Citrix is a leading company in providing virtualization technologies that allow central hosting of applications and resources. Popular Citrix technologies like XenApp and XenDesktop, which are offered as on-premises or cloud services, enable enterprises to quickly and seamlessly provide their customers with virtual environments. With the help of Citrix technologies, companies can provide users access to their workstations and services from any location, at any time, on any device, and across any network. Many companies have benefited from Citrix’s assistance in making the switch to virtualized services, which reduces the requirement for costly hardware.
What is Citrix Monitoring?
Citrix monitoring helps IT, professionals, to maintain the maximum performance of the company’s virtualization desktops, applications, and complete virtual infrastructures. As a result, the employees can diagnose issues affecting network performance and provide assistance to the customers. Citrix monitoring makes it possible to assess the effectiveness of your Citrix configuration and receive alerts whenever something occurs that could have an influence on the end-user experience. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the top Citrix monitoring tools that can help you find the source of errors and solve them more quickly. Let’s get started!
Paessler PRTG
Paessler PRTG is a well-known network monitoring tool to perform real-time monitoring, diagnosing, and reporting on the performance of Citrix virtual applications and desktops. PRTG enables you to add your custom sensors, allowing you to further customize your monitoring and reporting. Integrated sensors can be utilized to keep an eye on different aspects of your Citrix system. For instance, You can keep track of all the crucial information about your host using the PRTG Citrix XenServer Host Sensor. And with the Citrix XenServer VM Sensor, you can monitor all the pertinent performance metrics of your Virtual machines, such as memory and CPU consumption, IO caching, and traffic patterns. Additionally, there are numerous ways to keep track of Citrix Hypervisor backups. For example, you can use the IMAP Sensor to keep an eye on your emails for terms that signify a backup has been finished. You can also make sure your resources are continually updated by configuring this IMAP sensor. And up to 100 sensors, it is completely free to download and configure. PRTG comes with a trial period of 30-days limitless access. And after that, it reverts back to the normal edition with limited features. You can switch to the premium edition at any time.
SolarWinds
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor ( SAM ) is a comprehensive server and application monitoring tool that allows you to actively monitor XenApp and XenDesktop performance. You can use this application to keep track of CPU load, performance counters, and every other activity for both Virtualization Applications and Desktops. The monitoring environment is very dynamic, with numerous visualization options such as charts and graphs. For instance, you can use the panel toolbar to build a graph of CPU utilization and watch how the metric fluctuates over time. You can even customize the whole monitoring interface according to your needs and interests. Alerts can be configured to generate SMS / Email messages which ensure that performance events are never missed. These alerts are limit-based notifications that notify you whenever VM functionality exceeds a significant level. SAM also streamlines the troubleshooting process by defining which services are operating on which hosts and virtual servers, as well as which memory resources are associated with the applications. The pricing Starts at $1,663 per year and provides a fully-functional trial period of 30 days.
Manage Engine
ManageEngine Applications manager is a strategic and powerful network performance and application monitoring tool that performs network assessment and delivers topological charts. Citrix monitoring capabilities are among the features that this tool application offers, in addition to monitoring servers and virtualization. Users can access crucial XenApp monitoring parameters to streamline problem discovery, check the accessibility and operation of the Virtual Applications, and prevent any unanticipated downtime. Additionally, it enables the user to set thresholds and get warnings when the service’s functionality or performance is compromised. Also, this application manager assists in the processing of logs between applications and servers to troubleshoot problems such as server overload, unauthorized user logins, improper session security configurations, and many more. In Citrix virtual environment, keeping an eye on XenApp directory listings and user profiles is essential to ensuring that customers have a constant authentication experience each time. You have the option to select between the Professional or Enterprise version for your trial period while downloading the tool.
Control Up
ContolUp is a specialized software solution for real-time infrastructure and performance monitoring that detect and fix errors across your entire Citrix environment. This application offers transparency from hypervisors all the way down to specific user interactions. Also, the adaptable dashboard provides real-time performance metrics and displays data in a tabular form such as bandwidth range, authentication timeframes, and service uptime. In order to identify the underlying reason for a server crash, you can analyze the parameters and configurations of the host systems. Citrix cloud, Citrix hypervisor, Citrix application delivery controller, and other Citrix products are all integrated with ContolUp. It supports all essential Citrix components you require to execute your virtualized activities. Users can even run automated processes through it in response to triggers specified on parameters or objects. ContolUp gathers metrics in real-time to provide you with a complete picture of your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) settings, enabling you to spot issues, diagnose them, and fix them before they negatively affect your customer’s digital experiences. Enterprise, Platinum, and Ultimate Editions are available to be purchased and download. Each version has its own significant features. You can compare the features and see the pricing details here.
eG Enterprise
eG Enterprise, by eg innovations, is a leading application monitoring solution that enables you to look beyond trivial metrics and focus on the issue of solving performance problems. With this eG Enterprise tool, you can also actively track, analyze, and report on the functionality of Citrix virtual applications and desktops. It is compatible with the latest version of all Citrix Workspace components. Additionally, you can obtain end-to-end accessibility, instantly compare performance metrics across tiers, rapidly identify the underlying cause of performance issues, and increase service uptime and efficiency. Every component of your Citrix architecture can be monitored, allowing you to track metrics like CPU consumption in a form of graphs and charts. Alerts can be set up to get notifications when there are performance problems, and they employ auto-baselines to spot unusual behavior in the Citrix environment. If an issue exists in your Citrix environment, efficient root-cause detection will enable you to determine how it came about. This tool uses machine learning algorithms to identify which elements of your system caused alarms and to evaluate their severity. It comes with a 30-day free trial and pricing is based on the deployment model. SaaS/Cloud model starts at $125/month and the subscription Starts at $100/ month.
Zabbix
Zabbix is a well-known brand among IT engineers. It is a complete monitoring solution that allows you to actively monitor your whole Citrix environment. It helps in monitoring user activity, service consumption, and application performance and automatically discovers Citrix servers. You can examine performance metrics in a form of charts to observe how user experience and app reliability fluctuate over time In order to find issues that are concealed in every layer, this tool monitors the complete application architecture that is behind the virtualization layer. Additionally, it has an efficient root cause detection feature. When new workstations are added to the monitoring environment, this auto-detection mechanism helps in updating the infrastructure changes automatically. Similar to other Citrix monitoring solutions, Alerts can be configured to be notified about performance issues. Depending on the requirements, you can ask the support team to integrate your application in a certain way.
Automai
Automai is yet another fantastic monitoring solution for your Citrix environment that automates the whole monitoring process for your virtual applications and desktops. This tool monitors real-time performance data and compares it with past saved records. You can keep an eye on end users’ specific experiences. You can also keep track of a user’s behavior, including login attempts and the period of time they lasted within every stage of a session. There are also alerting mechanisms to let you know when a certain performance event happens that requires user attention. Additionally, the pre-configured sophisticated ScenarioBuilder allows you to create procedures and workflows in a matter of seconds. You can request a demo from their website and see how robotic technology improves Citrix monitoring.
Conclusion
I hope you found this article helpful in learning about the best software applications for Citrix performance monitoring. You may also be interested in learning about the top Hyper-V Monitoring Software tools for Better Insights