Citrix Resource Management Services

In thin-client setups–such as those running Win NT Terminal Server, Citrix WinFrame or Metaframe–all processing takes place on the server side. This is because all clients log in directly to the server and run applications from there. If the server crashes or is down for some reason, the whole network can come to a halt. Not a very pleasant situation. Citrix Resource Management Services is a tool to manage servers running these three thin-client solutions. It analyzes the system’s performance and the applications running on it. If you’ve more than one server running, it must be installed on each. 

You can view the load on each server based on the number of applications or users, and get details like the number of times a particular user runs a specific application, on which server it was executed, etc. It has options for viewing data in tabular, graphical, or raw forms. It saves all data in any ODBC-compliant database format, such as Access, MS SQL Server, and dBase. You don’t need to have the database application running on the server for this. It even has a query builder to query the database easily. 

There’s an analysis tool for organizing the huge amount of collected data into easy-to-understand tables or graphs. It computes details to collate this data–such as average, minimum, and maximum–and also allows you to plot standard deviation of the value on its graph itself.

A good feature of the software is real-time system monitoring, which is supported by its online help. You can set trigger values for various attributes of system performance being recorded. When these values are exceeded, an alarm is set off. The program gives advice on what the problem could be and its cause. This is generic advice, but you can also add extra comments to make it more comprehensive. 

Another neat feature is its ability to view the details of two or more servers simultaneously on the same graph, so long as the data from the two servers is being written to a common database. You can also launch more than one instance of the tool to access data simultaneously from different machines on the network.

You can create billing reports on the usage of system resources, such as memory, CPU time, session time, etc. You can group users together in these reports (into billing centers) and create the report of a billing center, or create bills for single users.

Overall, it’s a useful tool, and a must-have for huge thin-client networks.