How to Accurately Troubleshoot Citrix ICA Network and Connectivity Related Issues

When troubleshooting Citrix end user experience issues, problems are often rooted in the bandwidth users have available for Citrix connectivity or Citrix connection latency. However, these conditions are not visible from a pure network monitoring perspective, as network monitoring tools can only leverage Netflow, AppFlow Analysis, SNMP, SYSLOG or ICMP monitoring. The key data necessary to gain visibility to a user’s session is found in the Citrix ICA Protocol and requires protocol integration from the VDA to access the necessary metrics on a user basis – not a network device, route, or trunk. This user-based approach to tracing their network performance enables Goliath to isolate the conditions affecting one or many users with sessions traversing the same network where some are experiencing a problem and others are not. These issues can be accurately identified, and connectivity constraints more accurately determined, by looking at the following metrics: User Connection Speed, Network Latency (from the Citrix ICA Channel), ICA RTT, and ICA Latency.

Figure 1: ICA Latency, ICA RTT and ICA Network Latency

These metrics are valuable because they take the entire stack – user connectivity, network performance, VDA performance, hosting environment and user behavior into consideration for more accurate troubleshooting.

When you use the product for troubleshooting consider the following:

When troubleshooting slowness, the primary question you need to answer is whether the slowness is due to a network/connectivity issue or a resource issue. The quickest way to make that determination is by reviewing the user’s Network Latency, Citrix ICA RTT, and Connection Speed.
The network latency we show here is not your common ICMP/Ping based network latency, but rather a measurement through a unique integration into Citrix ICA protocol that no one else can show you. Because of that we can measure the true network latency in real-time, which is the foundation for ICA performance. If network latency is persistently high, your users are not going to have a better Citrix ICA RTT or ICA Latency than network latency allows, resulting in poor end-user experience.
Additionally, the connection speed is a measurement of how much bandwidth your end user has on their endpoint for Citrix. Here’s why that’s important: If your user is on a laptop, Citrix must share bandwidth with Windows, other applications, windows updates, etc. and does not get a complete share to the full bandwidth available to the endpoint. If your users are on a thin client or mobile device, this can be even more problematic, and we have even seen where some thin clients end up on WiFi during upgrades and rollouts instead of the wired connection as expected.
So, by looking at the Network Latency and Connection speed we can determine if the user’s connectivity is the source of problems. High Network Latency points to route and connection performance issues, and low connection speed indicates network connectivity/wan issues which are going to impact the user’s experience.
If Network Latency and Connection Speed are fine then the Network can be eliminated from the equation, and we can focus on resource availability

If a user’s Citrix ICA RTT is high that allows us to quickly identify if there are enough resources for the application and user activity, or the session host is able to deliver the responsiveness for the user to have a good experience. If the user is experiencing slowness and it does not manifest in Citrix ICA RTT, the problem is most likely lower in the stack in the host or storage architecture.

When troubleshooting network and connectivity related issues the information necessary is all contained under the View > XenApp & XenDesktop Session Display.

Goliath Performance Monitor is the only product that can open up the ICA protocol in this way to give you the visibility and the accurate metrics to determine slowness, and the combination of all of the above metrics are required to achieve that determination.

Click here to learn more about our Citrix ICA capabilities or download the guide below.

a technical guide for understanding and troubleshooting citrix ICA HDX

MTM Hits End User Uptime SLAs with Goliath Technologies

“Goliath Technologies is the only truly proactive end-to-end monitoring and management solution for Citrix. Goliath provides deep metrics and analysis necessary for organizations to get ahead of issues in the three key areas that often cause pain for end users: logon initiation, logon duration and session performance.”
– John Byrne, MTM Technologies Director of NOC Technologies

MTM Technologies, Inc., is a Citrix Service Provider and leading national provider of next-generation IT solutions and services to Global 2000, enterprise organizations, and mid-size companies. MTM is a National Platinum Citrix Partner and VMware Premier Partner. MTM, who maintains all four Citrix specializations, works with Citrix to assist companies with the demands of today’s mobile workforce. Whether on-premises or in the cloud, by combining Citrix’s product suite with MTM’s branded professional and managed services enterprise, commercial and government organizations are provided a robust solution to serve their mobile workers their applications and data in a highly secure manner.

