Replacing Edgesight with Goliath Performance Monitor

After receiving quite a bit of feedback from my first post on Replacing Citrix Edgesight with Goliath Performance Monitor (GPM), I have decided to create a feature-to-feature comparison between Edgesight 5.x, Desktop Director\Insight, and Goliath Performance Monitor. With this comparison, it should be clear that GPM is more than capable of replacing your existing Edgesight deployment and Desktop Director, while a useful utility, it isn’t and wasn’t meant to be an Enterprise monitoring solution for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop.

The following charts show a breakdown of features between Citrix Edgesight products (not compatible with XenApp\XenDesktop 7.x and later), Citrix Desktop Director (see notes about specific version requirements) and Goliath Performance Monitor. A status of ‘Basic’ indicates that there is limited or basic support for that item.

The first category is general monitoring data – the basic metric gathering for the environment. The only area Edgesight is lacking in this category is hypervisor monitoring.

Monitoring Data
	Citrix Edgesight 5.x	Desktop Director	Goliath Performance Monitor	Explanation
Basic system configuration data	Yes	Yes	Yes	System IP address, OS, hostname, CPU, memory
CPU and Memory performance data	Yes	Basic	Yes	CPU utilization, memory utilization
Session process details	Yes	Basic	Yes	Session process memory and CPU usage
Full process metric data	Basic	No	Yes	Detailed process memory allocation (commited, working), thread and handle count
Eventlog monitoring	Yes	No	Yes	Monitor the event log for specific event IDs or event strings
Windows service monitoring	Yes	No	Yes	Windows and Citrix service hangs or crashes
Network utilization and throughput	Yes	No	Yes	Network interface receive and transmit data, network latency
Storage metrics	Basic	Basic	Yes	Session IOPS, latency, disk queue length
Basic hypervisor hosting data	No	Yes	Yes	Hypervisor connection, hosting server name, VM name
Hypervisor CPU and memory data	No	No	Yes	CPU ready percentage, VM memory allocation, memory overhead, memory balloon

Next, is the ICA session data – both Edgesight and Director have a strong showing, gathering all ICA\HDX data.

ICA Session
	Citrix Edgesight 5.x	Desktop Director	Goliath Performance Monitor	Explanation
Basic session information	Yes	Yes	Yes	Connection type, endpoint, time in state, session ID
Detailed session information	Yes	Yes	Yes	Agent version, client receiver version, client name
Session virtual channel status	Basic	Yes	Yes	Individual HDX channel status (graphics, audio, printing, media), ICA latency
Session virtual channel metrics	No	Basic(1)	Yes	Individual channel metrics, ICA RTT
Session logon duration breakdown	Yes	Yes	Yes	Breakdown of logon timings including brokering, GPO, profile load, and interactive session
*Note(1): Requires NetScaler Insight

The realtime data and analysis capabilities of Edgesight were excellent and are clearly lacking in Desktop Director – Goliath Performance Monitor has you covered with the added benefit of real time hypervisor metrics.

Realtime Data and Analysis
	Citrix Edgesight 5.x	Desktop Director	Goliath Performance Monitor	Explanation
Basic system health dashboard	Yes	Basic	Yes	Easily readable dashboard showing faults and alarms
Compute and Storage dashboard	Yes	No	Yes	Dashboard showing CPU, memory and storage metrics
Customizable dashboards	Yes	No	Yes	Modify dashboard view my modifying servers and desktops in focus, sorting, and grouping
Realtime alarms	Yes	No	Yes	Set alarms based on any number of counters – compute, eventlog, or session issues
Alarm threshold customization	Yes	No	Yes	Modify the threshold of alerting for individual alarms to fit the environment
Hosting infrastructure compute data	No	No	Yes	View CPU, memory and storage metrics of the underlying virtual infrastructure

Troubleshooting performance issues requires historical data in order to draw conclusions about exactly what happened. Reporting was a strong suit for Edgesight – while GPM may not have the sheer quantity of in-box reports that Edgesight does, it does have a good number of quality reports without the reliance on SQL Reporting Services.

Trending and Reporting
	Citrix Edgesight 5.x	Desktop Director	Goliath Performance Monitor	Explanation
System CPU and Memory trends	Yes	No	Yes	Graphical CPU and memory utilization over time
Session connection trends	Yes	Basic	Yes	Session counts over time including active and disconnected sessions
Logon duration trends	Yes	Yes	Yes	Session logon duration counts over time
Session logon detail historical reporting	Yes	Basic	Yes	Historical session logon performance details
Historical XenApp application usage	Yes	Basic(2)	Yes	Historical XenApp application usage by user
Report export functionality	Yes	Basic(2)	Yes	Export configured reports to other formats for viewing
Schedule and send reports via email	Yes	No	Yes	Schedule reports to be run with results sent via email
Report custom branding	No	No	Yes	Apply custom logos and URLs to reports
*Note(2): Only available in Director build 7.6.300

One of the most-missed features from Edgesight is alerting – Desktop Director simply does not have any sort of alerting engine.

Alerting
	Citrix Edgesight 5.x	Desktop Director	Goliath Performance Monitor	Explanation
Email based alerts	Yes	No	Yes	Send emails based on alarm thresholds
Advanced alert actions	Basic	No	Yes	Send alerts via SNMP, syslog, tap, or beeper services
Advanced alert configuration	Yes	No	Yes	Set alerts based on multiple rules or a schedule
Remediation actions	Basic	No	Yes	Automatically act on specific alarms by running a program or script
Create custom alerts	Yes	No	Yes	Create custom alerts on objects in addition to pre-configured alerts

When you talk about monitoring software as a whole, it should be clear what the product is capable of doing. As I mentioned before, Director is a help desk tool first and a monitoring product second; and unfortunately Citrix Edgesight is end of life. IT staff are being left in the dark when it comes to knowing exactly what is going on in their Citrix environment in the XenApp\XenDesktop 7.x world – Goliath Performance Monitor fills the gaps left by Desktop Director and adds much needed functionality to get a complete picture of performance.

Infrastructure
	Citrix Edgesight 5.x	Desktop Director	Goliath Performance Monitor	Explanation
Monitor XenApp & XenDesktop systems	Yes	Basic	Yes	Gather performance metrics about the XenApp servers and XenDesktop systems
Monitor Citrix infrastructure servers	No	Basic	Yes	Gather performance metrics from supporting citrix infrastructure – DDC, Web Interface, Storefront
Monitor hypervisor compute	No	No	Yes	Gather CPU and memory performance metrics from the underlying virtual infrastructure
Monitor hypervisor storage	No	No	Yes	Gather performance metrics from the hypervisor storage layer
Monitor synthetic user sessions	Yes(3)	No	Yes(3)	Launch and monitor synthetic user logons to the environment
Monitor nVidia GRID virtual graphics	No	No	Yes	Gather performance data from virtualized GPU adapters

*Note(3): Synthetic transactions require Edgesight AAM or Goliath Logon Simulator

As you can see from the above feature comparisons, Desktop Director simply cannot replace Edgesight – and even if it could Edgesight had some pretty significant feature holes. Goliath Performance Monitor is an agile monitoring tool that was purpose built to monitor your Citrix infrastructure as well as the virtual infrastructure as a whole.

If you’re ready to replace Edgesight or get (vastly) more information than Director can provide, sign up for your free trial today – http://goliathtechnologies.com/goliath-performance-monitor-trial-demo-request