Scripted Reporting & Alerting of Citrix Provisioning Services Boot Times

Citrix PVS, formerly Ardence, is still one of my favourite software products. When it works, which is the vast majority of the time if it is well implemented, it’s great but how do you tell how well it is performing? If you’ve enabled event log generation for your PVS servers thus:

then the Citrix Streaming Service will write boot times of your target devices to the application event log:

So we can filter in the event log viewer or use the script I’ve written which searches the event log for these entries and finds the fastest, slowest, average, median and mode values from one or more PVS servers and optionally creates a single csv file with the results. A time range can also be specified, such as the last 7 days.

The script lends itself to being run via a scheduled task as it can either email the results to a specified list of recipients or it can send an email only when specific thresholds are exceeded, such as the average time being greater than say 2 minutes.

For instance, running the following:

& '.\Get PVS boot time stats.ps1' -last 7d -output c:\boot.times.csv -gridview

Will write the boot times to file, in seconds, for the last seven days on the PVS server where you are running the script. It will also display the results in a sortable and filterable gridview and output a summary like this:

Got 227 events from 1 machines : fastest 21 s slowest 30 s mean 25 s median 25 s mode 26 s (39 instances)

Or we could run the following to query more servers and send an email via an SMTP mail server if the slowest time exceeds 5 minutes in the last week:

& '.\Get PVS boot time stats.ps1' -last 7d -output c:\boot.times.csv -mailserver yourmailserver -recipients someone@somewhere.com -slowestAbove 300 -computers pvsserver1,pvsserver2

The script has integrated help, giving details on all the command line options available, and can be run standalone or via scheduled tasks.

The script can be downloaded from here. Full help is built in and can be accessed via F1 in PowerShell ISE or Get-Help.

Update 13/02/18

Now with -chartView and -gridView options to give an on screen  chart and grid view respectively.