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Excel Services is built on the SharePoint products and technologies platform. There are three core components of Excel Services:

The role of Excel Calculation Service is to load workbooks, calculate them, call custom code (user-defined functions) and refresh external data. It also maintains the session state for interactivity. Excel Calculation Services maintains a session for the duration of interactions with the same workbook by a user or caller. A session is closed when the caller explicitly closes it or when the session times out on the server. Excel Services caches the opened Excel workbooks, calculation states, and external data query results, for improved performance when multiple users access the same set of workbooks.

In order to determine the quality of the user experience with the Excel Calculation Service, it is essential to know how smooth the user-service interaction is, how quickly the service is able to process the requests, and how effectively the service utilizes its caches. The Excel Calculation Services test closely monitors the aforesaid performance parameters, and accurately gauges the health of the service.

This test will report metrics only if the Excel Calculation Service is available on the target SharePoint server.

Outputs of the test: One set of results each for the Microsoft SharePoint server that is being monitored

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Requests_with_Errors	Indicates the number of requests to the Excel Calculation Service that are returned with errors per second.	Requests/Sec	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low.
Mem_util	This value represents the ratio of the resident set size of the memory utilized by the user to the physical memory of the host system, expressed as a percentage. If a user is connected via multiple sessions, the value reported is the sum of all memory utilizations across all the sessions.	Percent	This value indicates the percentage of memory resources that are used up by a specific user. By comparing this value across users, an administrator can identify the most heavy users of the Citrix XenApp server. Check the detailed diagnosis to view the offending processes/applications.
ICA_nwlatency	Indicates the latency experienced by this user when transmitting/receiving data over the ICA channel.	Secs	This measure represents the network latency detected between the ICA client and the Citrix XenApp server being monitored. If both the Screen refresh latency and Client network latency measures report high values, it implies that network slowness is contributing to user-perceived Citrix slowness (i.e., the problem is not due to the Citrix servers, but probably due to the network connection that the user is connecting from - e.g., a wireless WAN). If Screen refresh latency is high and Client network latency is low, this implies that there is a bottleneck in the Citrix stack that is causing user experience to be poor (e.g., overloaded server or virtual platform, slowness in storage, etc.). Slowness can also occur because of client-side processing delays on the receiver end.
Latency_avg	Indicates the average time interval measured at the client between the first step (user action) and the last step (graphical response displayed) of this user's interactions with the server. The value reported is the average of the latencies for all the current sessions of a user.	Secs	This is a measurement of the screen lag that a user experiences while interacting with the XenApp server. In other words, is the latency detected from when the user hits a key until the response is displayed. Comparing the value of this measure across users will enable administrators to quickly and accurately identify users who are experiencing higher latency when interacting with the XenApp server. If both the Screen refresh latency and Client network latency measures report high values, it implies that network slowness is contributing to user-perceived Citrix slowness (i.e., the problem is not due to the Citrix servers, but probably due to the network connection that the user is connecting from - e.g., a wireless WAN). If Screen refresh latency is high and Client network latency is low, this implies that there is a bottleneck in the Citrix stack that is causing user experience to be poor (e.g., overloaded server or virtual platform, slowness in storage, etc.). Slowness can also occur because of client-side processing delays on the receiver end.
IO_reads	Indicates the rate of I/O reads done by all processes being run by this user.	KBps	These metrics measure the collective I/O activity (which includes file, network and device I/O's) generated by all the processes being executed by a user. When viewed along with the system I/O metrics reported by the DiskActivityTest, these measures help you determine the network I/O. Comparison across users helps identify the user who is running the most I/O-intensive processes. Check the detailed diagnosis for the offending processes/applications.
IO_writes	Indicates the rate of I/O writes done by all processes being run by this user.	KBps	These metrics measure the collective I/O activity (which includes file, network and device I/O's) generated by all the processes being executed by a user. When viewed along with the system I/O metrics reported by the DiskActivityTest, these measures help you determine the network I/O. Comparison across users helps identify the user who is running the most I/O-intensive processes. Check the detailed diagnosis for the offending processes/applications.