Citrix Observability: New Citrix Infrastructure Monitor

Have you used all the Citrix Observability tools that are available? One of them is Citrix Infrastructure Monitoring. It lets you gain insights from core components such as StoreFront and Provisioning services. 

In this Citrix Community Article, I’ll walk you through the new Citrix Infrastructure Monitoring feature, which will help you quickly identify, troubleshoot, and resolve issues related to your infrastructure. 

Citrix Infrastructure monitoring provides end-to-end visibility into the health of your entire stack from a single console. You can see the core components of your on-prem or Cloud environment from the Citrix Monitor console.

Let’s talk about the four main features:

• Real-time monitoring: Use the out-of-the-box dashboards to gain insights into server health metrics, such as Resource Utilization and Performance Metrics.

• Alerts and notifications: Create policies and alerts, including custom ones based on your thresholds. You can receive the notifications through email or use the webhook to send data to third-party vendors, such as ServiceNow for Incident management, PowerBI for custom dashboards, etc.

• Granular Data Analysis: Monitor connectivity status, services, and processes and how resources are consumed, such as CPU, memory, and Disk utilization.

• Better Management: minimize downtime by identifying issues before impacting many users.

Some Use Cases - Scenarios

Let’s give a quick example of how Citrix Infrastructure can help you.

StoreFront Monitoring

One of the most frequent issues in a production environment is users complaining about being unable to enumerate resources or “the webpage is down.” You start validating your StoreFront servers, looking for any clues individually. Citrix Infrastructure Monitor gives you complete visibility of your StoreFront Cluster and its services, doing all those validations for you and giving you performance insights for a better user experience.

As part of the feature, you can monitor components such as URL status (the website! ), IIS service and IIS / ICA—SSL certificates status, Server performance, and uptime.

Citrix Provisioning (PVS) Sites Monitoring

If your infrastructure consists of one or multiple PVS sites, you need complete visibility of the primary Services and Components to ensure everything is running. This new feature gives you what you need in the right place in real-time. 

Monitor Reachability, Dependent Services, Resource Utilization, and Impact (in case issues are detected). 

Here are some examples of what you monitor: Streaming Services, SOAP and DB connectivity, PVS Site performance

How it works?

The Infrastructure Monitor is a small piece of software you install in the component/server you want to monitor. You can download the .msi installer here. When you register to the Monitor Service to create the connection between the Server and Monitor console, the Server sends data through port 9595 using an HTTP or HTTPS connection (the default protocol is HTTP, but you can create a secure connection HTTPS by adding an SSL Certificate).

How to start?

The configuration process is straightforward. Here are the steps:

1. Download and install the Citrix Infrastructure Monitor on your StoreFront or PVS server.
2. Install Remote PowerShell SDK on any domain-joined machine (The minimum required version of PoShSDK is 7.42.26154.48609 or later.)
3. In Citrix Cloud, create an API access (Client and Secret) 
4. Run the PowerShell command to register the Citrix Infrastructure Monitor

To wrap it up, watch for all the new features Citrix adds to the Monitor console. 

Stay tuned. In my next article, I’ll show you more new Observability features, such as Application usage monitoring, Cost Optimization, how to use Probes, Rightsizing capabilities, and advanced integrations.

Remember, as a Citrix administrator, you need the correct tools and data to create a healthy environment. Citrix Observability helps you have a better Monitoring and Troubleshooting solution, Improve IT Efficiency, Proactive and Reactive monitoring, Resource usage, Cost Management, and integration with automation and third-party products.