Citrix Director vs SCOM
Citrix provides a tool called Citrix Director for monitoring Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD), formerly known as Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp. While this is a great tool for providing day to day end user support with real-time health information about CVAD software components and user sessions, there are a few important differences compared to an Enterprise Monitoring Platform, such as Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). You should know this when monitoring CVAD stacks.
Citrix Monitoring: Scope
Citrix Director is a point solution and only provides information that is available within the Citrix CVAD database. This means it does not provide information for the whole stack. For instance, it lacks monitoring for StoreFront and Provisioning Services which are crucial tiers in a common Citrix CVAD stack.
Furthermore, it does not monitor the Windows Server Operating Systems, Hypervisors, Physical Hardware, Storage and Network components your CVAD stack components and user workloads are running on. Nor does it monitor infrastructure services like Active Directory, DNS, DHCP and File Services which Citrix CVAD heavily depends on.
Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops stack. Click image to enlarge
This is shown in the diagram above. It shows which components and layers of a common Citrix stack are monitored by Citrix Director and which are not.
As you can see, Director does monitor the user layer and some components of the control layer. However, it lacks hardware, access and resource layer monitoring.
An Enterprise Monitoring Platform, such as SCOM, can monitor all components of a Citrix CVAD stack, as long as you have the right set of Management Packs installed. It is built for operators, tasked with the overall health of data centers and clouds with multiple vendors representing multiple software and hardware products.
Citrix Director is not an Enterprise Monitoring Platform. It is a point solution built for a specific task.
Scope Citrix Director/Monitor vs Enterprise Monitoring System (SCOM)
Citrix Monitoring: Depth
Because a point solution is built for a specific task you can often zoom in and get generally more detail than an Enterprise Monitoring Platform provides.
Citrix Monitoring: Role-based Event Management
An Enterprise Monitoring Platform is a standardized system maintained by a dedicated team to support your event management process. It is a system the whole IT organization heavily relies on when it comes to event detection, before actual incidents occur that affect user experience.
Events or alerts are handled according to an alert life cycle and the system is also responsible for making user experience measurable (KPIs) and show trends over time. It can be used in every layer in the organization; by datacenter operators, system engineers, IT managers, CIOs etcetera, due to its role-based event management features (views, dashboards, alert life cycling).
It integrates with ITSM systems to generate tickets (semi-)automatically and thus supports your incident management process as well. For SCOM there are several ITSM bi-directional connectors available that do this.
At the other hand a monitoring point solution, like Director, is typically a tool system engineers maintain themselves and use if they think they need too. Director has some role-based access, but because of its concept, there is no Role-based Event Management that groups events and dashboards into teams and manages alert life cycles, like a typical Enterprise Monitoring Platform would.
Citrix Monitoring: Trend Analyses
Analyzing trends over time requires you to have descent data retention. Let’s say a retention of multiple years. Again, Citrix Director is not really appropriate for this. It only provides a maximum history reporting of 7 days for Standard and 1 month for Advanced license customers. If you want historical data beyond 1 month you would need a pricy Premium (previously called Platinum) license for Citrix CVAD. This increases data retention to 1 year only.
By default, SCOM’s data warehouse data retention is about 1 year, but can easily be increased unlimitedly. This enables you to baseline and do trend analyses over time spans you require for your organization.
Citrix Director complements an Enterprise Monitoring Platform
Generally, an Enterprise Monitor Platform delivers the following features:
- Event Detection; to detect any health degradation of end user experience and technical components within the whole datacenter or cloud environment;
- Role-based Event Management; Alert Life Cycling and Role-based access to alerts, dashboards and views, to manage the process of solving detected events by multiple teams with different skills;
- and Single-Pane-of-Glass functionality; to provide dashboards each showing the overall health of a particular service stack.
Some Enterprise Monitoring Platforms, like SCOM, are also able to let you drill down into objects when health has been degraded to find the root-cause of the degradation. Nevertheless, point solutions will always be very useful to support Root-Cause-Analysis.
Citrix Director is such a point solution and the following diagram shows how it complements an Enterprise Monitoring Platform.
In short, use an Enterprise Monitoring Platform like SCOM to detect and manage events and let Citrix Director excel in further deep-diving and trouble-shooting to solve it. Make sure you understand this when monitoring Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD) stacks to get in control.
If you need more information on this, please watch the SCOMathon 2022 demo session video recording on this subject.
SCOM as an Enterprise Monitoring Platform
In the next blog we will zoom in on using MS SCOM, as an Enterprise Monitoring Platform, for monitoring Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops stacks (formerly known as Xendesktop/XenApp).
Also check out GripMatix's Citrix SCOM Management Packs to monitor Citrix CVAD, Citrix StoreFront, Citrix Provisioning Services and Citrix NetScaler (ADC).