Instant EdgeSight for XenApp: Effective, practical instructions to monitor your Citrix XenApp servers using EdgeSight 5.4

Insert the Citrix XenApp CD and click on Manually install components.

Click on Server Components and then click on Application Performance Monitoring.

On the Welcome screen, click on EdgeSight Server and then click on Next.

Select Edgesight Server Website and Database; click on Next.

Click on Warning to read the warning message, ignore the SSL certificates warning if not using SSL certificates, and click on OK.

Accept the License Agreement checkbox and select Custom as the setup type.

Enter the name of your database server and click on Test Connect after selecting the appropriate authentication method.

Enter the name of the new database that will be created on the database server.

Enter the credentials that the web server uses when connecting to the database and then click on Validate. After successful validation click on Next.

Accept the default sizes for the File Group Size and Log Files Size options and click on Next.

Accept the default path or modify it if required, click on Next, and then on Install.

Verify that Go to the EdgeSight Server website now. is checked and click on Finish.

Click on Next to continue with the Post Installation Setup Wizard web page to configure initial configuration of the EdgeSight Server.

Enter a name in the company Name field and select the Time Zone and Language values you want to use for this company. Then click on Next.

Create a Superuser account with a valid e-mail address.

Enter the FQDN or IP address of your SMTP server to be used to route the e-mails generated by the EdgeSight Server.

Select the type of agents from the drop-down menu for which uploads are supported according to your licenses.

Review your choices and click on Finish; this will open the EdgeSight Server login web page.

The EdgeSight agent can be installed during the XenApp installation or after the XenApp installation. If you want to install the EdgeSight agent with the installation of the XenApp server, during the installation of the XenApp server, when selecting the roles to be installed, make sure you select the EdgeSight Agent option:

The EdgeSight agent can also be installed after the installation of XenApp or on an existing XenApp server. The XenApp 6.5 CD image contains two agent installer files, as shown in the following screenshot:

The EdgeSightXA6Agentx64.msi installer file is used to install EdgeSight agent Version 5.4, while EdgeSightXAAgentx64.msi is used to install EdgeSight agent Version 5.3.

The installation of the agent is straightforward; the only thing one should keep in mind is that the company name should match the name specified during the EdgeSight Server setup.

The agent can also be installed via the command-line interface. A typical command line to install the agent would be:

Msiexec /i EdgeSightXA6Agentx64.msi /l logfile.log /q SERVER_NAME=ServerName COMPANY=CompanyName DEPARTMENT=DeptName REBOOT=ReallySuppress

As soon as you log in for the first time on the EdgeSight web console, you will see a message on the top such as Reporting Services is not configured or is configured incorrectly. In the Report Server URL field, enter the URL of your reporting server and the credentials for the Reporting Server. Click on the Save Changes button.

The Reporting Services Configuration Status – Webpage Dialog window pops up. Wait a few minutes for the pop-up window to configure the Reporting Services. Once the Reporting Services have been configured, click on the Close button.

If the Reporting Services Configuration Status – Webpage Dialog window does not appear and times out after 20 minutes, there is a delay in communication from the EdgeSight web server with SQL Server Reporting Services. If this happens then ensure that the SQL Server Agent service is in started state. This is required for publishing the schedules.

Verify that the default departments were created successfully by navigating to Configure | Company Configuration | Device Management | Departments.

The All root department and the XenApp Farms subdepartments are created by default during the EdgeSight installation and are usually referred as the default departments. The default departments cannot be renamed, moved, or deleted but we can modify their worker and agent properties.

The subdepartments override configuration settings inherited from parent departments. If you have two alerts mapped to the All department and three are mapped to a subdepartment, then that means that a total of five alert rules will be applied to this subdepartment.

After installing the EdgeSight agent and rebooting the XenApp server you will receive an e-mail from the EdgeSight Server that a new instance has been discovered. Verify that you start getting those e-mails. The following screenshot displays the e-mail received from the EdgeSight Server after a new device gets registered with it:

Navigate to Configure | Company Configuration | Device Management | Devices to verify that the XenApp servers on which the agent has been installed start to appear in the EdgeSight console.

