Usage guide: Citrix DaaS essentials

The Citrix virtual machine monitoring dashboard offers a centralized view of your environment. It displays VM status, reboot health, and VDA registration to support timely decisions and actions.

For cloud controller servers, the Citrix infrastructure dashboard provides a focused overview of their health and availability.

To streamline issue detection, a set of pre-configured VDI monitors allows administrators to quickly identify and respond to performance and availability concerns.

Remediation is supported through remote actions that can restart session hosts, refresh GPO policies, log off VDI sessions, and terminate unresponsive processes within a user session.

Library pack uses

Jump to Use cases on this page to see relevant scenario applications.

Virtual machine monitoring

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

Visibility into online/offline VM distribution

With the Summary tab on the provided Citrix virtual machine monitoring dashboard, you can quickly determine the online/offline status of your VMs, with breakdowns by desktop pool and VDI type.

Virtual machine performance overview

The Performance Overview tab on the Citrix virtual machine monitoring dashboard focuses on hardware load and resource utilization across your virtual desktop session hosts. It helps you identify infrastructure bottlenecks before they affect the end-user experience.

It organizes telemetry into four health groups:

CPU/GPU: Normalized CPU queue length, overall CPU usage, and GPU utilization for graphics-intensive pools.
Memory: Available memory, available cache, and swap activity to reveal pressure and paging.
Storage: Disk queue length and read/write latencies to surface storage contention.
Network: Failed connections, slow connection establishment, and total traffic to highlight connectivity and saturation patterns.

Infrastructure server monitoring

The Citrix DaaS 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.

Citrix DaaS hypervisor monitoring

Monitor Citrix DaaS hypervisors (virtualization hosts) to understand their load and how it affects hosted virtual machines. This dashboard provides insights into VDI pools, virtual machines, and user sessions across virtualization hosts, along with a performance summary of these hosts.

Monitoring Citrix DaaS and Workspace client application

Monitor and manage your employees' experience with the following Citrix applications:

Citrix DaaS application. This network application provides visibility into the connectivity and network usage of Citrix DaaS on devices, helping to identify issues with this application.
Citrix Workspace client application. This hybrid web and desktop application provides insights into usage, performance, and stability, helping to identify issues with the application on devices.

Refer to the Monitoring applications documentation for more information on monitoring web and desktop applications.

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 to fix common issues with VDI devices that normally require specialist teams with VDI experience or administration tools to resolve them. These fixes include the ability to invoke session host restarts, update GPO policies, and 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 that are considered critical for the server to function. If any of these services are stopped, it could potentially have a large impact on your VMs and the employees using them. For example, if the Broker Service is not running on the Cloud Connector server, then users may not be able to connect to their applications or desktops. This should be investigated as a matter of urgency.

Monitor the component health of the Citrix DaaS solution by monitoring their event logs

In the Events Insights section, use remote-action-based widgets to monitor the health of your DaaS Cloud Connector. These widgets display results from remote actions that monitor Citrix event logs for specific events related to predefined topics.

The list of predefined topics for Cloud Connectors is as follows:

Cloud connectors with synchronization issues: indicates Cloud Connector servers with ongoing synchronization issues with Citrix Cloud. These issues prevent the servers from importing configuration updates. This widget can detect whether the topic is currently in place and display the relevant state. This is based on the "Monitor Citrix Cloud Connector events" remote action.
Cloud connectors acting as a Local Host Cache: indicates Cloud Connector servers that are having ongoing connectivity issues with Citrix Cloud. Because of these issues, these servers are acting as local host caches. This widget can detect whether the topic is currently in place and display the relevant state. This is based on the "Monitor Citrix Cloud Connector events" remote action.
Cloud connectors with connectivity issues: indicates Cloud Connector servers experiencing ongoing connectivity issues with the Citrix Control Plane. This widget can detect whether the topic is currently in place and display the relevant state. This is based on the "Monitor Citrix Cloud Connector events" remote action.

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.