Citrix Monitoring 3rd Party Tools Review by Jo Harder

By ControlUp Team
3 minutes June 29, 2014

Citrix

Last week Jo Harder, a senior virtualization architect, released a blog post and a white paper on Citrix Monitoring 3rd party tools that complement the existing EdgeSight/Director offering. I think Jo did a thorough work covering the major players in the market and I want to thank her for allowing us to publish parts of the white paper in this blog post.
ControlUp was one of the tools Jo reviewed, along with eG Innovations, Lakeside Systrack and Splunk. The white paper includes a comparison table and overall highlights for each product. For your convenience, I am attaching here the overall highlight on ControlUp and the full comparison table:

ControlUp overall highlight

Smart-X ControlUp is a newer product that is easy to use and visually appealing. It includes several unique features, and a few basic features are on the roadmap but not yet part of the product. ControlUp is largely suitable as is, and it will likely become a formidable player in the monitoring marketplace in short order.

Comparison/Analysis of Citrix vs. Third-Party Monitoring Tools

Vendor / Functionality	eG Innovations	Lakeside Systrack	Smart-X ControlUp	Splunk	Citrix Director 2.1 / EdgeSight	Citrix Director 7.x
Vendor / Functionality	eG Innovations	Lakeside Systrack	Smart-X ControlUp	Splunk	Citrix Director 2.1 / EdgeSight	Citrix Director 7.x
Key Monitoring Tools by Platform
XenApp 6.x					Dir for 6.5 only	No
XenDesktop 5.x					Limited scalability for ES	No
XenApp / XenDesktop 7.x					No
Basic Functionality
Server Health Monitoring
ICA/HDX Channel Monitoring
Login Performance (inc. Profile)
Delegated Admins
Additional Modules / Components
Network
Storage					No	Limited
Hypervisor			Q3 2014		No
Others	Available	Endpoints, desktops	Endpoints, Servers	Any machine data	n/a	NetScaler
Requirements
Agent	Agent or agentless			Depends		Built-in
Server/VDI-side changes	None	None	None	None	WinRM	WMI proxy
Console Server Resources	2 CPUs, 4GB Ram	2 CPUs, 4GB Ram	8% avc CPU/800MB RAM	Depends	Depends	Depends
Admin Training	Yes, provided	Minimal	Not required	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data
Database Type	SQL Server or Oracle	SQL Server Express or full	In-RAM/cloud	None	SQL Server	SQL Server
Retention Period (default)	13 months	3 years	Unlimited	Forever	30 days	90 days
Data Archive	Available	Via SQL	n/a	Built-in	Via SQL	Via SQL
Data Security	SSL, AD integration	Full/end-to-end	Login/encryption	Encryption, certificates	None	SSL optional
Application Monitoring
App Latency			No		No	No
App Resources					No	No
Launch Frequency
Launch Time			Q2/15		No	w/HDX Insight
User Sessions
Drilldown into Metrics
Involuntary Disconnections					No	No
Recover Version
Printer Errors					No	No
Network
Latency						w/HDX Insight
Min/Max					No	No
Idle					No	No
Identify Network Failure					No	No
Licensing
Users, Servers or Endpoints	Servers or users	Per desktop, server, RDS	# CCUs and admins	Daily volume	Platinum (full features)	Platinum (full features)
Separate License Server	No	No	No	No
Free Version	No	FastTrack (Citrix Project Accelerator)	<50 user sessions	Yes	Platinum	Platinum
Trial Period	30 days	60 days	30 days	60 days	n/a	n/a
Upgrading to XA/XD 7.x
Same Console					No	No
Same Database				n/a	No	No
Changes to Config	Reconfiguration required	Minimal	No	Yes	Migration required	Migration required

Yoni Avital
CTO
Smart-X