as graphs and not as tables.
• Grooming retention values of the Monitor Service control the trends data availability. The default values are available in Data granularity and retention. Customers on Premium licensed sites can change the grooming retention to their desired number of retention days.
• The following parameters in IIS Manager control the range of custom ending dates available for selection. However, the data availability for selected dates depends on the grooming retention setting for the specific metric being measured.

Available trends

View trends for sessions: From the Sessions tab, select the Delivery Group and time period to view more detailed information about the concurrent session count.

The Session Auto Reconnect column displays the number of auto reconnects in a session. Auto reconnect is enabled when the Session Reliability or the Auto Client Reconnect policies are in effect. When there is a network interruption on the endpoint, the following policies come into effect:

• Session reliability comes into effect (by default for 3 minutes) where the Citrix Receiver or Citrix Workspace app tries to connect to the VDA.
• Auto client reconnect comes into effect between 3 and 5 minutes where the client tries to connect to the VDA.

Both reconnects are captured and displayed to the user. This information can take a maximum time of 5 minutes to appear on the Director UI after the reconnect has occurred.

The auto reconnect information helps you view and troubleshoot network connections having interruptions. It also analyzes networks having a seamless experience. You can view the number of reconnects for a specific Delivery Group or time period selected in the Filters. A drilldown provides additional information like Session Reliability or Auto Client Reconnect, time stamps, Endpoint IP, and Endpoint Name of the machine where Workspace app is installed.

By default, logs are sorted by the event time stamps in descending order. This feature is available for Citrix Workspace app for Windows, Citrix Workspace app for Mac, Citrix Receiver for Windows, and Citrix Receiver for Mac. This feature requires Delivery Controller version 7 1906 or later, and VDAs 1906 or later.

For more information about session reconnections, see Sessions.

For more information about policies, see Auto client reconnect policy settings and Session reliability policy settings.

Sometimes, the auto reconnect data might not appear in Director for the following reasons:

• Workspace app is not sending auto reconnect data to VDA.
• VDA is not sending data to the monitor service.
• Delivery Controllers discard VDA payloads as they might not have the corresponding sessions.

Note:

Sometimes, the client IP address might not be obtained correctly if certain Citrix Gateway policies are set.

View trends for connection failures: From the Failures tab, select the connection, machine type, failure type, Delivery Group, and time period to view a graph containing more detailed information about the user connection failures across your site.

View trends for machine failures: From the Single-session OS Machine Failures tab or Multi-session OS Machines tab, select the failure type, Delivery Group, and time period to view a graph containing more detailed information about the machine failures across your site.

View trends for logon performance: From the Logon Performance tab, select the Delivery Group and time period to view a graph containing more detailed information about the duration of user logon times across your site and whether the number of logons affects the performance. This view also shows the average duration of the logon phases, such as brokering duration and VM start time. This data is specifically for user logons and does not include users trying to reconnect from disconnected sessions. The table below the graph shows Logon Duration by User Session. You can choose the columns to display and sort the report by any of the columns. You can also export these reports to a .CSV file. For more information, see Diagnose user logon issues.

View trends for load evaluation: From the Load Evaluator Index tab, view a graph containing more detailed information about the load that is distributed among Multi-session OS machines. The filter options for this graph include the Delivery Group or Multi-session OS machine in a Delivery Group, Multi-session OS machine (available only if the Multi-session OS machine in a Delivery Group was selected), and range.

View hosted applications usage: The availability of this feature depends on your organization’s license. From the Capacity Management tab, select the Hosted Applications Usage tab. Select the Delivery Group and time period to view a graph displaying peak concurrent usage and a table displaying application based usage. From the Application Based Usage table, you can choose a specific application to see details and a list of users who are using, or have used, the application.

View Single-session and Multi-session OS usage: The Trends view shows the usage of Single-session OS by site and by Delivery Group. When you select Site, usage is shown per Delivery Group. When you select Delivery Group, usage is shown per User. The Trends view also shows the usage of Multi-session OS by site, by Delivery Group, and by Machine. When you select Site, usage is shown per Delivery Group. When you select Delivery Group, usage is shown per Machine and per User. When Machine is selected usage is shown per User.

View virtual machine usage: From the Machine Usage tab, select Single-session OS Machines or Multi-session OS Machines to obtain a real-time view of your VM usage, enabling you to quickly assess your site’s capacity needs. Single-session OS availability - displays the current state of Single-session OS machines (VDIs) by availability for the entire site or a specific Delivery Group. Multi-session OS availability - displays the current state of Multi-session OS machines by availability for the entire site or a specific Delivery Group.

