Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

The Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops extensions allows you to monitor your Citrix environment.

You can choose to have a holistic view of your Citrix environment, monitor individual Virtual Delivery Agent machines or both.

The extension can be deployed from an OneAgent or an Activegate:

OneAgent Deployment

When running from an OneAgent, the extension can be configured in one of two ways:

• Citrix VDA - Monitor the individual user sessions, by activating the extension on each Virtual Delivery Agent, this will not collect environment wide metrics, only RUM data for the individual sessions, and a couple of perfmon counters.

• Citrix Powershell SDK - Monitor the entire Citrix Environment, by activating the extension on a machine that has the Citrix Powershell SDK installed. Usually where Citrix Studio is installed or a Delivery Controller.

Activegate Deployment

• DAAS - Connect to Citrix DAAS via the REST API, collects the same metrics as in "Powershell SDK" mode, with the exception of licensing and delivery controllers metrics which don't apply to DAAS.

• Managed - Connect to a local Delivery Controller via the REST API

VDA - Virtual Delivery Agent

This mode captures Real User Monitoring data from the individual VDAs. Some Windows Performance Counters are also collected.

In this scenario, you must have an OneAgent deployed to each VDA. The recommmended activation flow for this scenario is:

1. Install the OneAgent on the Golden (or Master) Image
2. Make sure to set the Host ID source, the option most customers use is fqdn
3. Activate the Citrix Extension on that machine, by creating a Monitoring Configuration in your Dynatrace environment that targets that host and selecting the Citrix VDA monitoring mode
   • This will distribute the extension binary to that machine, making the deployment much faster later since the extension binary will be available on all VDAs created by this machine.

Requirements

• Ctrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (any version) or Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop (version 7.5 or later)
• Your Citrix VDAs must have the Citrix End User Experience Monitoring service enabled and running

You can check that a certain VDA can be monitored by the extension by:

1. Starting a ICA Session on that VDA via the Citrix Receiver (Desktop or individual Application works)
2. Running these powershell commands on the VDA:
   • Get-WmiObject -Class Citrix_Euem_RoundTrip -Namespace root\citrix\euem
   • Get-WmiObject -Class Citrix_Sessions -Namespace root\citrix\hdx

These commands must return some data about the user session.

Activation

Create a new Custom Application

• Navigate to Deploy Dynatrace > Monitor a custom application
• Give your application a descriptive name, chose an icon, then select Monitor custom application.
• Select Instrumentation wizard and keep a note of the Application ID that is generated for your custom application.

Create a Monitoring Configuration

• Under Infrastructure -> Extensions chose Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and click Create monitoring configuration

• Select which hosts you want to monitor, these are your Citrix VDAs.

  • We highly recommend you make use of Host Groups, Management Zones or Tags to make this easier to manage. For example all VDAs of a farm could have their own Host Group

• Monitoring Mode: Citrix VDA

• Custom Application ID: The ID of the custom application you created in the previous step

• Capture User Data: whether to capture Usernames and IP Addresses or not

After a couple minutes, if ICA Sessions are running on these VDAs you should see data being captured in the Custom Application you created.

Citrix Powershell SDK

This mode captures metrics about your entire Citrix Environment using the Citrix Powershell SDK
In this mode the extension runs from a single machine where Citrix Studio (or the Powershell SDK) is installed.

Requirements

• Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (any version) or Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop (version 7.5 or later)
• The machine where the extension is running must have the Citrix Powershell SDK installed, this can be accomplished by installing Citrix Studio

To test that a machine can run this mode, execute commands below on powershell (as a user that can run Citrix Studio):

# replace localhost with the address of your delivery controller if necessary
Add-PSSnapin Citrix.*.Admin.V*
Get-BrokerSite -AdminAddress localhost

Activation

• Under Infrastructure -> Extensions chose Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and click Create monitoring configuration

• Select which host you want the extension to run from, the one where the Powershell SDK is available

• Monitoring Mode: Citrix Powershell SDK

• Username: an user that can run the citrix powershell sdk commands, it can include a domain example: my.company\my.user

• Password: for the user defined above

• Metric collection frequency: how often metrics should collect data

After a couple of minutes, metrics should be ingested for your Citrix environment. You can use the built in dashboard to access these metrics

Citrix DAAS

This mode captures metrics about your entire Citrix Environment using the Citrix DAAS Rest API. This mode can only be activated when running from an Activegate.

Requirements

• Linux or Windows Activegate capable of reaching the Citrix DAAS endpoint
  • https://api.cloud.com - for US, EU or APAC
  • https://api.citrixcloud.jp - for Japan
• An API Client ID and Secret with Read Only Administrator scope.
• Your Citrix Customer ID which can be obtained from the API Client creation, or from the cloud console.

Configuration

In Dynatrace create a monitoring configuration and select Monitor remotely, choose an Activegate group that is capable of reaching the DAAS endpoints, note that you can also configure a proxy later.

The credentials can be stored directly in the extension settings, or using the Dynatrace Credential Vault

Metrics will arrive to your environment and can be seen in the overview dashboard that comes with the extension.

Notes

• With Citrix DAAS you don't manage Delivery Controllers, so these entities will not be created in Dynatrace
• The Site entity will not report some licensing metrics, which don't apply to Citrix DAAS.

Citrix VDA

For the VDA mode, we ingest Real User Monitoring data, each Citrix ICA Session corresponds roughly to one Dynatrace User Session, although long ICA Sessions (2+ hours) can be split into multiple User Sessions

Powershell SDK

The formula for the DDUs consumed is the sum of:

• 4 * <sites>
• 5 * <controllers>
• 11 * <groups>
• 5 * <catalogs>
• 9 * <desktops>

multiplied by 525.6 DDUS per year.

Example:

• 1 Site
• 1 Controller
• 20 Groups
• 12 Catalogs
• 160 Machines

Will consume: (4) + (5) + (11*20) + (5*12) + (9*160) * 525.6 = 908,762.4 DDUs per year.

DAAS

DAAS has a similar fomula except it doesn't have metrics for the Delivery Controllers:

• 4 * <sites>
• 11 * <groups>
• 5 * <catalogs>
• 9 * <desktops>

Example:

• 1 Site
• 20 Groups
• 12 Catalogs
• 160 Machines

Will consume: ((4) + (11*20) + (5*12) + (9*160)) * 525.6 = 906,134.4 DDUs per year.