Goliath recently released a free eBook on understanding the logon process to a Citrix environment and they break it down into different pieces where they show how the different processes which are running during a logon. Then they go into how they use their product Goliath Performance Monitor to troubleshoot slow logon issues in a Citrix environment.
NOTE: The eBook can be found here –> http://bit.ly/1ZBciMB
To be honest I wasn’t aware of all the details in a logon process to a Citrix environment it’s pretty complex and so much happening under the covers which is concealed from the user, simple yet powerful. Also kudos to the support people in Goliath Technologies which was the authors behind this eBook to actually describing it in such detail! Helps to have people which have this deep understanding of this process to write an eBook about the subject.
One of the other cool thing is that they also list a couple of real customer issues or support cases that they had, and what kind of issues that different customers was been facing, and how they used their product to troubleshoot their environment and find the root cause of the slow logon issue they were facing.
Now there are some things that I found was missing in the eBook, which I hope they will cover in a future release or in another eBook, which is having an architectural over of their product, I always find it helpful to see the bits and pieces that make up a product and how its connected from an architectural level.
The product is pretty much based on having a small agent installed on each Citrix Server, where information and data is pulled out and sent back to the monitoring server. The monitoring server which will then store all the data on a remote SQL server. Since it is agent based you means that you can also use this against cloud based environments running in Azure, Amazon and so on as well, and not dependent on any particular infrastructure/hypervisor to get this information
Which is how they are able to generate this information, another interesting part would also be describing how they manage to monitor a session throughout the environment and across all the different Citrix components.
Another topic they should include in their next eBook, is including how all the steps are when connecting from outside the environment, more precisely when connecting through NetScaler gateway which is the authentication and connection point for most remote connection. From there showing what additional steps are involved and add the additional metric which comes from there as well into the product.
You can go here to instantly download a complimentary copy of Goliath’s Complete Guide to Understanding the Citrix Logon Process for XenApp/XenDesktop.