Verify the EdgeSight Server's license status by navigating to Configure | Server Configuration | EdgeSight Licensing.

Verify that you only upload the data from the agents to the EdgeSight database that is important to you. Navigate to Configure | Server Configuration | Data Maintenance | Upload Configuration to make your selection according to your requirements.

To configure an authentication provider, browse to Configure | Server Configuration | Authentication and click on the New Provider button.

Select Active Directory from the list of authentication provider and click on Next.

Enter a name and description to identify the provider. If you want to configure this as the default authentication provider then also select Make this the default authentication provider. Also enter the LDAP path with the appropriate user credentials and then click on the Test button. After the message The test completed successfully, click on the Finish button.

Now we will create a new user in EdgeSight using the Active Directory User Picker and select a user from our Active Directory domain. To do this navigate to Configure | Company Configuration | Security | Users and then click on the New User button.

Select Active Directory as the authentication provider and click on Next.

Click on the Browse button to select User or Group from the Active Directory User Picker window.

Select the appropriate type as Users, Groups, or Users and Groups from the Type drop-down menu and click on the Go button to populate the list from Active Directory. Select the User or Group value you want to assign the permissions to and click on OK. Here we have selected the Domain Admins group.

Select the role you want to make this new user a member of and click on OK. You will be then returned to the Add a new user web page.

Select user permissions to be granted to the user from the Deny list box and click on Allow to grant the permission.

Click on Finish and verify that the new user you created now appears in the list.

To create a group, browse to Configure | Company Configuration | Device Management | Groups and then click on the New Group button.

The groups in the previous screenshot were created automatically during the installation of the EdgeSight Server.

Enter a name for the group and click on the Create a Group button.

The expiration period is the time after which this newly created group will automatically be deleted. This feature facilitates the management of groups created for short-term projects with a set duration, such as the evaluation of software. Groups can also be set to never expire.

The refresh period refreshes the device cache. This refresh rate generally provides you with sufficient currency of data without performing unnecessary cache refreshes.

To create an alert, navigate to Configure | Company Configuration | Alerts | Rules | New Alert Rule.

We will create an alert rule based on an application, so select the Application Alerts radio button and click on Next.

Select Application Performance as the alert type and click on Next.

Give the alert rule a name, the name of the process we want to monitor, and the CPU time in percent. Click on Next.

Select departments to assign this alert rule to and click on Next.

Select the department you wish to edit alert actions in and click on Next.

We now need to assign an action to this alert rule; we will create a new action. So select the Create New Alert Action radio button and click on Next.

We will send an e-mail notification as the alert action so select Send an email notification radio button and click on Next.

Enter a name, subject, and one or more recipient e-mail addresses for this e-mail action. You can click the Test Action button to test whether EdgeSight was able to successfully queue the message or not. Click on Finish.

Log on to the EdgeSight website, navigate to Configure | Company Configuration | Real-Time Dashboard, and then click on the New Real Time Configuration button.

Enter a name for the configuration, verify that Take me to the Add Devices and Counter wizard is checked, and then click on the Create the Configuration button.

This takes us to the Edit Devices screen. To populate the list, click on Go button and then double-click on the device name to add it to the Configuration Members list. Click on Next.

Checkmark the counter that you want to monitor and enter the threshold value for that counter. Click on Next and then click on Finish.

Click on the name of the configuration you just created. In this case it is Office2010Servers.

Click on Start Updating. To stop querying the devices, click on Stop Updating.

First we need to verify that the e-mail settings for the Reporting Services are configured properly. Log on to the server hosting your reporting services, open the Reporting Services Configuration Manager, and then select Email Settings. By default the Sender Address and SMTP Server fields are not populated automatically. After entering the appropriate information click on Apply.

Open the EdgeSight website, navigate to Configure | Server Configuration | Reporting Services | Schedules, and then click on the New Schedule button.

Specify a name for the schedule and specify other details as per your requirement. Click on the Add Schedule button.

Click on the Browse tab and the Subscriptions link of the report you want to subscribe to.

Click on the New Subscription button to create a new subscription.

