One of the most important responsibilities for a Citrix Administrator is to maintain the health of Citrix Virtual Desktop Agents (VDA). Registration and session launch issues can lead to unavailable desktops, disconnected sessions, and unusable environments. When virtual desktops are not available, it leads to a loss of employee productivity and incurred costs to the business.
To help maintain the health of Citrix VDAs, Citrix now offers a VDA Health Check as part of their Smart Check toolset. Smart Check is a cloud-based service from Citrix that can be used for on premises or cloud environments. Citrix Smart Tools is available to Citrix customers with certain Citrix Cloud subscriptions, or a perpetual or term license with Customer Success Services – Select, Priority, or Priority Plus.
The VDA Health Check automates a number of health checks to identify possible root causes for common VDA registration, session launch, and time zone redirection configuration issue. It is agentless, meaning it does not require any additional software to be deployed to the VDAs, and because it is cloud-based, you always have access to the latest version.
The VDA Health Check can be run manually or on an automated schedule. The benefit of the automated schedule is that you can configure it to check all of the VDAs in your environment on a set schedule and have the results emailed to you. For example, as a Citrix administrator you could have a report emailed to you every weekday morning at 7 am showing you the status of all the virtual desktops in your environment. If the report shows any issues with the VDAs, it will give you enough time to diagnose and remediate the issue before users start to connect at 9AM.
For information on how Gotham can assist with the installation and configuration of Citrix Smart Tools and the VDA Health Checks, please contact your Gotham Account Manager.