The Director console (Desktop Director)
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.
Note
Please note that the HDX Insight integration feature is for Citrix Platinum customers only. To read more on HDX Insight, please download the NetScaler HDX Insight deployment guide from https://www.citrix.com/content/dam/citrix/en_us/documents/products-solutions/netscaler-insight-center-deployment-and-sizing-guide.pdf.
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 screenshot of the dashboard shows the details of failed machines, user connection failures, established sessions, licensing issues, the current capacity, and logon duration among many others. The data is updated every minute on the console.
The Director console provides two detailed views that can help helpdesk technicians in identifying and troubleshooting issues. We will go through each of the views and understand their functionality and the data they provide to administrators.
The Filters view
Basic troubleshooting begins with digging into the user session details. The dashboard provides sufficient information on connected and failed sessions. If you click on Sessions Connected or User Connection Failures, it will automatically take you to the Filters view for the session details; an example is shown in the following screenshot:
Similarly, you can click on the failed connections and see the details of all the connection failures under the Filters view, as shown in the following screenshot:
The Filters view provides you with all the required details for the failures, such as failure reason, time of failure, machines affected, and other relevant details. You can select columns to get more details on the failures. This is really useful for helpdesk staff; they can look at these events and take the necessary actions at their level to resolve these issues.
You can also get the details of the machines by selecting the Machines radio button under this view.
The Trends view
The dashboard provides the data of the last hour, so it is really good to have some historical data to look at and that can provide you with more details for the past week or past month. Administrators can click on Trends on the dashboard and will be redirected to the Trends view on the Director console. Please have a look at the following screenshot for reference:
Here, you can select the time period to view the historical trends for the sessions, connection failures, failed desktop or server machines, logon performance, load evaluators, and network details.
By using these two views, the helpdesk staff can easily identify basic issues for desktop connections and troubleshoot/fix them.