Proactively monitoring apps and desktops is a critical part of managing virtual environments and enables admins to keep close watch on the health of their VDAs.
Why is it important?
Consider a scenario in which an organization has an app or desktop probe scheduled for 8 a.m., before employees start their day. Throughout the workday, though, users face issues while downloading and launching apps and desktops. In this case, the users must create a support ticket for admins, who must devote time and effort to resolving the issue so employees can get back to work.
What if this issue continues to occur over a few days at random intervals? Admins might want to configure probing twice in a day to identify the failures occurring during the employees’ workday. With Citrix Probe Agent 2206, the admin needed to create a separate probe task to schedule probing at different times of the day.
Does this approach help admins to catch failures after all probe jobs are completed? Is it proactively checking app or desktop health? App and desktop probing efficiently works with 20 different configurations of a tenant, and each configuration can have a maximum of 20 applications. Admins couldn’t really do frequent monitoring of the health of all published apps.
Now, imagine an organization with multiple shifts, operating in multiple locations. That can get complex quickly. There’s heavy traffic, at various times of day, which can lead to multiple failure scenarios over a 24-hour period. Configuring multiple probe jobs for all these scenarios is tedious, and admins might not be able to catch failures proactively.
The latest version of Citrix Probe Agent (2209 and above) paired with cloud-based Monitor, for Citrix DaaS, is here to the rescue. It supports probe jobs that can recur every 15/30/60 mins to provide more proactive monitoring. In addition, the jobs can be configured to run on specific days of the week and at specific times to avoid excessive alerting of the admins.
How Admins Benefit from Citrix Probe Agent 2209
With Citrix Probe Agent 2209, admins can schedule recurring app or desktop probe jobs on specific days of the week, so there aren’t probe jobs running on days when they’re not required. Probes also can be scheduled to repeat at fixed time intervals between any given start time and end time, all from a single probe configuration.
For example, you want to run a desktop probe from 8:37 a.m. until 12:37 p.m., repeating every 15 minutes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Here’s how you create that configuration:
In this configuration the desktop session launches at 08:37, 08:49, 09:04, 09:19 and so on until 12:37 on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The last launch time is 12:37 p.m. The report below shows that the desktop is being launched every 15 minutes.
Learn More
Improve your monitoring of virtual apps and desktops powered by Citrix DaaS with proactive detection and easy-to-configure schedules using app and desktop probing from DaaS Monitor. For more information, check out our product documentation to learn how to set up an application probe and how to set up a desktop probe.
