As part of the support escalation team at Citrix, I sometimes work with Citrix admins who are struggling with inconsistent or incomplete output from Citrix Director. Without complete and consistent data, they can’t do their jobs effectively, they don’t get a true picture of the health of their Citrix environment, and they might not get critical alerts and notifications for the site.

So why are they getting inconsistent or incomplete output? Here are some of the reasons I’ve run across:

  • Null entries in some of the tables in the monitoring database
  • Database grooming stored procedure failing to do its job
  • Accidental modification of the monitoring database
  • A calculation where the incorrect data in some tables lead to exceptions like division by zero
  • Invalid date range for a query such as “from July 2020 to May 2020”

There can be other points of failure like WMI on the VDA side and SQL server performance bottlenecks that can lead to queries from Director timing out. Here, I’ll focus on scenarios where the issue is caused by inconsistencies in the databased used by the monitoring service.

Ideally, you’d open a case with Citrix tech support and work with an engineer, who will collect data and provide you with a solution. But sometimes you might want to solve it on your own. Maybe the environment is just a POC\dev\lab setup or you’re an SQL expert and have tried investigating the issue yourself only to find the database is beyond repair.

In this blog I’ll show you how to eliminate the inconsistency in a matter of minutes from the GUI by doing a Monitor Datastore reset.

Yes, you read that right!

You can reset the Monitor Datastore just like you can reset a user profile. Just keep in mind, by doing this, you’ll lose all the historical monitoring data and Director will look like its being used for the first time.

Reset the Monitor Datastore

Here’s how you reset the Monitor Datastore so you can get the output you need from Citrix Director:

  1. Take a snapshot\backup of the DDCs and the Director servers, as well as a backup of the site and monitoring database.
  2. Go to the Configuration tab in Citrix Studio -> Site overview, select Monitoring.
  3. Click on “change database” in the right pane (refer the screenshot below for point 2 and 3)

  1. The “change database” option is typically used for scenarios where admins want to change the host SQL server. However you can use it to reset the database, as well. When this option is used only a blank database is created at the target location and the existing data is discarded. You can choose the existing server location; just provide a new database name. (This only works for monitoring and logging.) In other words, using this option will give you a brand new database with no data, irrespective of the SQL server location.
  2. Once the new database is created, Director will start showing the correct information. You can safely delete the old Monitor database.

Again, I’d recommend opening a case with Citrix tech support, but the steps I’ve provided here will help you to fix your Citrix Director database quickly when you’re seeing inconsistent or incomplete data and the historical data is expendable. Learn more about Citrix Director.