Usage guide: Citrix CVAD essentials

A Citrix virtual machine monitoring dashboard provides a centralized view of your Citrix environment. It highlights VM status, reboot health, and VDA registration, helping you make informed decisions and take timely actions.

A collection of pre-configured VDI monitors helps administrators quickly detect and address key issues affecting performance and availability.

Remediation remote actions are provided that can be used to invoke session host restarts, update GPO policies, log off VDI sessions, and end unresponsive processes running within a session.

Library pack uses

Virtual machine monitoring

The Citrix virtual machine monitoring dashboard acts as the starting point of this library pack. It provides a dedicated environment for managing the online/offline VM distribution, reboot health tracking, and VDA registration insights into Citrix CVAD machines.

Visibility into online/offline VM distribution

Using the Citrix virtual machine monitoring dashboard provided, you can determine the online/offline status of your VMs at a glance, with breakdowns by desktop pool and VDI type.

Triggering alerts for VDI-related issues

The installed VDI monitors from this library pack allow you to monitor and detect issues using the critical metrics specific to your virtual desktop infrastructure:

• High percentage of disconnected sessions per desktop pool – Identifies frequent or unexpected drops.

• High CPU usage per desktop pool – Flags potential performance bottlenecks.

• High average latency per VDI client location – Highlights network-related delays by region.

• High number of sessions per virtual machine – Prevents resource overutilization.

Alerts generated by the VDI library monitors appear in the Alerts overview dashboard for further investigation and analysis.

Virtual machine administration

Remediation remote actions are provided that can be used to fix common issues with VDI devices that normally require the assignment of issues to specialist teams with VDI experience or administration tools. These fixes include the ability to invoke session host restarts, update GPO policies, and to end unresponsive processes running within a session.

Use cases

In addition to the relevant use cases covered below, you may uncover other troubleshooting scenarios specific to your environment.

Investigate offline devices

To investigate any unusual distributions of offline devices, the dashboard filter can be used to select offline devices only. A table is provided listing all virtual machines by name, along with key information such as VDA registration status, reboot health, last seen date, collector version, etc.

Detect network congestion causing latency spikes in specific office locations.

The High average latency per VDI client location monitor tracks the average network latency for each VDI client entity and triggers an alert when the latency exceeds a dynamic threshold compared to a 7-day baseline, computed hourly.

Identify CPU bottlenecks affecting virtual desktops

The High CPU usage per desktop pool monitor tracks the average CPU queue length for virtual desktop pools and generates an alert when it surpasses a dynamic threshold computed hourly compared to a 7-day baseline.

Prevent overloading of a desktop pool to maintain optimal user experience

The High number of sessions per virtual machine monitor tracks the total number of active sessions per virtual machine and triggers an alert when the session count exceeds a user-defined threshold.

Identify network instability affecting session continuity

The High percentage of disconnected sessions per desktop pool monitor observes session disconnections, calculates the disconnection-to-active session ratio, and triggers an alert if the ratio surpasses a defined threshold.