When you’ve been supporting remote users, you hear it
all. Someone called the help desk or worse you.
“Not
sure what it is but my vm is slow today?”
“My
mouse just keeps wigging out?”
“Everyday from 3pm to 5pm it gets boggy?”
“I’m at my grandmother’s house today and nothing works.” (Yup…True
story)
They are tons of great 3rd party monitoring tools
out there and many would help you troubleshoot the issue. We all wish we could buy them all but hey we
are on a budget right! So let’s use
what we have. For those that are running
Citrix XenDesktop 7.x with the Platinum license, you have many of the tools and
information to help your users specifically XenDesktop Director
and NetScaler
HDX Insight.
Here is some key info to pass along to the Level 1 or 2
helpdesk staff.
The General Windows Stuff via Director
It is always a habit to pop open Task Manager or Resource
Manager on Windows to check things out and this is still a great place to start
even in a virtual environment. The nice thing is you can do it right from
Director. Check to see if something is
“Not Responding”? Something
pegging? Using a ton of memory? Basic but always a good place to start.
Session Details in Director
Do not overlook the info here. Often we jump right to the
Latency and say must be some poor connection.
Often it can be…like your grandmother’s wifi she shares with all her
condo friends. But the simple things like “Connected via” and
“Launched via” can tell you a lot of how
the user is connecting too. For
example, we’ve seen users who have VPN’d
in first then connected via StoreFront to their XenDesktop vm or XenApp
app. This has added 100ms since they
were VPN’ing in first. “Launched via”
may actually show your VPN controller or some other internal server signifying
they are connecting from the “inside” but you know they are remote. Why the do this? Because they always have done it that way.
Machine Details via Director
I usually look at Session Details first to get a sense of
the users network conditions. Assuming
they are ok …say < 250ms … based on the issue, I look at the storage. Storage has been an issue for VDI performance
for a long time. Many are moving to
Flash Arrays and this is becoming less of an issue but still something to check
as it can greatly contribute to a poor user experience. In the example, below you can see the disk
is queue up….no wonder nothing is happening.
NetSclarer HDX Insight
Again this advanced feature makes it possible to isolate and
manage your ICA network performance. When users are accessing remotely, the big
challenge is determining if the issue is internal or external. Remember that example where someone said
everyday from “3-5am” it is slow. The
screenshot below isn’t flashy and at first glance is boring but it does show
that the WAN latency has been consistent over the past week. So maybe it isn’t your stuff that is causing
the slowness. Internet surge? Partner’s WAN connection?
Hopefully this help give you a sense of how to use the
information in Director and HDX insight to start that troubleshooting
exercise. No tool will flat out tell you
the problem. You need to look at the
info and read those tea leaves a little.
Good luck.