You can click the following links on the banner displayed to gain better visibility into machine usage with Cost optimization:

• Estimated savings - This link directs you to the Estimated savings section on the Cost optimization page, displaying details of all delivery groups.
• Savings report - This link directs you to the Savings report section on the Cost optimization page, displaying details of all delivery groups.

Note:

The number of machines displayed in Available Counter includes machines in maintenance mode.

View resource utilization: From the Resource Utilization tab, select Single-session OS Machines or Multi-session OS Machines to obtain insight into historical trends data for CPU and memory usage, and IOPS and disk latency for each VDI machine for better capacity planning. This feature requires Delivery Controllers and VDAs version 7.11 or later. Graphs show data for average CPU, average memory, average IOPS, disk latency, and peak concurrent sessions. You can drill down to the machine, and view data and charts for the top 10 processes consuming CPU.

Filter by Delivery Group and Time period. CPU, memory usage, and peak concurrent sessions graphs are available for the last 2 hours, 24 hours, 7 days, month, and year. The average IOPS and disk latency graphs are available for the last 24 hours, month, and year. You can click the Check out link on the banner to gain better visibility into machine usage with Cost optimization. This link takes you to the Workload rightsizing tab in the Cost optimization page, displaying details of the selected delivery group from the Resource Utilization tab.

Note:

• The Monitoring policy setting, Enable Process Monitoring, must be set to Allowed to collect and display data in the Top 10 Processes table on the Historic Machine Utilization page. The policy is set to Prohibited by default. All resource utilization data is collected by default. This can be disabled using the Enable Resource Monitoring policy setting. The table below the graphs shows the resource utilization data per machine. For more information, see Monitoring policy settings.
• Average IOPS shows the daily averages. Peak IOPS is calculated as the highest of the IOPS averages for the selected time range. (An IOPS average is the hourly average of IOPS collected during the hour on the VDA).
• The machine drilldown lists processes with average CPU or average memory usage more than 1%, this could mean that sometimes fewer than 10 processes are listed.

View network analysis data: The availability of this feature depends on your organization’s license and your administrator permissions. This feature requires Delivery Controllers version 7.11 or later.

From the Network tab, monitor your network analysis, which provides a user, application, and desktop contextual view of the network. With this feature, Director provides advanced analytics of ICA traffic in your deployment through HDX Insight reports from Citrix ADM. For more information, see Configure network analysis

View application failures: The Application Failures tab displays failures associated with the published applications on the VDAs.

This feature requires Delivery Controllers and VDAs version 7.15 or later. Single-session OS VDAs running Windows Vista and later, and Multi-session OS VDAs running Windows Server 2008 and later are supported. For more information, see Historical application failure monitoring.

By default, only application faults from Multi-session OS VDAs are displayed. You can set the monitoring of application failures by using Monitoring policies. For more information, see Monitoring policy settings.

View probe results: The Probe Results tab displays the results of probe for applications and desktops that have been configured for probing in the Configuration page. Here, the stage of launch during which the failure occurred is recorded.

For more information see Application and Desktop Probing.

Create customized reports: The Custom Reports tab provides a user interface for generating Custom Reports containing real-time and historical data from the Monitoring database in tabular format.

This feature requires Delivery Controllers version 7.12 or later.

From the list of previously saved Custom Report queries, you can click Run and download to export the report in CSV format, click Copy OData to copy and share the corresponding OData query, or click Edit to edit the query. You can create a Custom Report query based on machines, connections, sessions, or application instances. Specify filter conditions based on fields such as machine, Delivery Group, or time period. Specify additional columns required in your Custom Report. Preview displays a sample of the report data. Saving the Custom Report query adds it to the list of saved queries.

You can create a Custom Report query based on a copied OData query. To do this, select the OData Query option and paste the copied OData query. You can save the resultant query for execution later.

Note:

The column names in Preview and Export report generated using OData queries are not localized, but appear in English.

The flag icons on the graph indicate significant events or actions for that specific time range. Hover the mouse over the flag and click to list events or actions.

Note:

• HDX connection logon data is not collected for VDAs earlier than 7. For earlier VDAs, the chart data is displayed as 0.
• Delivery Groups deleted in Citrix Studio are available for selection in the Director Trends filters until data related to them are groomed out. Selecting a deleted Delivery Group displays graphs for available data until retention. However, the tables don’t show data.
• Moving a machine containing active sessions from one Delivery Group to another causes the Resource Utilization and Load Evaluator Index tables of the new Delivery Group to display metrics consolidated from the old and new Delivery Groups.