The Summary tab is the user experience dashboard that provides information and metrics about the user's specific published app/desktop or virtual desktop session. This tab is essential to quickly diagnosing user session performance issues. Combining both a high-level view as well as detailed metrics, this should be the first place your help desk should look to determine a user’s performance issue.
Being able to see the user’s ICA latency metrics on the same screen you have virtual machine and host performance metrics will eliminate unnecessary time troubleshooting avenues. Why bother looking into a user’s connection when you can see that the problem lies the user’s virtual machine resources? Have multiple users complaining about performance issues? Take note of the hosts they are connected to and be able to escalate to the proper team that manages the host infrastructure.
Figure 1: Summary tab
Session Environment Details
The high level ADDM view provides a quick topology of the components that are involved in establishing and hosting the selected Citrix session, providing the viewer context on the session in seconds.
Figure 2: Session environment details
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How to Troubleshoot: When troubleshooting issues that are affecting multiple user sessions, this section helps to identify components that are present in the affected sessions. For instance, there are users experiencing long logon times specifically with the Authentication stage, this section can help Identify if a single domain controller is common among the impacted sessions. |
Key Performance Metrics
The middle section of the summary tab includes metrics about the session, virtual machine, and host the session is running on.
ICA/HDX
This section provides key metrics that allows the viewer to come up with quick answers about the performance of the Citrix Session and if slowness is caused by the network or the resources.
- ICA RTT (Round Trip Time): Indication of the performance of the session. If above 450ms, the end user is experiencing slowness in their session.
- Network latency: Shows the performance of the network for the Citrix session if this is above 250ms the end user could experience slowness within their Citrix session.
- Connection Speed: How much bandwidth the user has at their endpoint machine for Citrix. If connection speed is consistently lower than 10 Mbps the user does not have enough bandwidth for a responsive Citrix session and could experience slowness.
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How to Troubleshoot: If ICA RTT is high take a look at Network Latency, if this is also High and similar to ICA RTT then we can rule out the resources as the cause of slowness issues. If Network Latency is low the take a look at the Virtual Machine Resources and Host Resources Sections. If Network Latency is high take a look at Connection Speed, If connection speed is low then the user has a bandwidth issue. If Network latency is high and connection speed is not low some more investigation needs to be done, and you can do so by clicking on the ICA/HDX Channel Tab at the top of the screen. |
Virtual Machine Resources
This section provides insight into the resource utilization of the session host machine from the VM and OS level for the timeframe of the user’s session.
- CPU: Current and historical CPU load for the virtual machine.
- CPU Ready: The amount of time a virtual machine is ready to use CPU but was unable to schedule time because all CPU resources are busy. CPU ready above should be a warning and above 10% should be a major concern.
- Memory: Current and historical memory usage for the virtual machine.
- B/W: Network bandwidth consumed by the virtual machine.
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How to Troubleshoot: The Virtual Machine Resource section will assist you with either finding troublesome applications causing your virtual machines to struggle or outline an issue with under sized virtual machines. You can compare this section to ICA RTT graph in the ICA/HDX tab to determine if spikes in RTT correlate with spikes in resource utilization (see Example Troubleshooting Scenario) most likely caused by a resource issue. |
Host Resources
This section provides insight into the resource utilization of the Hypervisor host supporting the Virtual machine session host for the timeframe of the user’s session.
- CPU: Current and historical CPU load for the virtual machine.
- CPU Ready: The amount of time a hypervisor host is ready to use CPU but was unable to schedule time because all CPU resources are busy. CPU ready above should be a warning and above 10% should be a major concern in a virtualization environment.
- Memory: Current and historical memory usage for the virtual machine.
- Storage Latency: Current and historical latency between the hypervisor host and the datastore the virtual machine is running from.
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How to Troubleshoot: This section helps you quickly determine if your hosts or storage are oversubscribed. High CPU, Memory and Storage latency will affect all virtual machine sessions on the displayed host or storage. Make sure your user’s virtual machines are balanced across all available hosts. If necessary, set policies to power off virtual machines not in use to reduce the load on your hosts. |
Viewing Additional Data
Each graph on the summary tab can be expanded to view additional data points for the specific metric.
Figure 3: Virtual Machine Resources CPU graph expanded
In addition, you can use the mouse wheel to zoom in/out of each graph or selection specific areas of a graph to view more detailed data.
You can also click the header for any section on the summary chart to jump to the relevant tab within the session dialog.
Application Resource Usage
A detailed breakdown of application usage can also be essential to determining the cause of performance issues in a user’s virtual machine. Note that applications and processes are displayed for the current session host or virtual desktop as indicated by the timestamp included in the section.
Figure 4: Top 5 Applications by Resource Usage
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How to Troubleshoot: A single application may be the cause of a user’s poor session performance. Ending the offending application may take care of the problem, but if you notice this same trend on other virtual machine sessions you may be able to narrow down a larger issue. |
Example Troubleshooting Scenario
Figure 5, below depicts a scenario where there are spikes in Round Trip Time that correlate with spikes in Virtual Machine Resource utilization. This indicates that resource utilization is actually the driving factor in the high RTT and not network latency. To drill further into this issue you can open the App/VDI Server tab, the Application Performance Tab, or the ICA/HDX Tab to troubleshoot further.
Figure 5: RTT and VM CPU spikes