How to enable 365 day Data Retention in Citrix Director
Here is a fantastic post from our friend Aaron Silber.
Citrix EdgeSight is a tidal wave of information related to your Citrix environment. As long as you didn’t go into full shock from the enormous amount of data in the EdgeSight server, it was one of the most powerful tools available to the Citrix administrator. Unfortunately, it was just too much information and most people just set it up, checked it out once and never looked back at it again. In fact, at many clients, I would go to review the data and find it was not even functioning properly anymore due to the neglect.
With Citrix Director though, the company has taken a more user friendly approach and tries to only present the data in manageable bitesize chunks. Allowing administrators to digest the information without getting heartburn. 😉 With this more simplified approach though, a lot of the analytics that you may have used in EdgeSight are now missing (although we are pretty sure you didn’t use EdgeSight so most won’t notice any difference).
So now you know about Citrix Director. You have this wonderful way of not only collecting the massive amount of data but also a way to view, understand and report on it. You might have even gone so far as to integrate your Netscalers into it so that all network traffic is reporting. The systems have been running and humming along and the following situation occurs:
Boss: Can you run a report on Users sessions from 7 months ago?
Admin: No Problem! I have the perfect tool for that.
You go back to Citrix Director, run the requested report and only get options to see data from 3 months ago. What?!? This doesn’t make sense. You check the SQL server and everything is fine. Logs, check. Database, check. Licensing! You need to have at least Platinum/Premium licensing to get unlimited data retention capabilities. Licensing, check. 🙁 Everything looks fine and this should be working.
The solution to this problem is in the configuration. Just adding in the Citrix Platinum/Premium license does not actually trigger any additional data retention from Citrix Director. In order to keep more than the default 90 day retention, you have to configure it to do so. Of course, this can only be accomplished via PowerShell.
Full disclosure, this is very well documented in a Citrix KB but I think Citrix should add something to the console to allow administrators to configure this or at least report on how many days it is set to. It is much an overlooked setting in my experience.
In order to change the retention time, run these commands on the Director Server:
Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomApplicationInstanceRetentionDays 365 Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomDeletedRetentionDays 365 Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomFailuresRetentionDays 365 Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomLoadIndexesRetentionDays 365 Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomMachineHotfixLogRetentionDays 365 Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomMachineMetricDaySummaryDataRetentionDays 365 Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomNotificationLogRetentionDays 365 Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomResourceUsageDayDataRetentionDays 365 Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomSessionsRetentionDays 365 Set-MonitorConfiguration GroomSummariesRetentionDays 365
Once you run these commands, you will get a full year of retention for your data and the ability to run the necessary reports against it. Once again, you are able to reclaim your IT Rockstar status.
Aaron
Be sure to follow Aaron Silber on Twitter at @AMSilber. You can also subscribe directly to his blog at RaceCarOnRails.
You can also find Aaron’s original post here.
