Monitoring any Application’s Startup Duration with uberAgent 1.6 Application startup duration is an essential component of user experience. If you want to make sure that UX on your Windows machines is acceptable you need to monitor the time […] Read more
Persistent VDI in the Real World – Architecture This is the first article in a multi-part series about building and maintaining an inexpensive scalable platform for VDI in enterprise environments. Requirements Before we can even start to think […] Read more
Workaround: “554 rejected due to spam content” sending e-mail It sometimes happens when I reply to an e-mail from somebody who is asking about my products that the receiving mail server rejects my message with the code “554 rejected […] Read more
Shutting Down Unused Persistent XenDesktop VMs When you use XenDesktop the only way it makes sense you may find that Citrix has not really put much effort into making that a smooth experience. Read more
How to Process Terabytes – per Day (or: my account of Splunk .conf 2013) Processing several terabytes of data per day is not too uncommon and easily possible with Splunk – that is one of the many things I learned at .conf 2013 in […] Read more
The Unofficial Atlantis Ilio FAQ This is a collection of answers to questions around Atlantis Ilio you are likely to have when using the appliance in production. Read more
uberAgent Now Monitors RES Workspace Manager Logon Times, Too Whether user profiles are loading slowly or group policy processing is taking too long – uberAgent for Splunk tells you exactly what is causing slow logons. uberAgent always supported a […] Read more
Error Message Explained: User Profile Service Failed the Logon This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Many errors related to user profiles result […] Read more
Script: Gracefully Shut Down all VMs on a Given Set of Hosts (VMware/XenDesktop) Cleanly shutting down all virtual machines on a given set of hosts is not as trivial as it might seem – especially if you want to be able to restore […] Read more
Software Installation Very Slow without Internet Access I have been using Windows 8 Client Hyper-V for a while now and must say it works like a treat – except for one thing: it is practically impossible to […] Read more
How WinPE 4.0 Breaks ICA Connections I had to troubleshoot a case where it suddenly was not possible any more to connect via ICA/HDX to freshly installed Windows 7 VDI machines. As it turned out, the […] Read more
Boot IO Analysis with uberAgent for Splunk 1.5 Analyzing slow boots is a difficult task. You need to install software like XPerf and master its far-from-intuitive command-line options to generate a trace file that you can then analyze. […] Read more
Contest: Why Is This Desktop Empty? I just had a situation where I was facing an empty desktop with no way to logoff, start a program or do anything else. The only thing left to do […] Read more
Script: Add all Virtual Machines in the Data Store to the Inventory (VMware) There are situations when you have VMs on disk, but vCenter does not know about them – i.e. they are not in the inventory. While it is fairly easy to […] Read more
How-to: XenApp/RDS Sizing and Capacity Planning with uberAgent for Splunk Do you know the maximum number of users each of your terminal servers can host with acceptable performance? You may have found out the hard way how many are too […] Read more
Comparing the CPU Performance of Physical and Virtual PCs (VDI) When you move users from a physical PC to a VDI environment you may find that they are not too happy with their new machine’s performance – it happened to […] Read more
Remarks on Windows Disk and File IO During System Boot Let use take a look at some graphs I created with Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA), showing a typical corporate laptop boot Windows 7. Detailed information on creating such a trace […] Read more
Analyzing a Slow Boot with Windows Performance Recorder & Analyzer In the last five years Xperf has gained popularity as an administrator’s secret weapon for battling all kinds of performance issues. But just when it was on the brink of […] Read more
Monitor Boot Performance and Find the Cause for Delays with uberAgent for Splunk Today it is still as common as it was in the 90s to go for a coffee after switching on the PC in the morning, only to find it still […] Read more
The Effects of HP’s Power Profile on vCPU Performance When you buy a new HP server it comes with the BIOS setting HP Power Profile set to Balanced Power and Performance. That sounds good but is bad – at […] Read more
Monitoring Browser Performance per Site with uberAgent for Splunk 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 […] Read more
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 […] Read more
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 […] Read more
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. […] Read more
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 […] Read more
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 […] Read more
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 of […] Read more
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. Read more
uberAgent for Splunk is Here The beta version of uberAgent for Splunk is available. Official news release uberAgent’s website Download Read more
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 […] Read more
