Hands-on experience is a must, you need to know not only when and where, but also how to use and apply these tools. Internally we use these everyday, so it is good if external techies do as well.

They’re used internally by CTX Support and Escalations Engineers as well as externally by most sys admins out in the field, although chances are that in most cases the latter will be on request of CTX Support as Congrats – very good summary of our key tools. These are two of Citrix’s most used troubleshooting tools. If you’re the guy or gal who needs to deal with Citrix support every now and again, then Scout and CDF control are two very important tools you need to be, and perhaps are, familiar with. That’s what I’d like to discuss in this (short) two part series as well, let’s have a closer look at Scout, CDF tracing / control, some of the FMA services (PortICA) etc… I’ll start out with some of the basics and take it from there. I also went into a bit more detail regarding CDF traces and the accompanying modules and trace messages that come with it, including some of the steps we can take to interpreted the collected data ourselves. I also mentioned that when we do have to deal with CTX Support, and note that I’m not trying to sound negative here, we need to understand what to do when we are asked to inventory our Sites or to (CDF) trace certain components / modules for example. About two weeks ago I wrote (slides included) about my talk at the Dutch Citrix User Group (DuCUG) where I presented about troubleshooting the FMA.

What plays cdf files