I love the idea of a group of superheroes hanging out together on-screen. Take the movie Avengers: Infinity War. It brings together Iron Man, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Black Panther and many more to keep supervillain Thanos from amassing the all-powerful Infinity Stones in his quest to wipe out half of all life in the universe. The six stones represent different aspects of the universe: space, time, reality, power, mind, and soul. My favorite is the Time Stone, and here’s why!

The Time Stone grants its holder the power to rewind or fast forward time. Near the end of the movie, Doctor Strange uses it to trap the villain Dormammu in a time loop and prevent the destruction of Earth. Later, he uses the Time Stone to look into the many possible futures at the end of the Infinity War. He discovers that he will have to give up the stone to Thanos for the Avengers to eventually defeat the Mad Titan.

Fast Forward, Rewind with Citrix Director

So what does the Time Stone have to do with Citrix Director? In a way, Citrix Director lets you look into the future. Don’t believe me? Check out my blog post from last year.

But what about rewinding time? Citrix Director has you covered there, too.

One of the more difficult tasks for IT admins is diagnosing network connectivity issues pertaining to specific users and delivery groups. Citrix has session reliability and auto-client reconnect features to combat connectivity issues, but with Citrix Director you can use the more detailed information about the session reconnect to turn back time. Here’s how.

From the Sessions tab, select the delivery group and time period to view more detailed information about the concurrent session count. The Session Auto Reconnect column displays the number of auto reconnects in a session. Auto-reconnect is enabled when the session reliability or the auto client reconnect policies are in effect. When there is a network interruption on the endpoint, the following policies come into effect:

  • Session reliability comes into effect (by default for three minutes) where the Citrix Receiver or Citrix Workspace app tries to connect to the VDA.
  • Auto Client reconnect comes into effect between three and five minutes where the client tries to connect to the VDA.

Both these reconnects are captured and displayed to the user. The auto-reconnect information helps you view and troubleshoot network connections having interruptions and enables you to analyze networks having a seamless experience. You can view the number of reconnects for a specific delivery group or time period, as selected in the Filters. A drill down provides additional information like session reliability or auto client reconnect, time stamps, endpoint IP, and endpoint name of the machine where the Citrix Workspace app is installed. By default, the logs are sorted by the event timestamps in descending order. Citrix Director gives you the power to identify, analyze, and diagnose network connectivity issues, and turn back time to the way things were, so you can help your end users stay productive.

This feature is available for Citrix Workspace app for Windows, Citrix Workspace app for Mac, Citrix Receiver for Windows, and Citrix Receiver for Mac, and it requires Delivery Controller version 7 1906 or later, and VDAs 1906 or later. Check out our Citrix Director documentation for more information on features and capabilities.