Citrix Director has multiple pre-defined reports that users can use to Monitor their XenDesktop environment for multiple purposes. Most of the time, these predefined reports are sufficient. At the same time, some administrators have asked for the ability to create customized reports, which is currently not supported in Director.
That’s why we have created an extension that enhances the Director functionality to help XenDesktop Admins to generate reports on their XenDesktop environment with custom fields and filters using Director. Using this plugin extension we can generate any report on XenDesktop through Director and export it.
In this blog we will discuss on how to install the extension on a XenDesktop Deployment and explore how to generate the report. Citrix is making this custom reporting tool available for experimental evaluation and it is ideal for a trial in a non-production environment. The experimental versions of this tool including this one will not be supported by Citrix.
Requirement
- Installation should be done on Director server
- Supported for XenDesktop 7.6 or above with Citrix Director 7.6 and Citrix Director 7.7.
Installation
The installation of this extension is simple. We have to download the Zip file from this link.
Download installer for Citrix Director 7.6.0 : CustomReportInstaller-XD 7.6
Download installer for Citrix Director 7.6.300 :CustomReportInstaller-XD 7.6.300
Download Installer for Citrix Director 7.7.0 : CustomReportInstaller-Xd 7.7
Unzip the files to any folder. Unblock the contents if required.
Open the unzipped folder and click on CustomReportinstaller.exe. The installer prompts the information message, check on I Agree and click install.
Once installation is completed, login to director and you can see new tab on trends page with the name Custom report.
Usage
In this section we will discuss about the plugin usage along with an example. Lets generate a report for “get all the users and the client name who have used outlook ” and understand how it works.
Once you login to Director and Navigate to trends page, click on custom repot and you will see the following
These are the field that we need to look into,
Type
Select the type of report you want to generate. if you want application based report select Application. If you want to generate report based on Desktop session usage, select Desktop.
For our example, we will select the Type as Application.
Report Name
This field is used to name the report. The Exported report will be saved with the same file name.
For our example, we will change the report name to “OutLook Application”.
Conditions
These are the conditions or filters you want to apply on the report. This is a drop down with all available fields that can be used as filter.
For our example the condition should be like “PublishedName contains outlook”.
Output Columns
These are the columns that appears in the report.
For our Example, we have to select Name, Username, ClientName.
OData Query
This field is specially designed to help director admins generate the odata query. The field dynamically gets updated as an when there is modification on Conditions and Output Columns. This query can be copied and used on other tools to generate the same report.
The final report UI looks like this:
Now Clicking on Export will export the required report In CSV format. Exported report looks like this
