Chapter 13: Monitoring and Troubleshooting MetaFrame XP Servers

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Overview

Of all the skills involved in installing, configuring, deploying, and managing servers, the ability to fine-tune and troubleshoot is among the most highly prized. All the rest is similar to following a recipe. If you're careful and follow all the instructions, you can build a server or a server farm. Well, maybe that's oversimplifying it a little, but what happens when things go wrong? No book can possibly list every error message you might receive, or detail each performance problem that might crop up. Every server and server farm is unique (unless they are cloned), and each can have different hardware, installed applications, policies, and even users that will affect how the server performs.

Because perfection is hard to come by and things can, and will, go wrong, it is essential to become adept at monitoring and troubleshooting your servers. Monitoring your servers on a regular basis can help to prevent problems from occurring in the future. Monitoring can also help you to establish baselines for your servers; to see what is normal for them, and what is not.

Windows and Citrix both provide tools that can assist you in efficiently managing and troubleshooting your servers. Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server edition and the Windows 2000 Server family both provide the Event Viewer, System Information, and Task Manager. Citrix MetaFrame XPe includes Resource Manager and Network Manager, each of which merits a sizable role in your administration tool kit.

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