The days are long gone when a browser was just another application. Modern websites are applications of their own, and the browser is their operating system. That has consequences for monitoring. It is no longer sufficient to gather performance data for the browser as a whole. When, for example, Internet Explorer’s CPU usage is high, [...]
Why Every Self-Respecting Administrator Should Ditch Explorer For Good
Windows Explorer is an end user, a consumer product. It creates a reality distortion field that hides part of what is really there and makes you see things that do not exist. That is OK for its intended customer base, but as an administrator you cannot afford to live in a dream world.
What are Slow Logons and Where Do They Come From?
Considering the importance of fast logons for a good user experience there is surprisingly little information on the subject. Windows does not even record the total logon time, let alone where it is spent. Administrators wishing to analyze their users’ logons are left in the dark. But that can be changed.
Getting USB Smart Card Readers to Work with Citrix XenDesktop
Even if you only have a moderately sized VDI deployment chances are high you will face the problem of getting USB smart card readers to work on the virtual desktops. Given that this is such a basic requirement it is astonishingly hard to implement correctly. To save you the pain of having to start from [...]
Windows Offline Files: Problems and Solutions
This is a collection of bugs, errors and problems I encountered working with Offline Files, along with possible solutions or at least workarounds. For more information about Offline Files see also my other articles about this topic.is topic.
Application Usage Metering with uberAgent for Splunk
uberAgent has been pretty good at monitoring applications for some time. It is capable of auto-grouping processes to applications and showing IOPS and other stats per application in addition to per process. All this gets even better today: beta 2, available now, adds application usage metering to the feature list.
The Impossibility of Measuring IOPS (Correctly)
If you have ever used Sysinternals’ Process Monitor, chances are high you were a little intimidated when you looked at your first capture: it probably contained hundreds of thousands registry and file system events, generated in a minute or less. That amount of activity must surely indicate high system load – but strangely, very often [...]
XenDesktop Logon Failure: Desktop Viewer Pops up and Closes
Know this problem? You try to start a XenDesktop session, Desktop Viewer opens … and closes. Then nothing.
uberAgent for Splunk is Here
The beta version of uberAgent for Splunk is available. Official news release uberAgent’s website Download
Login VSI: Custom Command Line with CSV File for RDP Connections
Getting Login VSI to launch sessions on multiple RD session hosts is possible with the connection type Custom command line with CSV, but it is more difficult than it should be – especially if you want to launch the RDP sessions in windowed rather than full screen mode.
uberAgent for Splunk: User Experience
Who said that end users get all the pretty UIs? Administrators are as happy as anyone to replace ugly consoles with good-looking HTML5 that runs on a smartphone just as well as on a PC.
Performance Impact of Windows Offline Files
A little known fact about the Windows Offline Files functionality is it slows down network operations considerably. Here is how and why.
uberAgent for Splunk: Dynamic Application Identification
uberAgent for Splunk monitors Windows machines. It does not try to display as much data as possible but focuses on visualizing what is actually going on instead. In the last post we gave you a glimpse of the information it can display about user sessions and logon times. Today we are going to talk about [...]
Windows Update Error 80072EFE in Client Hyper-V Guest
Client Hyper-V was one of the things I was most looking forward to when I upgraded to Windows 8. I immediately added the Hyper-V feature and went to installing Server 2008 R2 in the first virtual machine. That went well enough and nothing extraordinary happened until I tried to run Windows Update in the new [...]
Introducing uberAgent for Splunk
uberAgent for Splunk takes Windows monitoring a step further. uberAgent does not just collect data – it gives you the information that matters. Other monitoring products rely on the performance counters built into Windows. uberAgent has its own metrics, covering key aspects of user experience and system performance.
How to Determine the Size of the System Volume Information Directory
Due to the strict permissions on the System Volume Information directory finding out its true size is not easy.
XenApp and RDS Sizing Part 4 – Calculating the New Farm’s Capacity
This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous articles in this series we saw how to calculate a farm’s capacity and then how to determine its load. With that information and knowledge of our methodology we can go about calculating the capacity of the new farm, [...]
Conferences 2012 and Beyond
What do I do for a living? I travel to community conferences, of course. In 2012 I spent 44 days going to 10 different conferences – err, wait, that is I would love to earn a living that way, but of course I have to work like everybody else. Nevertheless, having my own company I [...]
Clean Install of Windows 8 on Sony Vaio S15
Sony Vaio laptops are rumored to suffer from two defects: the preloaded OS image being full of crapware, and being extremely difficult to clean install. The former is true for nearly every laptop vendor. I do not care about it because I reinstall anyway – I know from first-hand experience how much can go wrong [...]
Batch Delete Issued Citrix User/Device Licenses with Udadmin
Udamin.exe is a handy tool for managing Citrix user/device licenses. To get a list of currently issued licenses run it like this: C:\Program Files\Citrix\Licensing\LS>udadmin.exe -list Usage data is 15 minutes old. Next update in 1 minutes. Users: username1 XDT_PLT_UD 2013.0815 username2 XDT_PLT_UD 2013.0815 Devices: computername1 XDT_PLT_UD 2013.0815 computername2 XDT_PLT_UD 2013.0815 You can delete [...]
Lenovo T520 Maximum Memory: Not 8, But 16 GB!
Contrary to what Lenovo wants to make you believe, the T520 laptop is not limited to 8 GB of RAM. I own this reliable workhorse and made the mistake of buying another laptop because I wanted something more elegant, but mainly because I need more than 8 GB of RAM. As it turned out, the [...]
Installing ESXi 4.1 on HP DL380 G8: No NICs Found
This kept us occupied quite a bit: after having worked with HP’s G7 line of servers for a long time, we ordered our first DL380 G8 for use with VDI. According to HP’s documentation the same custom image can (and must be) used when installing ESXi as with the G7. With that information, setting up [...]
XenApp and RDS Sizing Part 3 – Determining Farm Load
This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous part of this series we saw how to determine the capacity of a server farm. This time we will look at how that capacity is utilized, in other words at farm load. As before we will do that [...]
Solution to “Windows Cannot be Installed to this Disk”
I encountered a strange error when I moved my laptop’s hard drive to another computer to make room for an SSD. When I tried to install Windows 8 on the repurposed drive I could not see any partitions. Neither could I install Windows on the drive. I kept getting the error Windows cannot be installed [...]
The Sad State of Web Forums – and some Alternatives
The software industry in general is a very fast moving business, but even in this sector there are niches that allow species to survive that should, by normal means, have been dead a very long time ago. One such species is the web forum.
Choosing a Laptop, 2012 Edition
I have been using Lenovo laptops for more than seven years. They never failed me – not a single hardware fault or software instability in all those years. OK, not everything was great – I distinctly remember the R60 which had an atrociously bad screen – but apart from a few glitches here and there [...]
Show Me Your Start Menu and I’ll Tell You Who You Are
A Windows 7 start menu tells a lot about the user that, indirectly, created it. This is what mine looks like: So what does that say about me? Background This is the SetACL lettering with characters consisting of actual source code I am offering on t-shirts, too. Aero? You might notice that I am not [...]
XenApp and RDS Sizing Part 2 – Determining Farm Capacity
This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. As we have seen in part 1 of this series, when sizing a new farm the first thing we need to know is the capacity of the existing farm. Armed with data on capacity and additionally load, we can easily calculate [...]
Knowledge Base Gems
While I am generally satisfied with the quality of Microsoft Knowledge Base articles (many other vendors’ KBs are far worse), from time to time I encounter articles that either lack even the tiniest bits of information or are unintentionally funny. Today I found one that fits into both categories: Unexpectedly slow startup or logon process [...]
