Recently I came across a problem involving a new 1909 Citrix environment which was not logging logon times within Director.
When troubleshooting the issue, I started with the component in the environment reporting the issue, Director. I investigated the three areas Director reports the logon times for the environment, the Dashboard, the logon performance section within the trends tab, as well as the details section for an active user session. All three locations reported there were no logons during the period; in reality, there were several logons which had occurred. Only the active user session details reported an issue showing the logon performance data was not available.
The basics – let’s start at the beginning
Taking a step back, I will explain the process which occurs when logging into windows and how the user session login time is recorded within Citrix Director. This article CTX218717 explains how Director collects the login information. Below is an excerpt covering the process.
The following diagram from Citrix provides an overview of the process.
To explain the individual task from the graph., assume there is a real established session to the Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA).
- The OS providers are writing in the login process for the user/session;
- Using the VDA agent and the communication with the Broker Service, the information about the session is sent to the Broker. The Broker Service places the information about the session into the Site Database.
- During the transmission of the data from the VDA agent to the Broker Service, Monitoring Service interacts with data, collects the necessary information and places the same in a queue to be written into the Monitoring Database.
- When the Director admin logs in, Director uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Open Data Protocol (OData) queries which are sent to the Monitoring Service, and one of those oData queries is about the Logon Duration.
- Monitoring Service will run the oData call against the Monitoring Database, collect the information and deliver it to Director.
- When Director user opens Session Detail page in Director for a user session, Director first checks with the Broker Service, Active Directory (AD) Identity Service and Monitoring Service the information about the session and permission. When the Session Detail page is open, Director will send a WMI request to the VDA agent to collect certain information from the VDA directly. One of those items from that information is Logon Duration. VDA agent then uses the Director plugin to call the Citrix Profile Manager to collect the data from the WMI providers.
- When the Logon Duration is collected, the information is sent back to the Director Session Details page
In searching for answers, this issue seems to be quite common with reports dating back over many I will start troubleshooting by following within the official guides from Citrix on the matter and attempt to find the root causes of Director not reporting user logon times.
