Citrix Director is the monitoring and troubleshooting console for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environments. It offers a rich set of built-in reports, but there might be cases where you want to retrieve some specific data or to customize a built-in report to include an extra field. It’s possible that Director’s built-in reports didn’t give you what you needed. You could write a OData query to create a custom report, but that has its own learning curve and, it’s not easy to generate, store and share reports on a regular basis.
“I’m looking for a report showing periodical application usage or session states on a monthly, hourly, or daily basis.” – Sound like you? Well, then we have good news for you:
Citrix Director 7.12 introduces a new Custom Reporting feature that lets you generate reports with custom fields and filters on your XenApp and XenDesktop environment. Using this new feature, you can build custom reports on the fly and save them too. These reports contain real-time and historical data from the Monitoring database.
Now let’s explore how we can create a Custom Report in Director.
A new Custom Reports tab has been introduced on Director’s Trends panel. This tab shows all the Custom Report queries saved earlier. You can export, edit and delete the saved queries.
You can also copy the OData query from the saved queries and share it with other admins.
You can create a new Custom Report query based on Machines, Connections, Sessions, or Application instances.
To generate a report showing published applications, select Application Instances. The default condition for Application Start Date set to last 2 hours can be changed to daily, monthly or yearly basis.
Now you can add another filter, with the published name like “Calculator” and add Session State in Output Columns.
To see if the report works, you can always see the preview of the report.
You can save the query for later use, it will be listed in the saved queries table.
You can edit the saved query and add/remove one or more filter conditions. You can export the report In CSV format.
We have just created a custom report showing published applications on an hourly basis.
Ready to try for yourself? I suggest you start small and try a simple report to get familiar with the feature. Use Preview – it’s a great feature to help you see if the report contains what you want.
There is lots of data at your disposal in the Monitoring database. Use the Custom Reports feature to create the specific reports you need to help you troubleshoot better.
Requirements
Start using this great feature by upgrading the Controller (DDC) to 7.12 or higher.
