Cool Tool: Citrix Auto Support
Citrix has been touting and finally revealed Auto Support at Synergy Barcelona 2012 nearly a month ago and its purpose is to help Citrix administrators better troubleshoot, diagnose and quickly resolve issues in their environments. The tool goes a step further, however, and aggregates best practices that Citrix developed from working with thousands of customers. So, not only does it help in troubleshooting your environment, it will also measure it against best practice.
The best part is that not that it's free, but that it's also a SaaS application. That makes it all the more interesting, as the information you upload for analytics should be up the minute and accurate. You can access it if you have MyCitrix credentials, here.
Auto Support can be used for:
- Detecting known issues
- Best practices recommendation
- Patches that could resolve your issue
- System update information
- Crash dump analytics for NetScaler
The way Auto Support works is by collecting support data from your different products and uploading it to the system. I am sure you are wondering which tools are supported and how to collect data for them; well, here you go:
- XenApp -- To collect data for upload follow instruction on how to use Scout in CTX130147
- XenDesktop -- To collect data for upload follow instruction on how to use Scout in CTX130147
- XenServer -- Follow knowledgebase article CTX125372
- NetScaler (and you might as well call this XenScaler) -- Follow knowledgebase article CTX127900
If you are thinking that Citrix might incorporate this in all its products moving forward as a way of immediately providing troubleshooting and healthcheck capabilities and boosting the availability of their products, then I am agreeing and nodding my head with you, as it makes perfect sense.
Now what remains to be seen is how accurate and useful this tool really is in real-world implementations. I am very interested in getting some feedback from those who have put it to good use. Please share in the comments section here.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 11/13/2012 at 3:03 PM