Citrix Receiver (now renamed as Citrix Workspace app) is client software that is bundled with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and allows client devices to connect to various virtualization services offered by Citrix. Citrix Receiver is supported on various client platforms and form factors, including Windows, Windows Mobile, macOS, iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, HTML5, Linux, Google Chromebook, thin clients, zero clients, Raspberry Pi and embedded operating systems.

Most Citrix professionals are well aware that when desktop or application performance is slow, the first finger tends to get pointed at the Citrix team. But even for complex ecosystems like Citrix, ITIL guidance like a Service Desk continues to be a long-standing ‘best practice’ and can help if IT staff work together. This post will outline some of the ITIL guidance from the perspective of eG Enterprise and a Citrix-based digital workspace.

Daniel Feller, a lead architect at Citrix, recently posted a couple of very interesting articles relating to troubleshooting Citrix logon issues. These blogs highlight challenging Citrix issues and how to go about locating the root cause of these issues.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments are performance sensitive. There are many components both datacenter-side and client-side which must be optimally performing together to deliver a consistent and performing virtualized apps and desktops solution. With many different components in play, it can often be a challenging task for a Citrix administrator to determine the impact or cause of a Citrix related problem. Citrix troubleshooting nevertheless becomes challenging.

Ensuring that a Citrix infrastructure is working well is no easy job! Here are several free tools and scripts that can help you with your daily activities.

Virtualization technology is being widely adopted thanks to the flexibility, agility, reliability and ease of administration it offers. At the same time, any IT technology – hardware or software – is only as good as its maintenance and upkeep, and VMware virtualization is no different.

Monitoring, observability and analytics have become common phraseology in the Citrix world. Alongside every Citrix project, whether it’s a new deployment, expansion, upgrade, or cloud migration, what is essentially needed in the IT toolkit is analytics. Analytics means not just data, but insights obtained through continuous monitoring; periodic measurements of critical performance metrics that convey a lot about the health and availability of the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops session.

The biggest challenge when a user complains of slow application is diagnosing why it’s slow: Is it due to a code-level issue or a database issue? Should we call the DBA or the application manager? Performance problems with the database can cause up to 70% of all application performance issues in production, according to consensus among database practitioners and experts.

User experience is the biggest and most important factor in determining the success of Citrix rollout in an organization. When end-users are happy with their virtualized applications and desktops, then everything is hunky dory and Citrix admins can focus on operations and maintenance.

One of the biggest challenges Citrix admins face is uncovering answers for Citrix performance issues. When an application or a desktop is slow, people naturally pin the blame on the Citrix infrastructure. It’s possible that there could be issues stemming from the Citrix side of the house, but often the real culprits are the supporting infrastructure components: network latency, virtualization bottlenecks, AD issues, storage hotspots, database issues, etc.