The Customer’s Infrastructure: Citrix XenServer 6.5, Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop & Citrix NetScaler

The Business Challenge: Current Monitoring Vendor has Performance Visibility Gaps with Citrix XenServer, XenApp, XenDesktop, NetScaler, & End User Experience

As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), MTM Technologies designs SLAs that are unique to each customer but essentially focus on delivering a positive end user experience. MTM’s monitoring backbone to deliver these services had been Nimsoft for infrastructure and SolarWinds for the Network.

These are good tools but neither product offers purpose-built functionality for Citrix Monitoring and specifically the ability to proactively determine if there is a problem with Citrix Logon Initiation, Logon Duration or Session Performance.

Goal of Being Proactive

There are products that can tell MTM if something failed after the fact, but they needed something to give them advance warning before Citrix end users were impacted. MTM deemed it critical to use proactive Citrix Monitoring technology to ensure that performance based SLAs were met when offering Remote Infrastructure Monitoring (RIM), Monitoring as a Service (MAAS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

Unsure of Root Cause of End User Experience Issues

MTM wanted absolute visibility and predictability in their Citrix Performance Monitoring for XenApp and especially around the Citrix End User Experience in situations where they were providing RIM, MaaS or delivering DaaS. Essentially, MTM needed advance notice and alerts when logon initiation failures or slowness occurred.

Then, if there was a failure or degradation of service, MTM needed the correlated data from the end point through the NetScalers and the backend Citrix delivery architecture to determine the root cause so they could deploy remediation actions. This required logon simulation alerting and logon duration analysis as depicted in the below real-time screen shot of the Goliath Application Availability Monitor.

Real-time Application Availability Dashboard

Many times the logon initiation process was successful but the logon process was sluggish. In this case, MTM used the logon duration drill down which dissects 33 different, though interrelated, steps in the logon process as depicted below. Armed with this logon duration detail MTM was able to pinpoint the true root cause of logon duration slowness and resolve the issue permanently—before end user performance is impacted.

Real-time Citrix Logon Duration Drill Down

“Citrix is Slow!” Alerts

With MTM supporting many customers and SLAs, some running over 2500 VDI sessions, they needed alerts for the ambiguous “Citrix is slow” complaint.

Citrix CSPs, and especially Citrix Administrators, know that Citrix gets the blame when performance issues arise, which is why comprehensive Citrix monitoring is critical. Often, the true culprit of session performance issues are some element in the supporting infrastructure. MTM’s other base requirement was to have the visibility into the entire Citrix delivery infrastructure by having two unique capabilities; one, a drill down into a specific Citrix user’s session and two, a break down of the HDX latency and session performance in real-time.

Real-time Citrix ICA/HDX Channel Drill Down

Real-time Citrix Session Performance Drill Down

Finally, MTM needed to run historical reports and analysis to determine long-term performance trends because if they couldn’t see what happened, it would be impossible to be proactive. The requirement was to have the necessary reports available out-of-the-box. Armed with this data, MTM can customize Goliath’s Citrix Monitoring software to send threshold-based alerts and simultaneous remediation actions before end users are affected.

Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop End User Experience Report

Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop Logon Duration Report

Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop ICA Latency Report

Goliath has 66 of these types of performance and end user experience reports for Citrix and VMware, all of which come out-of-the-box with Goliath Performance Monitor.

The Solution: Choose a Proactive End-to-End Solution

Based on MTM’s criteria to proactively manage end user experience and satisfy their SLAs—ICA Latency, Logon Simulation, Logon Duration, and Session Performance—Goliath was the clear solution.

