Guest post by Andrew Morgan, ControlUp

Having a great monitoring product running in your environment grants you a lot of peace of mind — that everything is operating within your parameters and when any aspect of your environment fails, you are armed with the correct data in order to respond.

But still, it happens. No product is perfect. Your phone rings, then your colleague’s, and then your boss’. An issue has occurred, there was no forewarning, people can’t get access to the resources they need. It’s all-out panic…

We’ve all been there, we’ve all done this dance and today ControlUp and I are very happy to announce a new tool to add to your bag of tricks!

Today, we’re really excited to announce the brand new, free utility named “ControlUp Logon Simulator”.

ControlUp Logon Simulator:

Like its name implies the ControlUp Logon Simulator allows you to simulate user logons using “synthetic sessions” to test the availability and the responsiveness of all the elements taking part in real users login in your XenApp/XenDesktop Environment.

The ControlUp Logon Simulator is designed to communicate directly with the Storefront store (even through NetScaler gateway!) via native API’s to:

Authenticate via Citrix Storefront.

Mimic Citrix Receiver traffic flow.

Ensure the availability of the StoreFront Service.

Enumerate applications and ensure broker availability.

Launch application or desktop sessions against your catalogs.

Track key metrics such as connection time, logon time, etc. to ensure a successful end to end connection.

Unlike other solutions, the ControlUp Logon Simulator does NOT rely on “scraping” websites or the storefront web environment. Utilising ThinScale Technologies Connector technology, the ControlUp Logon Simulator communicates directly with Citrix StoreFront store or Netscaler Gateway directly to retrieve the richest, pertinent information and errors during the lifetime of the connection.

Once the Logon Simulator has ensured authentication was successful, resources are available and can be requested, The Logon Simulator then passes the ICA file into the Citrix Receiver SDK to actively track every aspect of the logon and log off process.

The ControlUp Logon Simulator can periodically repeat these tests morning, noon and night, ensuring your users have the connectivity they need, ensuring the infrastructure is live and serving logons.

In the inevitable case of an outage, should this connectivity path break, you’ll be the first to know about it and most importantly you won’t be caught “on the back foot” when a user gets in touch complaining of technical difficulties.

How to use the ControlUp Logon Simulator:

You can download the tool here. Once downloaded, run the application, then:

Add the storefront or NetScaler Gateway connection

Add the name of the resource you wish to test

Add the test user account credentials … that’s it!

You can also choose to run the Logon simulator from a number of endpoints in corporate sub sites or head office and let it do the hard work for you.

If… oh, who am I kidding… when a connection fails, an event log is created to alert the administrator of this failure immediately so it can be dealt with promptly.

This event log can easily be configured to raise an alert in ControlUp which can then send you email or mobile alert and be further analysed with the events pane

Alternately, you can configure an event log trigger to run a PowerShell script which will send an email, run a command, etc. The world is your oyster as to how you choose to respond.

What’s next:

As I mentioned already, ControlUp Logon Simulator is available for use in all enterprises, today, for free! So do grab a copy and prepare to get that bit more proactive!

So, what are you waiting for? Go try it now and get in touch with any feedback or thoughts on the future of this new, free community tool.