Nicholas Dille on Terminal Services and related technologies
I hope it is commonly known by now that EdgeSight 5.0 and 5.1 will stop working on 25th of March 2010. That’s merely two weeks away! In my opinion, the warning Citrix has published does not suffice for an issue of such effect.
Continue reading ‘How Many Will Be Affected By The EdgeSight Timebomb?’
In the course of the last six months, I have published nine articles about performance monitoring, why it is a crucial task and how the different subsystems of the operating system. To wrap up this series, this article offers an overview of the topics covered in the individual articles as well as a summary of my recommendations.
After several articles in this series have covered Windows server in general, I’d like to return to the topic of Windows-based terminal servers. But instead of talking about the concepts, the theory and technology of performance monitoring, this article compares two competing tools for monitoring terminal server environments: Citrix Presentation Server Resource Manager and Citrix EdgeSight.
This article is not meant to compare all available monitoring solutions as both fit in the same niche on the markets. My goal is to urge everybody to drop Resource Manager in favour of EdgeSight.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 9 – EdgeSight vs. Resource Manager for XenApp’
In the last post of this series about performance monitoring, I have described how to use Windows Performance Monitor to log counter values into a SQL database. Now I’ll show you that Excel is a tremendous tool to quickly analyze the collected data.
Excel offers a feature called pivot tables. It allows some data mining either on a local data set contained in an Excel sheet or on a database which Excel is connected to. Therefore, this article describes how to create a connection to the database and create nifty charts using Excel.
After a lot of theory about performance monitoring, this article demonstrates how the Windows Performance Monitor can be used to log to a database – even from multiple machines.
Most of you have probably used Performance Monitor before. It allows you to monitor performance metrics (local and remote) in real-time and to log performance data from multiple machines for later analysis. In this article, I will focus on the latter because collecting and analysing performance data from multiple machines is a time consuming task.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 7 – Using Performance Monitor with a Database’
While writing the previous article about monitoring the performance of the physical disk, I realized that I should also explain why memory management and disk activity are closely connected. As this section started to get rather lengthy, I decided to publish the topic in a separate article.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 6 – The Link Between Disk Activity and Swapping’
In the last two articles of this series about performance monitoring, I have introduced how to monitor the characteristics of the memory subsystem and the processor subsystem. Now, I’d like to explain why the physical disk is of importance to performance monitoring and how it relates to the memory subsystem.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 5 – Physical Disk’
In the last posts of this series I gave an overview why performance monitoring is important and that it is not a trivial subject, that terminal servers are an entirely different matter and they require special attention and, in the last post, how to monitor the processor and related corners of the operating system.
Continuing my way through the operating system, I’d like to take an extensive look at the memory subsystem in this post.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 4 – Memory Management’
After the introductory articles about the importance of performance monitoring and the characteristics of terminal servers in that area, I finally dive into the first and most obvious subsystem of an operating system – the processor.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 3 – Processor’
In the first article of this series, I provided a short overview why performance monitoring is important, what subsystems are to be monitored and named some tools focussed on monitoring terminal servers.
Having been concerned with the performance analysis of terminal servers in many projects, I can draw some conclusions about terminal servers before diving deeper into the subject. I’d like to introduce two categories of terminal servers from a performance standpoint.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 2 – Terminal Servers’
