Introducing the Citrix Session Reporting Kit

SysTrack Kits – Integration and Custom Reporting

One of the most exciting features of our latest version of SysTrack (7.2) is the new Kits program. This provides use case specific reports and dashboards to cover a broad set of different operational and analytical needs for a wide set of different environments. This month we’re pleased to announce that our most requested Kit, an extensive set of Citrix reports for XenApp and XenDesktop management, has gone live and is ready for immediate use.

With our latest Kit we introduce a path to continue many of the reports and capabilities of the EdgeSight for XenApp IMA environments (versions 6.5 and earlier). This is of particular interest for customers who are migrating to and adopting the FMA based versions of Citrix XenApp (7.0 and higher). This Kit helps complete the vision into the inner workings of environmental demand that IT administrators need to guarantee success in delivering a great user experience with Citrix products.

This includes critical historical analysis and trending reports, consumption coverage, HDX utilization details, and other key items across both IMA and FMA deployments. Of course, SysTrack also extends many of the reports and analytics to the physical desktop world and infrastructure components in the data center.

The Citrix Session Reporting Kit

So, what can you expect? Through the Kits import mechanism a single import brings in dozens of Citrix specific reports which are then automatically configured to work with SysTrack and ready to go in moments. This opens the door to deep reporting on everything from peak concurrency and session trends to application consumption and network utilization.

This also integrates in with several of our Citrix monitoring dashboards that can offer operational insight into advanced session issues. As a little bit of an extra we also have the ability to directly connect into the Desktop Director and its monitoring database to relate back session state and connection details directly with our in-system user experience collection. This helps answer some of the questions left over for enterprises moving to later Citrix product releases.

The obvious question: how do I get started? Directly from the SysTrack Launch page you can click through to the Kits area to get to the import center. From here, logging in with your SysTrack Portal Account credentials reveals the list of kits you have available. Find the Citrix Session Reporting Kit and select Import. This imports all the reports found in the table at the end of this post, but we’ll only cover a handful in this post.

 Citrix Session Dashboards

One of our newer tools is the SysTrack Dashboard Builder. There are a number of Dashboards that come with the Citrix Session Reporting Kit, so we’ll start here to give an idea of what’s presented. Note that the Citrix Session Reporting tag lets us filter for just the dashboards contained in this Kit.

One of the first dashboards to check out is Citrix Session Startup Duration Details. This actually makes use of a Shared Data Source, so we’ll want to start in the Dashboard Builder to set up the connection to the Director database. Specifically, we’re interested in the MonitorData information, so if you’ve got your database distributed between multiple database objects make sure to select the right one. In our case we just have one database, so I’ll configure the Shared item to be used in each data block to use it. Note that I just have to do this once, and any future dashboard that uses that connection can just use our Shared item.

Now you can see a logon trend as well as a component breakout for a selected day with a complete record of your user session timings.

Naturally there are some unique SysTrack dashboards as well, and many of them use our Health Score to articulate how well people are enjoying their sessions. For example, the Citrix XenApp Published App Health with Session Concurrency dashboard uses our XenApp view to show details about health concerns and concurrency of demand for publishes applications in use in the environment.

SysTrack Reporting for Citrix Sessions

The majority of the reporting content is found in our SysTrack Reporting area. That feature is built into Site Visualizer and Report Center to provide easily exportable content. The Citrix Session content can be found in the Citrix Session Reporting folder and is organized by type (Figure xx).

As an example, let’s check out the Session Count by Day report. This has a breakout of the count of sessions on each app host over the time range you specify.

This and many other categories of reports exist to make finding the specific reporting you’re looking for simple. Obviously we can’t go through every item here, so check out the table at the bottom to see how some of the available reports from EdgeSight 5.4 maps into our Kit. Because this is community driven feel free to make requests as well.

As a side note, we’ve got a significant library of Kits available now in addition to our Citrix Session Reporting Kit, including some focused on security, NVIDIA graphics analysis, and data center modernization. Look for more as our collection grows.