CDFControl

Citrix Diagnostic Facility, or simply CDF, has been around since 2007 and is still considered to be the most used diagnostic tool by Citrix administrators. It has been recently added into Citrix Scout; however, you can still download it as an individual utility from https://www.citrix.com. This tool works well with all the latest releases of Citrix XenDesktop.

CDFControl is an event-tracing utility that is made to capture all Citrix-related diagnostic information and that gets its output from Citrix subsystem DLLs. You need to have local administrator rights on the system to start an event trace.

It's always recommended to have a trace captured before opening a case with Citrix because they will always ask for the capture as the first thing.

Once downloaded, you can run CDFControl.exe from the specified folder on the system to take your first trace. It will present you with the GUI interface showing multiple modules, to select from and start your trace.

It also provides a list of trace categories to simplify administrator needs for troubleshooting. If an admin is experiencing issues with FMA services, he can select the Delivery Controller Services module or, if there is an issue with application enumeration or launch, he can select the Application Enum/Launch module category.

Please refer to the following screenshot showing the GUI interface:

To capture a valid trace, you should start your trace, reproduce your issue, and then stop the trace. The trace will provide you with an ETL file in the same folder where you have configured the CDFControl utility.

You can open the trace file with the CDFControl utility by going to the File menu and selecting Parse Trace:

You will also need to download trace message format (TMF) files that are responsible for carrying out the instructions to parse and format the binary trace messages generated by CDFControl.

Using CDFControl, you can easily download TMF files, as shown in the following screenshot:

Once the files are downloaded, go to the CDFControl Trace Settings window and configure the path for downloaded TMF files and the path for the online TMF server:

Now, you are all set up to parse and analyze the log files to find faults and issues within your XenDesktop environment:

PicaSvc2.exe is one of the most important services when you are troubleshooting Citrix XenDesktop issues. This service is a part of your desktop OS on the virtual machine, Blade, or remote PCs. This service is responsible for all communications happening on your VDA machine except for communication with the Delivery Controller, handled by the Citrix Desktop service.

So, you must enable service logging while troubleshooting XenDesktop issues. This can be enabled by two methods. The first method is to create an XML file on the VDA machine and edit the configuration file to allow logging.

The second method is to do it via Citrix Scout; you can remotely enable PortICA logging while taking the CDF trace using Citrix Scout, as shown in the following screenshot: