uberAgent

Citrix Session Monitoring

uberAgent provides unprecedented visibility into what’s happening on the session level: bandwidth usage, protocol latency, Citrix policies, video encoding settings, and much more.

Citrix Session Configuration Details

The session configuration dashboard lets you analyze almost any aspect of how users connect and what policies are being applied to their sessions. The dashboard pulls its data from live sessions, so it always reflects the current state. Historical values are available, too, of course.

Video Codec, Display Mode, Color Space

Many things need to be configured just right to achieve optimal visual quality in a remoting session. These include the video codec and color space, to pick just one set of essential session parameters. As you can see in the screenshot below, uberAgent shows you exactly which codecs and rendering algorithms are configured for your sessions:

uberAgent-Citrix-session-configuration-details-Thinwire-2

Frame Rate (FPS)

Another important metric that greatly influences rendering fidelity as experienced by end users is the frame rate, measured in frames per second. uberAgent continuously collects the frame rate for the entire duration of any session. This allows IT staff to proactively optimize the user experience without a single end-user having to call the help desk.

uberAgent-Citrix-session-FPS-over-time-v2

Citrix Policies and Settings

The Citrix session configuration dashboard offers drilldown capabilities that allow you to inspect the policies and settings of every session individually. The following screenshot shows a small excerpt of what’s available:

uberAgent-Citrix-session-settings-policies

Citrix Session Protocol Insights

The session protocol insights dashboard is focused on ICA/HDX remoting protocol analytics.

Virtual Channel Bandwidth Usage

One of the dashboard’s highlights: it visualizes session bandwidth usage per virtual channel. This is crucial information for any Citrix admin, as it explains which kind of data is transferred in the encrypted Citrix HDX protocol. In the screenshot below, for example, the user seems to have copied a lot of data to or from the clipboard (virtual channel: Clipboard), followed by what may have been scrolling in a long document (virtual channel: Thinwire Graphics).

uberAgent-Citrix-virtual-channel-data-volume-over-time-clipboard-thinwire

ICA RTT

Another cool metric helps to get to the bottom of many networking issues: ICA round-trip time (RTT). A high round-trip time may be experienced by end users as screen lag. The session protocol insights dashboard visualizes ICA RTT along with ICA latency, which offers a lower-level view of network connectivity (think: an ICA/HDX version of ping). uberAgent also determines the total incoming and outgoing HDX data volume, of course:

uberAgent-Citrix-session-protocol-insights-data-volume-latency-RTT

Configuration

Citrix session configuration details as well as policies and settings are configured through two metrics. The metrics are collected by default if uberAgent is running on a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops session host, but this behavior is customizable.

  • CitrixSessionVirtualChannelDetail
  • CitrixSessionConfig

Requirements

  • Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7.6 LTSR and higher
  • Citrix Cloud

Note

Verify That Registry Is Configured Correctly for Citrix Virtual Channel Metrics

Starting with uberAgent 7.3, the agent uses the following registry values to determine the install location of a Citrix deployment. Please verify that either one of the values points to the Citrix HDX binary folder.

1.

  • Hive: HKLM\Software\Citrix\Install
  • Value name: Location
  • Type: REG_SZ
  • Data: Path to HDX binary folder (e.g., C:\Program Files\Citrix\HDX\bin\ )

2.

  • Hive: HKLM\Software\Citrix\Install\HDX
  • Value name: BinFolder
  • Type: REG_SZ
  • Data: Path to HDX binary folder (e.g., C:\Program Files(x86)\Citrix\System32\ )

If these values are not present in your deployment, please create the following value and point it to your Citrix installation directory. Note that this value takes precedence over the values listed above.

  • Hive: HKLM\Software\vast limits\uberAgent
  • Value name: CitrixHDXBinFolder
  • Type: REG_SZ
  • Data: Path to HDX binary folder (e.g., C:\Program Files\Citrix\HDX\bin\ )

Please see the system requirements page for supported product versions.

Citrix Session Monitoring