This article has information about Director 7.12 – a feature-packed release that will make a XenApp/XenDesktop administrator’s job simpler and less time-consuming. The list of new features and enhancements with this release includes the ability to mine the monitoring database with custom reporting, context-specific troubleshooting tips,for customers with Enterprises licenses, alerts via SNMP and more.

Custom Reporting

The experimental version of custom reporting plug-in was widely adopted and tried by a number of Citrix partners and customers. Custom reporting enables XenApp/XenDesktop administrators to mine the Citrix monitoring database for the set of metrics they are looking for to generate a customized report.
Administrators can choose to apply filters to narrow down the resulting report data by time-period or specific conditions like username or application-name string. The custom report data is exported into a CSV file, which can be further processed to depict, pivot or aggregate the data according to the business needs. 
Also, the custom reporting feature uses the Odata API under the hood. So if an administrator wants to write Odata queries to periodically pull data from the Citrix monitoring database, custom reporting can help bypass the learning curve involved in Odata scripting. Now, we only need to select drop-down options in the GUI and the Odata query corresponding to the selections is automatically generated and displayed on the screen.
Note: Both DDC and Director should be upgraded to version 7.12 for custom reporting feature to work as expected.
Custom reporting is available in the Platinum Edition Director deployments.

Connection and Machine Failure Descriptions

Each connection failure and each machine failure reported in Director 7.12 comes with a knowledgebase-type stub that contains details such as possible failure cause and recommended actions. This helps to facilitate easy and quick troubleshooting. The failure type is used to map failure instance to the knowledge stub containing failure description, and hence it brings a context-specific perspective for the administrator.
These failure descriptions have been carefully curated by Citrix experts based on their extensive experience installing and troubleshooting XenApp/XenDesktop deployments in multiple customer environments over many years.
A catalogue of failure descriptions is also available in Citrix eDocs Failure Reasons Troubleshooting Guide.

One-Month Historical Data for Enterprise Edition

With Director 7.12, we are changing the historical data-retention entitlement in XenApp Enterprise edition and XenDesktop Enterprise edition customers within Director from 7 days to one month. These customers will now be able to see trend reports for longer time in history and hence make more informed decisions on capacity planning, budgeting and usage-based chargeback.
Note: This entitlement change will not be effective for Director versions earlier than 7.12.
In addition to sending email notifications and initiating Octoblu services, alerts captured within XenApp/XenDesktop deployments can now also trigger SNMP traps and forward them to a listening SNMP server. SNMP is a standard protocol for network management and used in enterprises to collate alerts from multiple sources within the environment.
Note: Proactive alerting is limited to Platinum Edition Director deployments.