XenDesktop 7 Monitoring from System Center Operations Manager

So a year ago I wrote a blog post regarding Comtrade and monitoring of XenApp enviroments in Operations Manager. This was possible due to a partner called Comtrade which creates management packs and connections to Citrix (Actually most of Citrix products)

* XenDesktop
* Netscaler
* Cloudportal Service Manager
* XenApp
* PVS
* WebInterface
And more are coming in the future that are announced.

Now I wanted to try this feature for monitoring of my XenDesktop 7 enviroment, so I got a evaluation package from ComTrade.

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The installation of the package was much more simplified than it was before, it also allowed to automatically import the management packs into SCOM. (If you have any error messages appear or not having adequate rights, go into SCOM console and administration –> Management Packs and import them there.

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So basically you have these 3 management packs that need to be imported.
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After the management packs are imported you also need to make sure that all the DCC that you are going to monitor are setup with agent proxy, this can be done pr agent under administration.

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If we now go into Monitoring pane we can now see all the different views and alterts from the management pack. I didn’t check the reporting feature ill get back to this.

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Now after the installation is complete of the management packs you should think that the setup is complete but not quite… Smilefjes
We have to install a specific Comtrade agent on each Citrix server roles.
And Attach a license (NOTE: Im not going to cover how to add the licese here)

But to install the agent you can to this by two ways, if you go into XenDesktop computers view in Monitoring pane in OpsMgr and locate one of the DCC that you want to monitor and on the right pane you have tasks –> Install Comtrade MPXD agent

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NOTE: Now we also need to created some dedicated Citrix Run As accounts before we can use this management pack

After you have installed the agent and installed the license it will start to generate information back to operations manager. So after the DCC server starts to publish data back to OpsMgr we will start getting alot of information.

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It will give the complete overvie of how the Xendesktop infrastructure is linked together.
It also gives you a good overview of how the state of the solution is at the moment.

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This solution also monitors Server OS machines remotely using WinRM. Now if I were to combine this with for instace StoreFront monitoring (When is comes) and Netscaler we can create a complete monitoring solution which covers our entire Citrix infrastructure.

ill get back to a more complete post when I get a hold of the other management packs. Smilefjes

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