Jun 262012
Farm Nanny 2.1 is available and now features a Citrix XenApp farm & server reporting / documentation module.
The Farm Nanny Reporter exports all data (and more!) that you see in the Farm Nanny Resource Monitor to an Excel sheet, without the need to have Microsoft Excel installed on your server.
With the Farm Nanny Reporter you don’t have to run PowerShell scripts (which require you to install the XenApp SDK on your server) on your servers to document your Citrix XenApp farm: Just click the button and you’re done!
Download or read more about Farm Nanny here.
Hello,
great tool but wouldn’t it be nice to add some kind of database behind it so that we can query for historical data like in the classic resource manager from citrix?
Keep up the good work!
cheers
Anthony
Hi Anthony,
Glad you like Farm Nanny!
Database integration for Farm Nanny is probably not going to happen any time soon.
My initial goal for Farm Nanny was to build a “clientless EdgeSight light”, which gives you a quick overview of whats going on, without the need to install a full server to take care of that.
Integrating Farm Nanny with with a database, would be like building just another EdgeSight competitor.
Thank you for this… I was starting to go a bit crazy writing PowerShell scripts for this. Excellent tool for any XenApp person. Glad everything seems to work with XA 6.5
Daniel
Hi Michel,
i just found your site/tool.
Is it possible for you to add a counter that conflates sessions of one user to one countable session?
For Example: User starts 3 PubApps (uses SessionSharing), in the counter this is displayed as 3 sessions on a Server so its hard to find out how many users are really connected to a Server.
Best regards & thanks for this wonderful tool
Marco
Hi Marco,
I’ve done a little testing with this after reading your post and noticed some odd behaviour on 2 XenApp 6.5 farms:
I opened 2 published applications (with the same settings and on the same server). In the Citrix AppCenter it showed 2 sessions, although they had the same session ID (so session sharing was working).
Ofcourse Farm Nanny also showed 2 sessions.
I found this thread which confirms my findings:
http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=301856
When session sharing “works” and the Citrix console shows only 1 session for a user (who might have opened 3 published applications), Farm Nanny should show 1 session only as well.
So can you confirm that when you have 3 published applications open, the Citrix console shows 1 only session and Farm Nanny shows 3 ?
In that case, send me an e-mail and I would like to try and fix that.
Thanks,
Michel
Hi Michel,
thanks for your quick reply.
I opened 2 published applications (with the same settings and on the same server). In the Citrix AppCenter it showed 2 sessions, although they had the same session ID (so session sharing was working).
Ofcourse Farm Nanny also showed 2 sessions.
That´s right. If I open for example Excel and Word and session sharing is active it´s listed twice in xenapp-console. So farmnanny also reports 2 active sessions on Server. There is no way to reduce this Count to 1 in XenApp-Console (i think?!) so it would be nice if this Feature is available in farm nanny.
Hi Marco,
I’m going to see what I can do about this after my vacation.
You’ve got an interesting point: Maybe Farm Nanny should show the total number of active sessions AND the total number of unique users.
Thanks for the information!
that would be great!!
Have a nice vacation.
Hi Marco,
Farm Nanny 2.11 now shows the total number of unique session ID’s.
Hope this helps!
Hey Michel,
thanks for your work, you added the “Total unique Session-IDs” on top the resource manager, right?
The problem is here: If i have for example 10 Server in my farm the value combines all sessions of these 10 servers. So if a user is on server 1, session 3 and a second user on server 2, session 3 this is counted as one session. It would be better if this information is added (may additionally) for each server in the servers-list.
Do you think thats possible?
Thanks,
marco
Hi Marco,
Indeed, the total unique value is the one on top of the resource manager.
So you mean adding a counter like “unique active sessions” to the server list, which counts the total number of unique active sessions per server ?
Yeah exactly. And the “unique active sessions” should be the total amount of these counters.
In my case the “Total active sessions” are 1061, the “Total unique active sessions” are 57.
This value is a bit useless, cause there are about 500 users logged in now.
So perfect it would be for example:
Total unique active sessions (logged on users on the farm): 100
Server 1: unique sessions (logged on users on the server): 10
Server 2: unique sessions: 10
…..
Server 10 unique sessions: 10
I’ll get in touch with you directly to see if we can sort this out, thanks!
Hi, Just a small “problem” I noticed.
With the latest version of farm nanny (2.12) the sort function in active sessions/unique active sessions isnt working correctly. It sorts 10+ sessions after 9.
Which isnt a big issue with few servers and quite low session counts. But with a big list it can be a bit anoying
For example:
8
7
5
14
12
Thanks for a great app!
Hi Peter,
Thanks for reporting this, I’m going to try if I can do something to fix that!
Does it not support session-host only servers? Just installed it on an IT-only server to provide my team with some tools, but it says I’m not running it as a farm admin, on a xenapp server or not running XenApp 6 or 6.5..
I’m running 6.5 HRP1.
Any ideas?
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for reporting this.
When Farm Nanny starts, it contacts the server it is running on and asks for the farm name through a XenApp PowerShell SDK dll, but because that command does not return the value it expects, it is giving you this error.
I did a little searching, but it appears that a session only host does not have the complete IMA subsystem and therefore Farm Nanny does not work on a session only host.
Thank you for the response! I went ahead and made the server a controller and it did work. Would installing the SDK help?
Hi Ryan,
No, installing the XenApp PowerShell SDK should not make a difference. The dll’s that come with Farm Nanny are from the actual XenApp 6.5 Powershell SDK and Farm Nanny uses those.
Hi Michel
Can FarmNanny be configured for Proxy Authentication when using the “Hotfix Brower” or “Technote Browser” ?
Hi Johan,
No, proxy authentication is still on my “I really need to get this done when I have more time” to do list
OK, thanks!
Farm Nanny is still a great tool!
Great tool, thanks!
Hi Michel,
Great tool. very handy. Only in my farm the 2,12 version hangs when running the Display application names and user load option. I have to kill the app in task manager to get out of it.
Leo
Hello Leo,
When you choose the option “Display application names and server load”, Farm Nanny actually just executes a
qfarm /appcommand.Could you please verify if this command executes correctly on the server you are running Farm Nanny ?
Hi Michel,
Yes, that was the first thing I tested. It is very strange. Farm Nany just hangs and when you kill off the session by pressing the right top X the session stays running in taks manager. You actually have to kill it. No errors reported.
Windows 2008 R2 server, XenApp 6.5 RUP01.
Leo
Hi Michel,
Great tool.
1) The “Unique Active Session ID’s” was not shown in the “Resource Monitor” Excel report.
2) Is it possible to have the “Total Unique Active Session ID’s”?
3) Is it possible to schedule to create the Excel report?
Thanks
Hi King Huat,
The first one I’m going to include in the next release.
About the second.. You mean the total amount of unique session id’s on a farm level ?
That might not be interesting to know: On server1, user A cloud have session id 3… On server2, user B could have session id 3 as well (session id’s are only unique on a server level). So the total unique active session id’s would be 1 in this case, while there are 2 unique users.
Or did you mean something else?
A scheduler is not coming up anytime soon, but I’m not saying never!