Citrix Scout is an important tool in any Citrix administrator’s arsenal, enabling proactive maintenance and diagnostics on their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment. Scout offers comprehensive, automated analysis of diagnostics collections through Citrix Insight Services and enables users to troubleshoot issues, either on their own or with guidance from Citrix Support.

The Scout tool comes pre-packaged with the latest Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops releases (including Current Releases and the latest XenApp and XenDesktop LTSR Cumulative Update), making it an integral part of any release.

With Citrix Scout, users can:

  • Collect diagnostics from controllers, VDA, and more. Administrators can run diagnostics on a collection of machines and upload the file containing the collection to Citrix or save it locally.
  • Always-on tracing (AOT) eliminates the need to reproduce issues by using the in-memory trace logs.
  • Trace and reproduce issues and collect diagnostics. With this feature, users can easily collect all relevant traces for reproducible issues and use it for analysis or provide to Citrix for assistance.
  • Schedule diagnostic collections to occur daily or weekly at a specified time on selected machines. Upload diagnostic information securely to Citrix on an ad-hoc or schedule basis.
  • Perform health checks on various components of your deployment.
The main landing page of Citrix Scout.

With the release of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 1909, we’ve added new health check capabilities to Citrix Scout. In addition to the controller and VDA health checks, Scout now offers health checks for the license server and StoreFront servers, as well as health check coverage across all the major components of a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment.

Even though we’ve added new capabilities in the health check area, we have not layered on complexity. Initiating health checks is as simple as it has always been. On initiating the health-check process, auto-discovery is triggered, which will detect and provide a list of all the machines that have been discovered. The types of machines included in the auto-discovery process include the controller, desktop VDAs, and server VDAs, as well as license servers. An admin has the option to manually add servers that are not auto-discovered, which could be a StoreFront server, for example.

Citrix Scout showing a list of auto-discovered and manually added machines with various components deployed

As part of the health check, Scout executes a comprehensive list of tests on the various components. Tests for the license server include testing connectivity to the controllers, system clock synchronization status, validation of the presence of the .opt file, and more. For the StoreFront server, the tests include certificate chain checking such as certification expiration, validation that the right Citrix services (Citrix Default Domain service and Citrix Credential Wallet service) are running. The complete list of tests executed are listed in the product documentation.

The comprehensive health check is just one of the great features within Citrix Scout. Learn more about Citrix Scout’s capabilities.