The default delivery is through e-mail; in case you want to save the report to a specified folder, you can click on the Delivered by drop-down menu and select File Share. To select the schedule, click on the Schedule drop-down menu and select the schedule you want the report to be processed at; click on the Create Subscription button.

We must first specify at least one Citrix License Server by navigating to Configure | License Monitor Configuration | License Servers and then clicking on the New License Server button. For the license server name we can specify either the IP address or the FQDN of the license server.

To configure the polling interval between two pools, navigate to Configure | License Monitor Configuration | Settings.

Setting the polling interval to 15 minutes means that a polling cycle will be initiated 15 minutes from the time that the last polling cycle completed.

For usage information about the published application, make sure that the EdgeSight for XenApp Support feature is configured as On - Basic and Advanced Agents by navigating to Configure | Server Configuration | Settings | Agent Support.

To track the usage of Citrix licenses, applications, and session durations, click on the Track Usage tab.

To get the real-time performance data of a device, navigate to Troubleshoot | Device Troubleshooter.

Either enter the IP address or the name of the device you are troubleshooting in the Search field or browse in the department tree.

You can also use the slider to change the time frame for the data you want to be displayed.

Click on the Go button.

Click on the System Summary tab and look for important counters here such as Committed Bytes In Use, which displays the usage of the system memory.

Click on the counter you want to have a much deeper look at and EdgeSight will display more detailed information in a pop-up window. You can also click on a point on the pop-up chart to display point-in-time data for the counter.

We first need to find the data files that are larger in size than other data files. We can run the following query to extract this information:

SELECT Name, (size*8)/1024 Size
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE DB_NAME(database_id) = 'Edgesight'

The following table is the output I received after executing the query. Your output (size) will be different:

From the previous results we can see that in our case the database Edgesight_FG6_Data is the largest in size. The size is in MBs.

The next step is to determine the names of the tables that are hosted by that particular file group. We can determine those names by running the following query:

SELECT  DISTINCT object_name(sys.sysindexes.id) as 'Table Name' ,sys.filegroups.name as 'File Group Name'
FROM sys.sysindexes, sys.filegroups
WHERE objectproperty(sys.sysindexes.id,'IsUserTable') = 1
AND sys.filegroups.data_space_id = sys.sysindexes.groupid
ORDER BY sys.filegroups.name

The output from this query in my case was as follows:

The next step now would be to find out the number of rows in each table. Run the following query in SQL Server Management Studio to find the number of rows in both the core_net_trans and core_net_stat tables:

SELECT sysobjects.Name, sysindexes.Rows
FROM sysobjects INNER JOIN sysindexes ON sysobjects.id = sysindexes.id
WHERE sysindexes.IndId < 2 AND sysobjects.Name IN('core_net_stat', 'core_net_trans')

The output from this query in my case was as follows:

These results clearly tell us that the table named core_net_trans has more rows than core_net_stat and hence core_net_trans would also be much larger in size compared to core_net_stat.

The next step would be to find out the number of records that for some reason could not be deleted after the number of Groom Days has passed. The default Groom Days value for both the core_net_trans and core_net_stat tables is 10 days. To verify the Groom Days you can navigate to Configure | Server Configuration | Data Maintenance | Grooming.

We can use the following query to determine the number of records (if any) that could not be deleted:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM CORE_NET_TRANS
WHERE dtperiod < GETUTCDATE() – 10

Now we can run this query to delete rows by increments of 100,000:

Declare @row int; cf1 declare @date datetime; cf1 set @date = GETUTCDATE() - 10
Set @row = (select COUNT(*) from core_net_trans where dtperiod < @date);
While @row <> 0
Begin
Delete top(100000) from core_net_trans where dtperiod < @date
Set @row = (select COUNT(*) from core_net_trans where dtperiod < @date);
End;

We also need to reclaim the disk space after removing the unwanted rows. To do that, open SQL Server Management Studio and right-click on your EdgeSight database name. Here I have used EdgeSight as the name; hence, click on EdgeSight | Tasks | Shrink | Files.

Select FG6 as the Filegroup value and click on OK.