Monitoring Citrix with Operations Manager 2012

In the earlier days if you have Operations Manager 2007 you would have MP’s available for the most of the Citrix products. On the installation media on XenApp 6.5 you would for instance have a management pack which you could use in OpsMgr 2007.
Now with 2012, Citrix have said that they would no longer continue with development of these management packs and have pushed the development to a partner called ComTrade.

ComTrade have developed a bunch of Management Packs for most of Citrix’s products including;

* XenApp
* XenDesktop
* XenServer

Now for instance Netscaler is primarily a network device so you have “free” monitoring capabilities via SNMP but for extended monitoring and pro capabilities Citrix actually has a new MP which was released in September.
When regarding the MP’s you can sign up for a free trial at ComTrade’s website here–> http://www.managementproducts.comtrade.com/management_pack/citrix/Pages/default.aspx
I’m going to take a quick walkthrough of how XenApp monitoring is set up and how it works.

After you have received the user information you can start downloading the MP’s
The installation process is pretty straight forward, next. next, finish and the setup will automatically import the management packs.

So if you open the console and check under adminitration –> Management packs
You can now see ComTrade Management Packs appear.

If you go back to the monitoring pane, you will see that there are a bunch of new options under ComTrade XenApp

As well as under reports there a new bunch of new reports available for XenApp.

This will give you a good insight in your Citrix environment, and regarding what applications users actually use. And what kind of performance issues they might be having.
We will take a further look at this later when we are finished setting up the connection to XenApp.

When the installation process is finished you will receive a new start-menu shortcut which allows you to complete the process of setting up the monitoring, you can see a shortcut called “XenApp connector”
Here you have to enter information about the XenApp farm, a farm administrator and password.

Now remember that you have to be a farm administrator if it is to setup correctly. And you have to get a valid license from ComTrade in order to use it. After that you have to set the scom agent as an proxy you can do this under managed agents in the administration pane on SCOM.

After this you have to go to the monitoring pane and find under Comtrade XenApp servers, from there choose the XenApp server you wish to monitor. On the right side you have the option to install a XenApp MP agent, so run this command.

When the installation is done (You can see this in the event viewer) you can see (in a while) that data starts being populated into SCOM.
So Yay! now we have a good and solid XenApp monitoring solution along with the rest of the infrastructure.
Now we can start monitoring SLA on our infrastructure (XenApp, Netscaler, SQL Server, Web-interface)

And as simple as that ( I have no real licenses on my XenApp server, therefore I get an error message each time I logon to the server around the licenses. ) And it also appeared in Operations Manager