Citrix Scout
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:
- Local admin rights on the Delivery Controller server
- Local admin rights on the remote machines
- WinRM needs to be enabled and configured on remote machines
- Remote registry needs to be enabled on remote machines
- All machines should be in the same domain
- You should be running at least PowerShell version 2.0
- File and print services should be enabled on remote machines
- .NET framework 3.5 SP1 and above
Configuring and running Citrix Scout
Before we jump into configuring Scout, let's have a look at the basic configuration of Citrix Scout. Launch the Citrix Scout console and then click on Config | Settings in the main menu.
The basic configuration enables you to change the settings for CDF tracing within this tool:
If you look at the utilities included within this tool, you will notice that CDFControl is one, along with XDPing and XDDBDiag:
These utilities can be used as standalone utilities to perform diagnosis. Citrix Scout uses CDFControl to perform CDF tracing.
The following steps need to be followed when configuring Citrix Scout for the first time on the Controller server prior to XenDesktop v7.x:
- Download and unzip the package on the Controller server.
- Execute
run.exe. - From the Tool menu, click on Options and select Config.
- Make changes to the default settings, if required.
- Click on Start CDF Trace.
- Select all controllers or VDAs experiencing the issue.
- Select the default modules to start the trace.
- Reproduce the issue for which you would like to capture details.
- Click Stop CDF Trace once the issue has been reproduced.
CDF trace files are written to the same folder where you have downloaded Scout.
Let's have a look at capturing a basic CDF trace. To start the CDF trace, you need to click on Start CDF Trace within the Citrix Scout console. You will notice that the Delivery Controller from where you started the trace is automatically selected, as shown in the following screenshot:
If you have any issues or if the previously mentioned prerequisites are not met, you will see an action item under the Action column:
In the preceding screenshot, it is clearly visible that the particular VDA machine doesn't have WinRM enabled on it. You can double-click on the action item and it will give you an option to enable WinRM remotely, provided that you have admin privileges on the remote machine.
To enable WinRM manually on each machine, you can launch the PowerShell CLI with administrative privileges on specific machines and type the following command:
winrm qc
This is shown in the following screenshot:
Once we are done resolving these action items, we will be good to proceed with CDF tracing. You can click on Continue to proceed with your CDF trace as shown in the following screenshot:
Note
Citrix Scout uses CDFControl in the background; it actually copies the executable to the remote machine and executes it remotely to capture the data. Once the trace is stopped, the executable is deleted from the remote machine and the data is copied to the controller from where the Citrix Scout is running.
We have already understood in a previous section of this chapter how CDF works to capture data and how we can parse the data to read logs. For detailed information on how to use Citrix Scout, please watch the Citrix TV video at http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/9268.