HDX™ Monitor
Citrix has invested a lot of time and money in improving its products to provide a high-definition experience to its customers by introducing HDX technologies. With HDX, it had become essential to properly configure these features on your XenDesktop and XenApp environments. Many administrators faced real challenges in understanding whether the Citrix policies that are enabled for HDX features really work or not.
It had become difficult to isolate the issues related to HDX and sometimes, configuring HDX policies incorrectly caused the user experience to be impacted badly resulting in session choppiness and delayed mouse and keyboard response.
So, to help its customers, Citrix has released this wonderful tool called HDX Monitor for XenApp and XenDesktop. The latest version of this tool has come up with some new features that allow administrators to customize the metrics required to troubleshoot.
The tool can be downloaded from https://taas.citrix.com/hdx/download/.
The HDX Monitor tool is used to diagnose and monitor the activity of VDA and its features, analyze the data, and issue alerts on the console to make you aware about incorrect configuration and performance. The home screen looks like this:
Let's discuss the basic features and functionality that the HDX monitor provides to administrators:
- Adobe Flash: This is used to monitor and troubleshoot Flash redirection issues. A red cross on the screenshot suggests that Flash is either not installed or not working correctly. You can click on Adobe Flash and it will show you the detailed description of the issue. Please refer to the following screenshot for details:
- Audio: This is used to know if audio redirection is enabled and is working fine.
- Client: This component is used to monitor if the right client is installed and compatible with handling all HDX policies.
- Graphics - Thinwire: The graphics component provides information about the configuration set in the XenApp and XenDesktop environment for graphics and it also captures the network performance of Graphics Thinwire.
This is one of the most important components in the HDX Monitor tool, as many Citrix administrators face challenges while configuring the right set of policies to be used to deliver HDX experience to endusers.
The following information is key and worth noting:
- Max FPS
- Min FPS
- Frames per second
- Progressive display
- Adaptive display
- Extra color compression
- Heavyweight JPEG
Let's have a look at the new graphics settings that come with XenDesktop 7.x:
These are some of the key changes that were introduced in XenDesktop 7.x and everyone should be aware of these before playing with HDX policies.
When we open HDX Monitor with the default graphics settings enabled, we notice that the Adaptive Display is disabled:
This means that you are using new codecs that are available with XenDesktop 7.x and not using first generation Adaptive Display.
If you look at the WMI tab for advance details, you will notice that the legacy graphics mode is turned off by a policy:
This is now default behavior. If you have your user based in LAN environments and you want to revert back to the Adaptive Display mode, you can always change the policy to enable the legacy graphics mode, which in turn would enable first generation Adaptive Display. Moreover, you need to switch off the desktop composition redirection to make it work.
However, keep in mind that changing the graphic settings to Adaptive Display can badly impact your WAN-based mobile users.
Note
To provide HDX experience to users working on graphics-intensive applications, you can leverage GPU rendering on physical devices in the data center or GPU rendering on the hypervisor using GPU passthrough. For more details, please refer to the following links:
- www.nvidia.com/object/xendesktop-vgpu.html
- https://www.citrix.com/content/dam/citrix/en_us/documents/go/configuring-xenserver-to-use-nvidia-grid.pdf?accessmode=direct
- https://www.citrix.com/content/dam/citrix/en_us/documents/go/reviewers-guide-remote-3d-graphics-apps-part-2-vsphere-gpu-passthrough.pdf
- Graphics - Thinwire Advanced: This is used to monitor the bandwidth of the graphics in a particular session; it can also be used to monitor network performance.
- Mapped Client Drives: This component is used to validate the client drive mapping functionality:
- Network: This component is used to monitor the network bandwidth performance for established sessions:
Sometimes, you will notice an error on the network component saying Citrix Receiver does not support collecting network information.
This error is reported due to inactive ICA sessions. You should make sure that the session you are monitoring is active. The other reason could be that the Perfmon counters are corrupted.
- Printing and Scanner: These tell you whether your printers' and scanners' redirection is working fine or not. The following screenshot shows the settings for scanners:
The following screenshot shows the settings for printers.
- Smart Cards: If you use smart cards in your environment, you can get the diagnostic details here:
- System Information: This provides the system information for the XenApp server or the VDA device that you are monitoring:
- VDA: This provides the details related to the VDA agent:
- Windows Media: Monitoring this component can help you with Windows Media redirection issues in your XenApp or XenDesktop environment:
Note
To understand Windows Media redirection, you can refer to the Citrix article at http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX137469.