User Experience Dashboard
One of the biggest challenges that Citrix/virtual desktop administrators have is that they often have to spend time troubleshooting problems that may be caused in other parts of the infrastructure that they do not control. For instance, a slowdown in the home network that a user is connecting from can impact the user experience when accessing a Citrix service. eG Enterprise v6 includes an End-user Performance Dashboard that makes it possible for end-users themselves to view the performance metrics related to their access to the Citrix/VDI infrastructure. This way, end users can easily determine when they see a slowdown, is the problem being caused by connectivity to the Citrix infrastructure, by any application(s) that they are using within a Citrix session, or by the Citrix infrastructure itself. If a performance problem is in the interconnecting network or in one of the applications the user has launched, the user can initiate corrective action (e.g., kill the offending process, contact the local network team, etc.) to alleviate the issue.
End-users do not have to login to the eG monitoring console to access the dashboard. Administrators can publish the dashboard for public viewing. By entering his/her domain user name, an end-user can get to see the performance of his / her Citrix or virtual desktop session. Historical performance can also be observed for all key metrics.
Citrix/Virtual desktop administrators can also use the same dashboard to handle user complaints. When a specific user calls, they can view the performance dashboard for that user and determine what action needs to be taken to resolve the issue. This industry first end-user performance dashboard for Citrix/virtual desktop infrastructures great simplifies the day to day operation of a Citrix/virtual desktop infrastructure. The self-service capability that the end-user performance dashboard provides results in fewer complaints and trouble calls to the Citrix/virtual desktop helpdesk. As a result, support costs are lower, end-users are less frustrated and the Citrix/virtual desktop deployment can proceed to successful completion.
To view the User Experience Dashboard:
- To access this page, click on the
icon available in the Admin tab. Then, select the User Experience Dashboard option under the Dashboards tile. - The User/Desktop available in the environment will be listed in this page. Clicking on the user name will direct you to the dashboard page of the specific user.
- While end-users may want to zoom into the performance of their virtual desktops after a problem occurs, administrators may want to detect potential problems with virtual desktops much before end-users even notice them! For this, administrators will have to quickly figure out which user is logged into which desktop across the infrastructure and how each desktop is performing. This page provides administrators with this useful information.
- This page reports the state of all active user sessions in the entire VDI infrastructure across hypervisors (if more than one is used in the environment), indicates which user is logged into which desktop currently, and displays measures that denote the current performance-level of each desktop.
- By default, the page is sorted based on the states of the desktops displayed in the Users/Desktops column. You can however, change the sort order by clicking on any other column in this page. Doing so will sort the contents of the page in the descending order of the values displayed in the corresponding column. This way, within seconds, administrators can isolate those virtual desktops where users are performing CPU-intensive / memory-intensive / I/O-intensive / bandwidth-intensive operations.
- Also, to bring abnormal user activity to the immediate attention of administrators, this page displays upfront the name of that user who has the maximum number of open sessions in the VDI environment, currently. This user name is displayed against User with maximum active sessions (see Figure 5). To take a quick look at the desktops this user is currently logged into and what is happening inside each desktop, administrators can use the Search text box in this page. By simply typing the name of the errant user in this box and clicking the magnifying glass icon alongside, administrators can view the state and the level of activity of only those desktops that are currently accessed by the specified user. Idle desktops can thus be identified and later released for the use of other end-users.
- Administrators can also select the number of desktop users to be displayed in this page from the Limit To drop down list. By default, the number of desktop users displayed in this page is 20. If you wish to view all the desktop users, then select the ALL option from this list.
- By default, this page provides an overview of the performance of virtual desktops, regardless of the hypervisor on which the desktops are operating. However, if administrators need the flexibility to pick and choose the hypervisor for which desktop performance is to be displayed in this page, then they need to set the showVdiHostCombo to true in the END_USER_DASHBOARD_SETTINGS section of the
\manager\config\eg_endUserDetails.ini file. Once this is done, a drop-down list will appear in this page, with VMware vSphere VDI as the default component type. You can pick any other virtualization platform from this list to view the user sessions on the desktops operating on that virtualization platform alone. - Administrators can also modify the default configuration settings of the dashboard by clicking on the icon. The Configuration Settings pop up window that appears (see Figure 7) will help you override the following default settings:
- By default, the END USER PERFORMANCE OVERVIEW page will display the details of the top-20 users/desktops in the environment. To view the details of more or less number of desktops by default, you need to change the value of the Maximum number of Users/Desktops parameter. If you wish to see all the desktop users by default, then select the ALL option from this list.
- Specify how frequently (in seconds) this page should refresh in the Refresh Frequency text box.
- To add or delete a measure from the END USER PERFORMANCE OVERVIEW page, choose the Add or Delete option (as the case may be). If the Add option is chosen, follow the steps below to add a new measure column to the page:
- Select the Test that reports the measure to be added.
- Select the Measure to be added.
- Specify a Display Name for the measure.
To delete an existing measure from the page, do the following:
- Select the Test that reports the measure to be deleted.
- Pick the Measure to be deleted.