Our goal with the Citrix Cloud licensing page is to provide license transparency across all Citrix products to help customers better understand utilization and plan for future expansion. We recently added the ability for customers to view Device licensing usage of their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service under the User/Device Licensing Model and licensing insights for the new Concurrent model.
Customers can now get end-to-end visibility of usage under the User/Device licensing model, as well as the recently released Concurrent model.
What’s New?
Here are some of the changes you’ll see when you view the updated Citrix Cloud licensing page:
- A New Name: The License & Usage page is now officially the Licensing page. Don’t worry, we’re providing all the same insights. We just changed the name to align it with the page’s purpose — providing license information for both cloud services and on-prem deployments.
- Introduction of License Server Usage Insights for On-Prem Deployments: On-premises Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops customers can now register their license servers to gain detailed insights into their usage. Learn more here.
- Ability to Release Licenses for Citrix Endpoint Management: Citrix Cloud admins can now release Citrix Endpoint Management licenses. The parameters for release are identical to those made available earlier to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service.
- NEW – Inclusion of ‘Device’ Information: Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops customers with User/Device Licenses are now able to view Device Licensing insights.
- Rolling Out Now – Inclusion of ‘Concurrent’ Licensing Insights: The Concurrent Licensing model is the newest licensing option for the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service family. We’re happy to announce customers will now see licensing associated to this model.
Let’s take a closer look at these license information and insights enhancements:
Inclusion of Concurrent Licensing Insights
In early April, we announced Concurrent licensing availability for hte Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. We have now included updates to the Licensing page that shows details on concurrent usage. Previously, the page only showed insights on the User/Device model.
How It Works
Every five minutes the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service queries for all active device connections and provides a snapshot of unique device connections at that specific time. This data is stored and processed to generate a real-time usage count, as well as a day, month, and lifetime peak usage count.
The insights experience is broken into the following three parts:
- Most Recent Snapshot: This provides the last usage snapshot. There is a small delay for processing, but customers will see this number updated throughout the day with the last reported value.
- Historical Snapshots: To provide quick insights on peak thresholds, we provide a snapshot over the last 24 hours, the calendar month, and the entire length of the subscription. These counts examine all the five-minute events over the time period and present the peak usage.
- Usage Trends: To provide more detailed insights across any time frame, the customer can select a specific day, month, or year from the drop down to examine detailed usage.
Concurrent licensing insights will be rolled out to existing accounts throughout the month of September. More detail on how the experience works can be found in our product documentation.
Device Information for Virtual Apps and Desktops
The Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service User/Device licensing model is easily one of our most popular cloud offerings. Until this release, the Licensing page only counted Unique User app and desktop launches. For customers primarily using the offering in a Device licensing scenario, only counting unique users could unintentionally show overuse. Because Device licensing allows for various users to connect to a single device, Device information is critical for accurate licensing counts.
With this update, we are now counting all the unique users and the unique devices in your account. Both counts are presented so admins have complete visibility across their Citrix Service Licensing estate. New additions to the page are listed here and highlighted in red below:
- Assigned Devices are included in the Historical Trending chart to help understand seasonal usage trends.
- We’ve introduced a new tab with specific device information and the users launching against those devices.
Citrix uses this data — unique users vs. unique devices — to calculate the “assigned license count” for your account, which is always the lower of these two values. Using the example above, you can see that 36 unique users used the service across nine shared devices, so the official assigned license count at the top of the page is nine.
We are constantly evolving the Licensing page in Citrix Cloud to provide more insight into how you consume Citrix products, regardless of your deployment type or location. All the new features highlighted are in production today. Just go to your Licensing page to check them out. And to learn more about these new features, check out the monitoring license usage for cloud services documentation.
