When it comes to monitoring the health of your Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop environment understanding it’s overall health can be critical. The level of criticality can vary of course depending on what your organization uses Citrix for, but there are many industries that rely on their Citrix deployments for their critical applications. That being said, the solutions and toolsets that we use to monitor our environments can be invaluable to the proactive response we can provide to the businesses we support. Often times these tools don’t provide much help if the proper amount of configuration hasn’t occurred, and that is where Citrix Smart Check comes into play.
So what else can I be thinking about using?
Recently I spent some time taking a look at a tool that Citrix offers for free called Smart Check. Just to be clear about its purpose I want to point out that it is not a monitoring tool replacement. The work effort and energy that you put into a monitoring solution will still provide you appropriate value when configured correctly.
So then why should I consider Smart Check? Well, it’s purpose is provide another layer of environment evaluation, similar to what I would call proactive reporting. You configure the tool to evaluate your Citrix environment, run the “Smart Check”, and you get granular detail about the health of your overall deployment.
Going a step further, this tool in some cases will provide you resolution guidance to the issue that you are facing. Also in the event that you are having an issue where you are on a support call with Citrix, this tool can also help provide their team with diagnostics information necessary to resolve the issue.
What else?
Your environment can be scanned on a schedule, and a report can be reviewed by you at your leisure proactively. Providing holistic insights that would otherwise to be a challenge to manually collect, or that would be time consuming to script on your own.
So how do you get started with Citrix Smart Check?
So first of all it is cloud-based, but it integrates with your onsite solutions, and to get the best detail about your environment you will need an agent on your Citrix controllers.
So let’s get started!
- Go to https://smart.cloud.com/
- Setup an account if you do not have one, or login if you have a Citrix Cloud account already. This is free to setup.
- Choose and click “Smart Check”
· Then the tool will start looking for sites if have uploaded any environment reporting to a tool called Taas or CIS in the past 3 months your environment may already appear when you launch Smart Check as seen below. An initial health report will also be available due to this uploaded information. If not then you will need to install an agent to get started. We will cover this below.
What if my sites aren’t here already?
Well there are some simple steps to accomplish this.
- Login to your Delivery Controller and you must be a full administrator on XenDesktop site for this to complete successfully
- Go to https://smart.cloud.com/, and either setup an account (free) or login
- Click Smart Check
· Click “Add Site” in the upper right hand corner of the screen
· Click “Download Agent”
· Click Run or Install. Note: This option may vary depending on the browser you are using
· Accept the terms and click Next
· When completed click Finish
· Fill in your credentials and then click Add Site
· The site will indicate that it is collecting information to start as shown below. See Coldfire79 and the fact that its started collecting information.
· Once that is complete you can click “Perform Check” to do a full analysis of your site
· When completed your site health detail will be available for your review
Lastly, it is completely possibly to schedule this to run routinely and review whenever you feel is suitable for the environment you support.
Enjoy!
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