MTM chose Goliath Technologies Citrix Monitoring to solve visibility gaps, end user experience issues and meet SLAs, but there was more than just deep metrics that factored into their decision, which include:

Service Level Agreements: Goliath’s suite of proactive IT performance monitoring and management technology allows MTM to meet their SLAs.
Multi-tenancy: MSPs like MTM can use Goliath to proactively manage environments by criteria such as customer, location, application, infrastructure, etc.
Master “Intelligent” Agent: This is an ultra-low resource utilization (0.1% CPU) agent to monitor remote locations without maintaining an external connection. The “Intelligent” Agent gathers numerous metrics like the ICA/HDX Channel and the Hypervisor, and it can execute remediation actions on XenApp Servers, XenDesktop VDI, Citrix Role Servers, & End Points.
MSP Management: Centralized management of the end user experience for MSPs.
Share Data with other Tools: Can send data to Nimsoft, SolarWinds, etc.
Custom Reporting: Real-time dashboards and historical reports that are branded with MTM’s logo.

As you can see from the above screenshots, MTM is able to use Goliath Performance Monitor and the Goliath Application Availability Monitor for Citrix to gain complete visibility into the end users’ sessions, XenServer and XenDesktop performance data, and end user experience metrics in a single view.

With Goliath, MTM can trend utilization over time and see exactly what is happening with remote users to troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and proactively deploy remediation actions to ensure a positive end user experience.

Drake University Troubleshoots Citrix, Windows, & Mac OS Experience Issues

How We Did IT

Drake University Troubleshoots Citrix, Windows, & Mac OS Experience Issues

“The initial reasons for selecting Goliath Performance Monitor were the rare combination of purpose-built functionality for monitoring Citrix XenApp and the supporting VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure. We have extended the utilization of Goliath to monitor XenDesktop 7.6 farm and added functionality like Goliath Application Availability Monitor for Citrix daily health check reports to proactively ensure end-to-end connectivity so users have seamless access to Citrix delivered applications.”

– Chris Mielke, Infrastructure & Security Services Lead at Drake University

Infrastructure

Citrix XenApp 7.6, Citrix XenDesktop 7.6, & Citrix XenServer 6.5

Challenge

End Users Experience Issues with Virtualized Windows on Mac OS

The Drake Infrastructure Team was having an issue with the performance of virtualized Microsoft Windows instances on Mac OS. More specifically, the College of Business users or students were having performance issues when attempting to use Excel.

Solution

The Drake Team worked with their integrator, Choice Solutions, to leverage Goliath for Monitoring Citrix XenApp and monitoring vSphere virtual infrastructure to troubleshoot and isolate server resources as the root cause of the performance issues. Once the failure point was identified, they were able to resolve the issue quickly by adding server capacity.

The figure below shows how the logon stages are broken down within a single user session and the screen an administrator sees to diagnosis root cause.

Beyond the performance issue related to Windows, the team has also been able to resolve storage latency issues and in general maintain a proactive IT posture by monitoring Citrix, Monitoring vSphere, and Citrix end user experience.

In addition to Goliath Performance Monitor’s Citrix reporting functionality, Chris now also uses the Goliath Application Availability Monitor to proactively get ahead of any potential logon issues in Drake’s Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop 7.6 environment.

This ensures a positive end user experience from session logon and duration to session performance. Chris stated that, “the logon data captured is very good, because of the deep visibility gained as a result of testing the entire Citrix delivery infrastructure, including the NetScaler.”

Results

To resolve the Windows and Mac OS performance issue, Chris needed objective evidence that isolated the root cause of the issue. This can only be had using a comprehensive Citrix monitoring tool that also deeply monitors Vmware vSphere. From there, Chris and his team could ultimately prevent the issue from occurring again.

With his selection of Goliath Technologies for his Citrix and VMware vSphere monitoring needs, Chris is now proactively providing Drake’s students with a positive Citrix end user experience.

ABOUT UNIVERSITY

Drake University is recognized as one of the finest universities for experiential learning. As a midsize, private university, Drake offers students the benefits and resources of a larger institution with the advantages of intimate class sizes and close personal relationships.

Headquarters location: Des Moines, Iowa
Founded: 1881
Employees: >2000
Students: >5300
Industry: Education and Academic

Law Firm Reduces Citrix Support Tickets by 60%

How We Did IT