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.

The infrastructure dashboard offers visibility into the health and status of your Citrix delivery controller, license server, and StoreFront components.

With a set of pre-configured VDI monitors, administrators can quickly identify and resolve performance and availability issues before they impact users.

Remediation remote actions are provided that can 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 is the starting point for VM diagnosis. 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.

Infrastructure server monitoring

The Citrix CVAD infrastructure dashboard is the starting point for server diagnosis. It provides a dedicated environment for monitoring infrastructure servers that are offline, with critical stopped services, or experiencing performance or stability issues.

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 devices with poor reboot health

The reboot health of a VM is determined by the custom field "Citrix reboot health" included with this pack. The parameters for 'good, average, and poor' are configurable. This information is summarized in the dashboard with a dedicated bar chart, showing the number of devices in each category. This allows you to drill down to any devices that have not rebooted for a long period, which may require further investigation.

Monitor critical services on infrastructure servers

Each infrastructure server monitored by this pack has a specific set of services considered critical for the server to function. If any of these services are stopped, it could potentially have a significant impact on your VMs and the employees using them. For example, if the Broker Service is not running on the Desktop Delivery Controller, users may not be able to connect to their applications or desktops. This should be investigated as a matter of urgency.

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.