What is Citrix Director and How Does it Work?

Citrix Director is a web-based monitoring and troubleshooting console for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, formerly Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop. Citrix Director replaced Citrix Edgesight, which reached the end of life (EOL) in 2013, and allows IT administrators to control Citrix sites and monitor overall performance. It gives them access to real-time and historical health monitoring data, enabling them to detect failures as they happen and get real-time insights into the actual end-user experience.

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop Monitoring with SCOM

SCOM, or System Center Operations Manager, is an all-in-one infrastructure monitoring solution that is part of Microsoft’s Systems Center Suite. It is suitable for all businesses, regardless of their size or industry. Although it’s used basically for monitoring Microsoft environments, it can be used for non-Microsoft products like Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop through SCOM management packs.

SCOM management packs are provided by Citrix and other providers, like eG Innovations and Squared Up. The problem is that Citrix announced the end of maintenance (EOM) and EOL for Citrix SCOM Management Pack earlier in 2020. Before we get into replacement recommendations, let’s investigate the functionality of the Citrix SCOM Management Pack.

The Citrix SCOM Management Pack monitored all Citrix products. It automatically discovers all Citrix components in a farm and organized them in SCOM’s native folder structure. It offered performance reports and displayed alerts within the SCOM console. However, it was available only to Citrix Platinum customers and supported only monitoring of Citrix tiers. The Citrix SCOM Management Pack did not monitor infrastructure tiers that were not Citrix but supported Citrix. Other SCOM management packs were needed to monitor those tiers.

Because Citrix SCOM Management Pack is being discontinued, users are advised by Citrix to migrate to Citrix Director instead of monitoring their Virtual Apps and Desktops environments.

Citrix Director Functionality

Citrix Director is available for XenApp and XenDesktop and their successor, Virtual Apps and Desktops. It allows IT administrators to view Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops session details and disconnect, restart or control a user session. They can also view and customize trend reports, view information on virtual machine (VM) malfunctions, and set alerts for the company’s IT policy violations. IT administrators can customize the Citrix Director console to enable help desk staff to troubleshoot end-user issues by controlling the user session through Windows Remote Assistance Technology.

Citrix Director can access real-time data from the Broker Agent through a unified console integrated with Citrix Analytics for performance management and network analysis. It can also access the historical data stored in the Monitor database and independent component analysis (ICA) data from the Citrix Gateway. Citrix Director provides reports on login duration, concurrent sessions, and resource utilization. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Platinum customers can also monitor their networks.

Citrix Director Specifications

Citrix Director supports Standard and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022. The supported browsers are Microsoft Edge, Firefox ESR, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 11 with default security and compatibility settings. Citrix Director requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 and ASP.NET 2.0, and Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 (specifically for viewing event logs).

In addition to these system requirements, Citrix also recommends that the Director be installed through the Virtual Desktops installer to ensure proper configurations and ensure that all prerequisites are met. The minimum hardware requirements include a dedicated machine with four CPU cores and a minimum of 4 GB of RAM per 100 help-desk users. Citrix also suggests 1366 x 1024 resolution for optimal screen display for Citrix Director.

Site and Session Monitoring

Administrators with all administrative privileges can monitor the health and usage of a site through the Director dashboard. All the panels in the dashboard remain collapsed if there hasn’t been a failure in the past hour. Administrators can view user connection failures, average logon duration, licensing status, connected sessions, a list of the site’s infrastructure, and failed desktops and servers. But if a failure occurs, the specific panel appears automatically. This health information is not available for sites that use System Center Virtual Machine Manager hosts, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and CloudStack.

Citrix Director also provides session monitoring. Administrators can view all connected sessions at a given time, monitor a user’s current session, terminate idle sessions, and view historical trends for user sessions. But Director does not display all information if the user device is running a Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) older than version 7 or a Linux VDA.

IT administrators can also monitor hotfixes installed on a machine VDA and monitor historical trends—information about sessions, failed connections, logon issues, resource utilization, capacity management, and network stats—for specific sites.

Choose Parallels RAS Over Complex Monitoring Solutions

Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) provides a great alternative as an easy-to-use, all-in-one application delivery, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution. Parallels RAS Performance Monitor comes with a simple installation and enables straightforward troubleshooting.

Switching from Citrix XenApp to Parallels RAS isn’t complicated. The entire process has only a few simple steps with a free Citrix XenApp 6.x migration tool.

Experience performance and simplicity, all in one!

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