Citrix Utilities

With Smart Tools having hit EOL back in July, 2019, the functionality and health checks have been distributed (scattered) across the Internet... again. Here is a growing list of useful utilities:

Citrix Virtual Delivery Desktop Agents

Troubleshooting

Citrix Health Assistant: Troubleshoot VDA Registration and Session Launch. GUI and command line support. Can be run remotely.

Optimization

"Speed is king!" is a familiar phrase among Citrix administrators. We go through great lengths to shave fractions of seconds from an individual login so we can aggregate the time saved before presenting our clients, who will translate that into money saved - the return on their investments.

Citrix Logon Simulator: EG Innovations provides a free utility to graphically break down the logon process. Unfortunately, the free version only interrogates through your external facing ADC, and you will have to provide their service with a set of credentials. Not compatible with any 2FA integration you may have installed.

Citrix Optimizer: A GUI/CLI utility that performs an analysis, selectively optimize and even roll back a number of optimizations. It's community supported and regularly updated by Citrix.

VMware Optimziation Tool (and accompanying guide): Probably more comprehensive that Citrix's equivalent.

JGSpiers Scripts: George Spiers, a UK-based CTP, will post his optimizations before they are eventually added to the Citrix Optimizer, i.e. safe, conservative optimization = Citrix Optimizer, aggressive optimization = JGSpiers Scripts. He has scripts for various Windows builds and they're very well documented.

Citrix Connection Quality Indicator (CQI): A Windows toast notification tool that will provide real-time notifications about any changes in the connection quality that may affect the user experience. Handy for trying to troubleshoot hard-to-repro issues around odd UI behaviors. I recommend that it's best used by administrators and power users, and only published on test/dev applications and published desktops.

Because CQI settings are set by Computer-level policies, it should be used on dedicated VDA's whose AD Computer objects are isolated within their own OU (or use GPO Security Filtering).