We just announced that Citrix GoToManage can now be used to monitor and support Citrix VDI-in-a-Box deployments, making it easy for you to remotely monitor and support virtual desktop deployments at multiple sites or customer locations.

As the industry moves from the PC Era to the Cloud Era, desktop virtualization is rapidly being adopted by cloud providers and large enterprises to centrally-manage and deliver virtual desktops and apps as a service to any user, on any device, in any location. Small and medium businesses want to adopt desktop virtualization for the same reasons large enterprises do — to reduce desktop management costs, improve security and increase business agility, but they often find enterprise-class solutions overkill for smaller environments. Citrix VDI-in-a-Box 5 is purpose-built for SMB customers. Its simple all-in-one architecture eliminates over 60 percent of VDI costs without compromising features like user experience, security and high availability that are needed by customers of all sizes.

To make it even easier, Citrix GoToManage has new dashboards and alerts to remotely monitor and support Citrix VDI-in-a-Box servers and virtual desktop deployments anytime, from anywhere. GoToManage continually tracks key health and performance metrics on the physical and virtual infrastructure helping to keep end users productive. Alerts can be configured to provide an “early-warning-system” – giving IT pros time to troubleshoot problems and make configuration changes before users are impacted. With the GoToManage Remote Support module, it is easy to set up and securely access (over the Internet) all VDI-in-a-Box servers from a PC, Mac, or iPad.

You can access the new dashboards by browsing to the Community section (under GoToManage Monitoring) and searching for VDI. You will most likely be interested in the “VDI-in-a-box Monitoring” dashboard which provides a view into the health of the host, the hypervisor, and the management interface. It also presents the key error log data that is collected from the VDI server. [Note that the GoToManage Crawler can act as a syslog receiver – it listens on port 514. So, to receive logs configure the VDI manager to send its syslog messages to the machine the Crawler is running on. The Crawler receives, compresses and sends the syslog messages to the data center.]

We have also created a number of alerts to notify you of important events. For example, you can add the following custom PQL queries to log alerts to proactive monitor the environment.

For VDI-in-a-box Server Timeout – error.server.timedout OR error.server.timingout

For VDI-in-a-box Server Missing – KAVIZA error.server.missing

For VDI-in-a-box Server Returned – KAVIZA server.missing.return

For VDI-in-a-box Error Message – “KAVIZA ERROR”

You can read the full story on how Citrix is building its SMB desktop virtualization business.