Citrix has been working hard for the last few years to simplify its consoles and we must say that they have succeeded in this with the release of XenDesktop 7.x. Thanks to their efforts in this area, we now have just two consoles to effectively carry out all our primary duties with Studio and Director.

Citrix Studio is one of the Citrix management consoles provided with the Citrix XenDesktop suite that all Citrix administrators will be using to configure and deliver apps and desktops for their enterprise environment.

You can organize your resources in the form of machine catalogs, delivery groups, and also provide access to delegated administrators.

Citrix Studio is installed by default on all the Citrix Desktop Delivery Controllers. The initial configuration for the creation of site and database connections is established using this console.

You can also configure secure RemotePC access...

The Director is the primary tool for helpdesk administrators to troubleshoot basic issues within the XenDesktop environment. This console has been improved by Citrix in their last few releases and it has only gotten better.

With Director 7, you can now integrate Citrix NetScaler Insight to resolve session performance issues. You can view HDX NetScaler Insight in Director views and easily identify whether the issue is related to network.

Director comes with a very informative dashboard displaying the relevant diagnostic details of your XenDesktop infrastructure. Please refer to the following screenshot of the Director dashboard:

The preceding...

Citrix Diagnostic Facility, or simply CDF, has been around since 2007 and is still considered to be the most used diagnostic tool by Citrix administrators. It has been recently added into Citrix Scout; however, you can still download it as an individual utility from https://www.citrix.com. This tool works well with all the latest releases of Citrix XenDesktop.

CDFControl is an event-tracing utility that is made to capture all Citrix-related diagnostic information and that gets its output from Citrix subsystem DLLs. You need to have local administrator rights on the system to start an event trace.

It's always recommended to have a trace captured before opening a case with Citrix because they will always ask for the capture as the first thing.

Once downloaded, you can run CDFControl.exe from the specified folder on the system to take your first trace. It will present...

To troubleshoot all the issues arising in the XenDesktop environment, you should be aware of what is cooking under the hood of the XenDesktop architecture. For this purpose, enabling service logging, VDA agent logging, and Controller logging is very essential and the key point here.

Service-based logging can be enabled via the command line or by using Citrix Scout, which is installed by default on XenDesktop 7.5 and later versions. Citrix Scout lacks some feature logging capability; it doesn't enable Citrix Broker Service agent logging.

So, it's always better to enable your environment's service-based logging using the command line or PowerShell:

BrokerService.exe –Logfile "C:\XDLogs\Citrix Broker Service.log"

After you have successfully configured...

If you are a Windows or Citrix administrator, you might have heard the terms Perfmon and Procmon before. These are Microsoft tools that have been around from the NT era and have been used by all administrators for their daily troubleshooting issues.

Perfmon or Performance Monitor is used to monitor system performance such as CPU, memory, and network bandwidth being used by an operating system, applications, services, and so on. Perfmon is installed by default during Windows installation.

Procmon or Process Monitor is a free tool provided by Microsoft Sysinternals. The tool is used to monitor real-time activity of all the processes on the Windows platform. It combines two old tools called RegMon and FileMon, used to track registry and file access activities.

Procmon can be used to track failed attempts against accessing the registry, file shares, detect file errors, critical system processes, and many more.

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...

In the recent past, Citrix released a tool called Citrix Scout; it collects diagnostic information for the XenDesktop product suite. It has been made user-friendly and now has just a start and stop button to capture a diagnostic log.

You can download Citrix Scout from http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130147.

You can upload the Scout log to the Citrix Auto Support site (TAAS) to get a quick analysis by the TAAS engines.

There are certain prerequisites that should be met before you start configuring Citrix Scout; they are as follows:

The Citrix Quick Launch tool is used to create ICA sessions similar to the older ICA clients. However, it is not a replacement for your Citrix ICA client or receiver. It doesn't work until you have the ICA client installed on the client device.

It was solely developed by Citrix to be used by administrators to test and is not recommended or supported by Citrix. It can be your go-to tool if you are troubleshooting published application launch issues. With this tool, you can create ICA files with specified XML service port details and the right launch mechanism:

To download and configure it correctly for the purpose of using it with XenDesktop- and XenApp-based ICA sessions, please read the article at http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122536.

Print Detective is a utility used to troubleshoot issues related to printer drivers. It gathers information related to all the printer drivers, including driver-specific information, and then enumerates them on the specified Windows machine.

It is one of the most important tools to troubleshoot printer issues in the XenApp and XenDesktop environment. The tool is really useful to remove or delete conflicting printer drivers that can make your XenApp server or user VDI machine unstable and can cause the print spooler service to keep crashing.

You can launch it by executing PrintDetective.exe to gather information on the relevant print drivers, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can analyze your event viewer application log to get the details of bad printer drivers that are crashing the print spooler service on the XenApp server or VDI:

After you identify the respective print drivers, you can delete them using the Print Detective tool from the specific Windows machine.

The StressPrinters utility is used to troubleshoot printer problems in a terminal service or remote desktop service environment and is basically meant for Citrix XenApp. However, you can also use it for standalone Windows operating system and XenDesktop VDIs, as it doesn't have any dependency on Citrix-specific components.

This tool is used to simulate the creation of printers using specific printer drivers. This helps in identifying the corrupted or conflicting printer drivers that are actually causing the spooler to crash.

In a remote desktop service environment (Citrix XenApp), multiple users log in to work on published applications or desktops. Some drivers don't respond properly when processing multiple threads of printing jobs in a remote desktop service environment. Due to this, the print spooler sometimes crashes. This utility can help reproduce the issue in a simulated StressPrinters GUI environment using the same printer driver.

You can download this utility from http...

The XenDesktop Site Checker tool is used to validate the functioning of active XenDesktop sites. It enumerates the XenDesktop site brokers, services, hosts, assignments, catalogs, provisioning tasks, and schemas with the user of the PowerShell SDKs in the background.

You can use this tool to check the status of services, whether they are running OK or not; service instances are registered and it even provides the ability to enable logging for each service. However, this tool is outdated and can be used only for XenDesktop 5.x sites. A new tool is under development to replace this tool for XenDesktop 7.x sites.

The new tool is not supported by Citrix yet, but it...

XDPing is a command-line tool developed by Citrix to assist in analyzing and troubleshooting misconfiguration issues in the XenDesktop environment. You can run this tool from the PowerShell prompt on a remote computer or from the Controller server; it provides information about all your network interfaces, logged-in users, time synchronization issues, and domain membership details along with DNS lookup data.

This tool is supported on all the latest releases of the XenDesktop product. The tool comes with two files: XDping.exe and XDPing.exe.config. You can place these two files wherever you want. To run this tool from the command prompt, you can browse to the directory where it is placed and then run the following command to learn about all the available syntaxes it provides:

C:\Xdping /help

Running this tool with the /host switch will give you the following output; this can help administrators troubleshoot any communication issues between a controller and VDA machines:

XDPing 2.3...

XDDBDiag is a command line tool provided by Citrix to help us perform consistency checks on data and connectivity verification for the XenDesktop site database. It provides diagnostic output in comma-separated value files (.csv).

The output files contain the following information:

The tool can be run from a command prompt on the controller. The syntax to be used to run this tool is as follows:

C:\XDDBDiag windows MySQLServer SQLDB

The result of the preceding command is as follows:

Data Compression disabled
windowscitrixdbXD_test_dbXDDBDiag 4 Citrix Support
UpdateVersion Error The remote server returned an error: (407) Proxy Authentication Required.
Unable to detect latest version - Can not find https://taas.citrix.com/tools/XDDbDiag/version.xml
Preparing to execute database consistency checks...
DBCollation...