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LOGON PROCESS
MONITORING FOR
CITRIX XENAPP
Understanding logon phases and their most common
issues
WHITE PAPER LOGON PROCESS MONITORING FOR CITRIX XENAPP / April 2010
Contents
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WHITE PAPER LOGON PROCESS MONITORING FOR CITRIX XENAPP / April 2010
User logon is a complex and resource intensive process on a Citrix XenApp system. It is initiated
when a XenApp farm load balancing algorithm selects the system where a published application
or desktop, which a user has selected, will be started and ends when the application or desktop is
running and the user is able to interact with it.
There are a number of factors that have an impact on the logon process that can get further
complicated if solutions that integrate into the logon process, such as User Workspace
Management products, are used. All this is making the user logon process very hard to
troubleshoot. Only a few of the best management tools can break down the logon process on a
XenApp system into phases and measures their duration. Thus, troubleshooting the logon process
is much easier, because you don't have to inspect the logon process as a whole; instead you
concentrate only on the phase that is particularly slow.
Below you will find elements of each logon phase and possible reasons for their slow behavior.
The phase starts just after the user credentials are validated and lasts until the profile is
downloaded from the profile storage (network share).
Additionally, monitoring of Windows user profiles for the presence and amount of the specific file
categories is important. Various file categories should be tracked: executable files, media files,
and custom files.
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WHITE PAPER LOGON PROCESS MONITORING FOR CITRIX XENAPP / April 2010
During this phase, the server applies user settings defined on the Domain Controller.
• issues with required infrastructure (required services and components are either not running
or configured as expected),
• issues with network and domain controller availability,
• system time is not configured correctly,
• high network load, or
• the high amount of policy settings.
During this phase, network connections are restored and profile settings, such as fonts and screen
colors, are loaded. Also, if this is the first time this profile is being used, some extra initialization is
applied. The default profile is created, first time use settings are applied for the shell (Explorer),
Internet Explorer, Office (particularly Outlook), and any other application that uses Active Setup.
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WHITE PAPER LOGON PROCESS MONITORING FOR CITRIX XENAPP / April 2010
Management tool should differentiate between Terminal Server (RDP client) and Citrix (ICA client)
logon. If the user used the RDP connection to log on to the server, this will be the last phase of the
logon process.
The phase covers Citrix specific activity before it launches the requested application: launching
seamless windows engine shell, auto creation of client printers, and ICA client update process.
• issues with the client printer (usually third party printer drivers) or
• issues with retrieving ICA client version and the rest of the update process.
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WHITE PAPER LOGON PROCESS MONITORING FOR CITRIX XENAPP / April 2010
To isolate the problem inside the logon process, the answers to the following questions should be
provided:
Providing answers for troubleshooting Citrix and Terminal Server slow logons can be very easy
when you are using the right management tool that provides logon process monitoring, reporting,
and managing capabilities to narrow down where the problem might be.
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WHITE PAPER LOGON PROCESS MONITORING FOR CITRIX XENAPP / April 2010
NOTICES
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WHITE PAPER LOGON PROCESS MONITORING FOR CITRIX XENAPP / April 2010
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