Are you looking for an easy way to monitor your applications for EUC? Without much scripting or tinkering? Of course there are many monitoring solutions that can also automate application testing and application monitoring. But the problem is, in my opinion, that these are often complicated and not always easy for beginners in the field of EUC to get started. Then Scoutbees by ControlUp might be just right for you. I’ve had a closer look at the whole thing and have to say that I think it’s a really cool solution. What I like best of all is that it’s really easy to implement and the dashboard looks really smart.
But I think it’s better if we take a closer look at it together – I don’t want to give away everything at the beginning of the article.
Why is application monitoring in EUC environments important?
Well, usually the virtual machines and also the services are monitored in a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop, VMware Horizon or Microsoft WVD or RDS environment. But what happens if the services on the servers are all working but the application does not start because the app server is not working properly or there is a problem within the application?
Right, the users cannot work properly. So it makes sense to have a look under the hood and not only monitor the tire pressure 😉
What is Scoutbees?
Scoutbees is a SaaS solution. ControlUp offers with this solution a fully managed cloud solution that enables continuous testing of the applications provided.
Scoutbees is a SaaS solution. ControlUp offers with this solution a fully managed cloud solution that enables continuous testing of the applications provided. The cool thing is that you can test your apps directly from the cloud. So you also have a monitoring of your gateway of the EUC solution. Additionally you can provide a satellite, called “Hive” here, so you can also monitor your vmware Horizon Broker or the Citrix Storefront from the internal network.
What does Scoutbees cost?
If you just want to monitor a published application or a desktop and probe once an hour, it’s all free. If you want more, you can get an offer from a Scoutbees / ControlUp partner.
For more information take a look at this:
First Steps in Scoutbees
Registration
To be able to watch the whole thing, we need a Scoutbees account first of all. We simply create one on the website.
Just create an account on https://app.scoutbees.io/register .
Once you have confirmed your e-mail address and assigned a password for the account, you can log in directly to the Scoutbees Dashboard and get started. If everything went well with the account, we can now create our first scout.
The first time you log in to the dashboard you will be shown a wizard for the first steps. I will skip this at this point.
Your first scout
I would now like to monitor a published app externally (i.e. via the Citrix ADC), directly from the cloud. To start I first create a new Scout with “Create Scout”.
Now we will go step by step through the steps to monitor our application, which is deployed on a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop environment, externally via the Citrix ADC Gateway.
Here I now select the desired settings for my scout from external.
Let’s go through the individual steps together.
1st Scout Type: Here you define whether the monitoring from external via a Cloud Hive or via a Custom Hive (you can simply install this in your environment on a VM (I will also show this later). In my case I choose Cloud Hive here.
- which Hive should be used? I choose EU (Frankfurt), because my environment is operated in Germany.
- which gateway is to be used. I select Netscaler Gateway.
- enter the address (public FQDN) of your external gateway here.
- the user with whom the monitoring should run.
- the password. In the step below, you can use a Fixer OTP if necessary. You can even connect an OTP here, then it can remain dynamic.
- click on “Get Resources” to list the available applications and desktops.
- you can now select the desired application here.
Finally we choose the desired distance in which we want to monitor and give the whole thing a name. If the settings fit, we click on “Next: Alert Policy”.
Alerting
Here you can now set the conditions when you want to be notified by mail or webhook. The cool thing about it is that you can use the Webhook to trigger a post in Microsoft teams.
If you do not want to be notified, you can simply skip this section and go to “Skip For Now”.
Now we look through the summary and save the scout.
Congratulations you have created your first scout. He will now start to monitor your environment. I think this was a really good step to set up a simple application monitoring for an EUC environment.
The Dashboard
Let’s take a look at the dashboard that is available so far. Here you can see directly the applications you monitor from your EUC environment. In the overview the whole registration time is shown. Here you can see some outliers and if necessary take a closer look.
In the lower area the details of a single scout are visible. Here the successful executions per application or desktop are shown as well as the average login time.
In this case you can see that the application has an availability of 100%.
Here you can see an example of an environment running on Microsoft Azure with Citrix Cloud So you can see that this also works normally and can be monitored.
The environment was influenced by script to show the difference.
Check out monitoring details
In the detail view for a single scout you can see the details for every single action. Login time, which hive was used and also how long the authentication took
If you click on a single line in the overview, you will directly see all details for the individual run. What I find really cool is that you even have a screenshot with you and a breakdown of how long each step in the test took. You can also see here which Virtual Apps Server provided the application.
Connect a OnPrem Hive to Scoutbees
If we now want On Prem to monitor our environment, we can do this with a custom hive. For this we click on “Add Hive” in the tab “Hives” .
Now we assign a name and click on Download Installation to download the setup file for the agent.
On a server I can now start to install the Hive in my environment. Here you can see the steps at a glance.
When the installation is complete, I click on Finish. The configuration of the hive starts automatically, now I just enter the hive key on my server and click OK. Now the connection is checked and the hive is registered and connected to the SaaS service.
If everything worked out, it should look like this.
The Hive is now visible in my surroundings. I can now use it for tests in my own environment.
Now I can select a custom hive directly when creating a new scout. The cool thing now is that I can test directly against a Citrix Storefron Server or a VMware Horizon Connection Server.
You can see, application monitoring in EUC environments can be a great advantage. I hope the article brings you further and you were able to take some things with you. Stay healthy. If you want, you can follow me on Twitter @ThomasPreischl