For those of you who have used Citrix Edgesight in the past, you probably have run into issues with lack of visibility into key performance metrics as well as less-than-stellar correlation of XD session logging and network analysis. Another big issue in the current implementation of Edgesight is around the impact of performance and resource utilization required for just running Edgesight itself.
The good news, Edgesight has been completed rearchitected, starting with the monitoring process.
In the current deployment of Edgesight, an ES agent load is required for each VDA. Not so in the new version. The ES agent is now a simple plugin module that is installed automatically as part of the rollout of the VDA.
Previous versions of ES(including 5.4), the ES Agent collected metrics indiscriminately. Further, the ES agent would collect data on an interval basis and store the data in the write cache. the ES agent would then periodically upload the performance metrics to the ES DB. All of these additional IOs required for just monitoring did in some cases cause performance issues for the VDA or scalability issues on the XD servers themselves. The new ES plug-in collects 60% less metrics and the data is sent directly to DB real-time. This avoids the unnecessary IOs for writing to the write cache as well as the bulk upload to the DB.
Another great enhancement to ES is the ability to hold data for longer periods, up to 365 days, in order to providing trending information for baselining performance and capacity planning. This does require Platinum level licensing, as non-platinum license holders will have a 7 day retention only.
The new version of Citrix ES also provides full integration into HDX Insight metrics, which provides all the data for network analysis from Netscaler devices. This correlation is very useful for RCA (root cause analysis), as you can quickly see both the network data and the XD session data to determine if the problem is XD based or network based. The data is all viewable in the new XD Director console, providing a central console to monitor network and XD sessions. This feature does require Platinum-level licensing as well.
Citrix will also provide views into the data schema of the ES DB for public access. This is great for those who would like to create their own custom reports. Citrix will also provide report APIs for easy custom report creation within Director for those who aren't SQL experts.
The new version of ES is only available for XD7, so for those on XD 5.6 or XA 6.5, you should continue to use ES 5.4. Labels: Citrix, Edgesight, HDX Insight, XD7