We recently announced general availability of Citrix Session Recording service, an integrated web service that’s part of all our Citrix DaaS offerings. To recap, the service provides an advanced admin experience and simplifies deployment. It supports centralized management of server settings, policies, and playback. It also facilitates admin tasks by providing a unified entry point to manage and observe Session Recording servers across your organization.
I’m excited to share that we have released some great new features on the cloud platform that can simplify your session recording deployments, deliver an improved onboarding experience, and provide a comprehensive management dashboard that can help you get insights into your systems. Let’s dive into these features and take a look at how you can benefit from them.
Session Recording Server Auto-Installation
A major point of feedback we heard during the Session Recording service preview was that the deployment needed to be simplified. Customers still had to install several components themselves, including the Session Recording server, the SQL server database, and file storage.
We are continuing to reduce the effort required for Session Recording deployments, and introducing Session Recording server auto-installation is the first step. You can make the process easier by following these steps:
- In your environment (either on premises or in the cloud), prepare a VM that meets the typical Session Recording server requirements. Make sure the VM meets the network requirements described in our product documentation.
- Install the cloud client on the virtual machines provisioned in Step 1. You can find the cloud client download link on the Server Management page, in the left-side navigation pane. Once installed, a new server will appear in the Server Management page and will show in a “Ready to install” state. Click the icon on right side to invoke the wizard.
- Follow the wizard in the service to initiate auto-installation. The wizard will ask you to check the SSL configuration, which is often misconfigured. It will also ask if the server to be installed is for a new site or an existing site. If it’s a new site, you’ll need to provide the database connection information to proceed. The screenshots below show the “overview” and “database” sections in the wizard.
- Wait for installation to finish, then check your installation status. If the server is installed successfully, the server status will change to “Available,” and it will be moved to the site it belongs to.
You can realize big benefits by combining this with a managed cloud database because you’ll save on both your DBA and Session Recording deployment efforts. You can find the supported cloud database services in our product documentation.
A User-Friendly Onboarding Experience
One thing we heard a lot about was the onboarding experience, which required admins to enter the PowerShell command manually. That can be error-prone and difficult to troubleshoot, and mistakes around SSL certificates and binding often occurred.
We’ve made this easier for admins with the new onboarding wizard. This UI-based process asks you a few questions that’ll help you avoid common errors. Then, you provide required inputs that enable the PowerShell command to be generated for you. Copy and paste the command into PowerShell, and you’re done. It’s that easy!
Insights from the Management Dashboard
Observability plays a critical role in maintaining healthy, manageable systems. That’s why we created the Session Recording management dashboard. It provides comprehensive insights into your systems in these four ways:
- Server status: This section displays metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage and network performance, and you can configure warning/critical thresholds. You can also view details on current live sessions.
- Storage consumption: You’ll get insights into how much storage Session Recording consumes for each storage location. With the ability to toggle between specific storage locations from within the dashboard, you can dynamically configure warning thresholds so you can be proactive with your management.
- Session statistics: You can view details on recorded sessions, from total sessions and average sessions to longest sessions and largest file size by session.
- Client devices information: You can check the percentage of client devices that have different machine name prefixes and the percentage of sessions run by different versions of Citrix Workspace app.
This data is refreshed once a day, except for server status information, which is refreshed every minute.
For security reasons, the management dashboard is only available for Citrix Cloud admins assigned to the Full Access, Cloud Administrator, and Session Recording-FullAdmin roles. For these roles, the dashboard becomes the Session Recording service home page.
You can also build your own customized dashboard by leveraging the service APIs.
Get Started Today!
The latest Session Recording service updates can help you simplify your session recording deployments, deliver an improved onboarding experience, and help you uncover valuable insights with its comprehensive management dashboard. Check out our product documentation for more details, and try it out today!
