Bridging the Gap Between System Performance and User Experience
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POCs are an activity that sales engineers perform on a routine basis. It's the best way to show the value of a product within a customer's environment. I created this guide to help anyone (Citrites, partners, customers) who is interested in setting up a POC of EdgeSight 4.5.
Are my notes perfect? It would be nice to be perfect, but I'm human.
Should you deploy this in a production environment? Never
Can I contact Citrix Tech Support for assistance with this document? Unofficial = Unsupported
If you have any questions, compliments, corrections, etc. about this document, please post a comment to the blog and I will respond.
A top request from most customers that I talk with is how to use EdgeSight to monitor the XenApp/Presentation Server environment. One thing that needs to be remembered about EdgeSight is that it monitors all applications that are launched on the device that is being monitored. This in turn includes the core applications that keep a XA/PS infrastructure up and running efficiently.
Here is a link to a fantanstic article on setting up Alerts in EdgeSight to monitor the necessary core apps.
EdgeSight Alerting for Citrix Presentation Server - CTX116449 - http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx116449
Below is a snippet taken from the document.
Infrastructure Health
There are many components that contribute to the overall health of a Presentation Server farm. By creating real-time alerts for the following processes as detailed below, an administrator can quickly determine the health of a particular server or the entire farm.
What to Monitor
| Process Name | Process Description |
| imasrv.exe | Citrix IMA Service |
| xte.exe | Citrix XTE Service |
| hcaservice.exe | Citrix Health Monitoring and Recovery |
| termsrv.exe | Terminal Server Service |
| smaservice.exe | Citrix SMA Service |
| imaadvancesrv.exe | Citrix Services Manager |
How to Monitor
There are several recommended alert rules that can be created for each process, all of which are defined in the alert rules setup as Application Alerts. Each alert informs the administrator of a particular problem.
• High application resource usage
After setting the CPU time (percent) or Memory usage (Kbytes) values for the particular process, EdgeSight will fire an alert when it detects that the process has exceeded those configured values. Processes consuming a high amount of CPU or memory could impact the overall performance of the server and have a negative impact on the end user experience.
• Process fault
This alert will notify administrators when the process configured in the alert rule has faulted due to an unhandled exception within the process. The details collected by EdgeSight give a total picture of what was occurring on the server when the fault occurred without expending time and resources trying to reproduce the problem.
• Thrashing application
By configuring the thread queue length value for a process in this alert, administrators can quickly be notified if there are any processor bottlenecks that may be degrading server performance. Thread queue length is invaluable in determining applications that are bottlenecked on a system as the parameter indicates the number of CPU work items currently waiting for the threads of the application to process them.
The Citrix EdgeSight Team has released Service Pack 4 for the ES 4.5 platform. You can download the full installers from the following link http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116690.
Some improvements and fixes that are addressed:
Agent Fixes and Enhancements
• Addressed a problem where, when attempting to run the PhotoshopElementsEditor.exe from Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0, the following message appears: "Attempt to access invalid address."
• Addressed a problem that prevented processes from running when Imprivata was installed.
• Addressed an issue that caused Sentillion Context Management to crash.
• Addressed a problem where the user associated with an Event Log alert was not always displayed on the real-time alert pages and reports.
• Added support logging for diagnosing problems with the Terminal Services service.
• Corrected a problem where network Round-trip Time (RTT) and Delay were not captured correctly in some applications.
• Addressed an incompatibility with SoftGrid Virtual Application Server when launching the default application.
Server Fixes and Enhancements
• Addressed a run-time error in the Alert real-time report when displayed using Excel 2007.
• Addressed timeout errors in the User Group pages and reports.
• Addressed a problem where the user associated with an Event Log alert was not always displayed on the real-time alert pages and reports.
• Addressed a problem that occurred while grooming session data.
• Addressed a timeout error in the Presentation Server Session Wizard.
• Addressed a problem where the License State Hash could become corrupted immediately after an installation.
• Addressed a column labeling issue concerning units of measure in the Network Bandwidth reports (Devices > Network > ICA).
The following issue was discovered:
• Issue: There is an incompatibility with McAfee Host Intrusion Protection 7.0 and the EdgeSight Agent.
Workaround: Do not install the agent on devices where this McAfee firewall is running.
