With my extensive
experience troubleshooting Citrix Products (Starting as a Citrix Administrator
for over 6 years, then as a Technical Relationship Manager for Citrix Systems,
and now an Architect for Anexinet) I want to share with you my favorite Citrix
tools that has saved me from a lot of headaches. They are very helpful in
troubleshooting issues that occur in your environment as well as being
proactive so you can prevent disasters from happening. I would highly recommend to run some of these
tools on a monthly basis to see if you are compliant with Citrix Best
Practices.
One of my good
friends from Citrix developed this tool.
A lot of Administrators are unsure of what data to collect when an issue
occurs. This tool delivers a suite of
tools and automation options in an easy to use structured format that closely
resembles the look and feel of any standard Windows application, even though
each tool is an independent standalone application.
(Used to
troubleshoot or run proactively)
HDX Monitor provides
detailed information about the various HDX Technologies, their performance, and
diagnostic information. The tool is
designed for ICA session HDX experience diagnostics. The following are the HDX technologies
covered by this tool:
•Thinwire
(Graphics)
•Direct
3D (Graphics)
•Media
Stream (aka RAVE)
•Flash
•Audio
•USB
Devices
•Mapped
Client Drives (CDM)
•Branch
Repeater
•Printer
•Client
•Smart
Card
•Scanner
•System
(Used to
troubleshoot or run proactively)
Print detective is a
great tool when you are troubleshooting Citrix related print drivers. Citrix
leading practices state that you should uninstall non-native printer drivers
since they can cause issues. This utility
will gather all printer driver information for a specified XenApp server.
Many printer driver
problems in Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services environments revolve
around poor multi-threaded performance, which in turn can cause print spooler
instability. Problematic multi-threaded performance is usually exposed when
multiple users connect to a Terminal Server simultaneously using the same
printer driver. Symptoms include the failure to autocreate client printers,
increased thread count of the printer spooler and/or Citrix Print Manager
services, and possibly the unresponsiveness and/or unexpected termination of
these services (stop responding).
This tool can be
used to simulate multiple sessions auto-creating printers using the same
printer driver.
It can also be used
to compare the following among various drivers:
• CPU load incurred
while creating a printer using a particular driver
• Time required to
successfully create a printer using a particular driver
Note: The current
version of the tool does not test concurrent printer capabilities, settings, or
actual printing calls, which are also possible causes of failing to print.
Therefore, good/passing stress results do not always mean that printers are
actually working or certified.
*Note* I HIGHLY recommend to run this tool on a
monthly basis.
This tool is my
favorite tool. When you run Citrix Scout
from a single XenDesktop controller (DDC) or XenApp server, it captures key
data points and CDF traces for selected computers followed by secure and
reliable upload of the data package to Citrix Technical Support.
So once this data is
uploaded to
Citrix Insight Services, the
data will be auto-analyzed against a list of known issues and best practices. A
personalized report, including next step resolution recommendations, will be
displayed.
The XDPing tool is a
command-line based application which automates the process of checking for the
causes of common configuration issues in a XenDesktop environment. The tool can
be used to verify configuration settings on both the XenDesktop Broker and VDA
machines, both from the console and remotely.
There you have
it! My favorite Citrix tools that I
recommend for all you Citrix Administrators out there to use.
Labels: Citrix, Citrix Printing, citrix scout, HDX, print spooler, troubleshooting, XenApp, XenDesktop