Many of us, logging geeks, are used to debugging problems in our infrastructure by looking at historical logs (which most every application nowadays has) to pinpoint these issues. Why? Because generally logs never lie. And people do.

If you deploy or manage a Citrix environment, you are also well aware by now how important logs are for troubleshooting regardless if you do it yourself or you call Citrix Support. In PVS 5.x and 6.x, if logging is enabled, you would normally see the following logs under C:\ProgramData\Citrix\Provisioning Services\Logs:

Each log corresponded to a process. For instance, if you are troubleshooting an issue with the Console GUI you would be looking at Console.log, the stream process would log to StreamProcess.log, etc. In PVS 7.x, however, server-side historical logging is no longer enabled through PVS nor it’s located under the same directory. Our modules are now integrated in Citrix Diagnostic Facility (or CDF) much like XenApp, XenDesktop and Citrix Receiver/ICA Client. There are two options that you can use to generate and collect a single CDF trace from PVS:

1. CDF Control (download it from CTX111961)

This tool is nice and easy. All you need to do is download it on your PVS server, extract it, run it as an Administrator, and start a trace (preferably select all modules). This works great if your issue is reproducible at will (for example, a MAPI error when launching the PVS Console). The trace is generated as a .ETL file in the same folder you installed CDF Control and can be viewed from the same tool or parsed to a .CSV file to open in a more convenient program such as Excel.

2. CDF Monitor (download it from CTX129537)

This is a very, very powerful utility. A bit more complex to install but adds a real value to your environment. It runs as a Windows service and generates a circular CDF trace under C:\Windows\CDF Monitor. There is a config file that comes with it and for PVS there is an extra step to go to CTX138698 and download the PVS-specific config and place it in the CDF Monitor installation folder to replace the original one. Luckily, full instructions on how to deploy CDF Monitor are provided in the same article. I highly recommend this tool for capturing intermittent issues and root cause analysis of production outages.

Note: CDF tracing is only integrated with PVS 7.x. There are no CDF modules for previous versions. Target-side logging can still be enabled from the PVS Console and is logged into CDF. ConfigWizard and Console logs are still available under the old folder.

Enjoy the deep dive!