Thursday, 09 December 2021 15:34

New release MetrixInsight for CVAD - v1.4.21000.x

GripMatix is Citrix partner and market leader providing SCOM Management Packs for monitoring Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix License Server, Citrix Provisioning Services, Citrix StoreFront and Application Delivery Controller, formerly known as Citrix NetScaler. Our solutions have been tested and verified within the Citrix Ready program.

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Besides quality updates, we continuously work on developing new features to improve your Business Continuity and Performance even further. As a result, we are happy to announce that we have released a major new version of our MetrixInsight for CVAD solution.

Sessions and Session Host Machines

Among others, it contains some exciting new Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops User Session monitoring features and has got an even more advanced, scalable and high available workflow management mechanism to remotely monitor Citrix Session Host Machines and the user sessions that run on it. In general, this new mechanism makes sure there is no limit on the amount of Citrix Session Host Machines and Sessions the solution is able to monitor remotely.

Published Applications

Moreover, the release discovers your Published Applications and their relationships with Delivery Groups and Multi-Sessions Machines to better control respective Business Continuity and Performance.

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User Experience

From time to time your users might complain about slow performing applications or laggy desktop sessions. Every Citrix engineer knows it is difficult to find the root cause of such issues, as there are a lot of factors that could be the cause of it. Is it network related? Is it Wi-Fi? Does it concern remote users working at home only? Is it the database the application is connected to? Are some Single- or Multi-Session OS machines out of compute resources? Applies the issue to Azure Virtual Desktop resources specifically? Is it storage? End point devices perhaps? Etcetera, etcetera.

If you monitor your CVAD stack with MetrixInsight for CVAD and SCOM, you are able to pinpoint the root cause of such user experience issues rather quickly. First of all, by ruling out what components of the stack are not the culprit. As SCOM is able to monitor the full stack, including non-Citrix components, which actually form up the biggest part of your CVAD stack, you simply have the means to do such.

Moreover, if you use MetrixInsight for CVAD, you can monitor User Sessions on your Session Host Machines for issues as ‘slowness’ or ‘lag’. Now, the latest release has additional new features to find the root cause of such user experience issues even quicker, as it monitors some essential new user session metrics. Details will be provided in a next blog, but below you can already find an example of MetrixInsight for CVAD detecting high Session ICA Round Trip Time (RTT) and providing a quick hint on where to look for the root cause.

Session ICA RTT is the elapsed time, from when a user hits a key, until the response is displayed back at the end point. This is a very good indication on how users are experiencing their application or desktop sessions.

On the right, you can see a SquaredUp for SCOM Session Host Machine drill-down view, from the community dashboard pack that we have created and updated for the latest Management Pack release.

We deliberately generated some network lag for a certain end point device, ROBOT07.

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In the view you can quickly see that indeed the issue is end point related and not the Session Host Machine itself or its network.

As mentioned earlier, this is just a quick example, and more details will be pointed out in another blog.

Road Map

Whether your Citrix platform is on-prem, cloud or both, GripMatix continues to develop new virtual application and desktop user experience and session monitoring features to improve your Business Continuity and Performance to the limits.

As we speak, we are developing a SCOM Management Pack for CVAD Service running in Citrix Cloud which is going to be included into our existing MetrixInsight for CVAD offering.

If you want to know more about our (cloud ready) offerings, see the solution in action, or run a trial in your own environment, use the forms or just give us a ping at info@gripmatix.com

Happy SCOMing!