Foglight for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp 5.8 - User Guide

Viewing object dependencies

A typical XenDesktop® environment consists of many interrelated components. Understanding the dependencies between logical and virtual components in your monitored environment and the levels of resources they consume allows you to better understand resource-related issues, potentially affecting the stability of your system. This can help you predict the impact a potential outage may have on your environment, and to prevent such events, by reallocating resources where they are most needed.

The XenDesktop Dependency dashboard visualizes the relationships between the objects in your environment through an interactive map. The map illustrates how different components relate to each other, and the levels of the available resources available to them.

Using dependency maps

When you open a dependency map, the XenDesktop Desktop tab appears on the navigation panel. This tab displays a a navigation tree representing a simplified map of your monitored objects. On the right of each object or object group, alarm indicators appear. Each indicator represents the alarm of the highest severity that is generated against the object. For an object type container (for example, All DeliveryGroups), the status indicator represents the alarm of highest severity that is outstanding for all objects belonging to that group.

When you select an object in the navigation tree, the display area refreshes, showing the selected object and any dependencies that it may have with other objects in your monitored environment.

The complexity of the information appearing in a dependency map depends on the selected object and the dependencies that object has with other objects within your integrated infrastructure.

In a large multi-component environment, dependency maps are likely complex and may not fit your screen. The NAVIGATOR in the top-right corner allows you to easily set the zoom level by dragging the slider into the appropriate position.

Dependencies between the objects in a map are illustrated with single-directional arrows. The color of the arrow reflects the alarm state of the target object: gray for Normal, yellow for Warning, orange for Critical, and red for the Fatal state.

To find out more about an object appearing in the dependency map, click the object icon. A dialog box appears, displaying more details about that object. The type and range of information appearing in the dialog box depends on the selected object’s type. For example, drilling down on a XenDesktop machine shows the machine name, DNS name, and the type of services hosted on the machine (desktops, applications, or desktops and applications), and the count of user sessions over the selected time range.

TIP: To return to the XenDesktop Environment dashboard, use the bread crumb trail in the top-left corner.

Exploring XenDesktop Alarms

The XenDesktop Alarms dashboard is a simple dashboard that shows the alarms that have been triggered but not cleared. It can be used to isolate alarms specific to your monitored XenDesktop environment.

Exploring alarm counts

The top part of this dashboard shows the counts of alarms grouped by object type against which the alarms are generated: Agents, Infrastructure, Delivery Groups, Desktops, Applications, Users, and vSphere.

Each group displays the numbers of alarms in each severity state: Fatal (red), Critical (orange), and Warning (yellow).

When you drill down on an alarm count in an object group, a dialog box displays, showing the list of all alarms generated against the selected object type and severity.