Citrix Management Pack for MOM 2005
Citrix Presentation Server 4—running in both 32-bit and 64-bit environments—deepened integration with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 earlier this month with its new release of the Management Pack for MOM. This integration improves user experience and heightens management, monitoring and security capabilities.
The Citrix Management Pack is a plug-in to MOM that enables system administrators to centrally monitor the health and availability of Presentation Server systems and server farms from a single view, and easily respond to and resolve issues from a single desktop console.
Management Pack Features
Some key features and benefits of using the Management Pack in a Presentation Server installation:
Event management. The Management Pack captures a variety of events from servers and server farms. These events are collated and then presented to the administrator through the MOM Administrator Console, allowing an overall view of server operation. In MOM 2005, events are managed through the MOM Operator Console.
Performance monitoring. You can use the Management Pack to monitor server performance. Rules can be customized and new rules created to set thresholds for key performance attributes in the server farm.
Extensive knowledge base. The Management Pack includes an extensive product support knowledge base, including links to relevant Citrix Knowledge Base articles. Centralized access to information about managing servers enables administrators to quickly interpret events and troubleshoot problems.
Customizable rules and alerts. You can configure the Management Pack to alter how it responds to an event. You do this by modifying and extending the rules to best suit your environment. For example, you can configure the rule for the ICA session disconnection rate so that the alert that is triggered is meaningful and appropriate to your site. Citrix Knowledge Base documentation is available to help you with this customization.
License server monitoring. The management pack can raise alerts pertaining to Citrix license servers. For example, the pack is able to alert an administrator if licenses are near their expiration date, or if the number of available licenses on a Citrix license server is running low.
State monitoring. New for this release is full support for the MOM state view. The management pack adds two columns or “roles” to the MOM state view to allow administrators to quickly view the current state of their Citrix Presentation Servers and Citrix License Servers alongside other products and services they are monitoring using MOM.
Graphical topology view of monitored farms and servers. Also new in this release, the Citrix management pack utilizes the MOM Topology view to display a diagram showing the structure of a user’s Citrix deployment. This diagram comprises a hierarchical view showing Citrix farms and zones, and the servers they contain. The diagram shows servers with special roles such as zone data collectors, as well as general information for each server, such as whether logons are enabled, and which license server is supplying its licenses.
Convenient launch of the Access Suite Console. The new management pack takes advantage of MOM 2005’s task-running functionality to provide a link inside the operator console which will launch the Citrix Access Suite Console if it is currently installed on the MOM server.
Citrix views. Citrix views are available in the Public Views folder. These views allow you to monitor events and alerts raised for servers and server farms, and to identify trends and performance issues occurring on servers and published applications.
Citrix notification group. The Management Pack includes a notification group, called the Citrix Administrators group. You can configure this group to ensure that the appropriate people are notified about problems with servers and server farms.
Easy installation. The Management Pack consists of a single file that is available from the Citrix website. To install the Management Pack, you simply import this file into MOM, using the MOM Administrator Console.
The Citrix Management Pack for MOM is available to Citrix Subscription Advantage™ members, who can download it from the Citrix Secure Portal at www.citrix.com/mycitrix.