Welcome to this comprehensive guide to setting up the LoadGen End-to-End Monitoring Cloud Edition. This powerful tool is designed to provide detailed insights into the performance of your IT environment from a user's perspective. By utilizing this cloud-based solution, you can continuously monitor the user experience, spot potential issues before they escalate, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your IT infrastructure.
In this article, we will walk you through the steps to access and navigate the LoadGen Cloud platform, explain how to create and manage your End-to-End Monitoring profiles, and discuss the new privacy options available. Whether you are new to LoadGen or an existing user looking to explore our Cloud Edition, this guide is meant to help you understand and effectively utilize the capabilities of LoadGen's End-to-End Monitoring solution.
Login to the LoadGen Cloud
To enter the LoadGen Cloud you will need an active tenant and username. If you don't have an account yet you can create one requesting a free trial of the LoadGen End-to-End Monitoring Cloud via this link. After registration, you will receive a couple of emails. You can then visit https://www.loadgen.cloud. You will see the following page:
To log in you will need to perform the following actions:
- Switch to a tenant by clicking the Change link.
- You will see the following form:
- Switch to the tenant.
- Add the Tenancy name which you received in our email.
- Press the Switch to the tenant button.
- Now log in with your email address and password which you received in our email.
Main menu overview
LoadGen Cloud settings menu overview
Read more about the LoadGen Cloud settings menu in this article.
End-to-End Monitoring menu overview
The LoadGen End-to-End Monitoring Cloud menu comes with three options:
- Dashboard: an enhanced tool for monitoring your End-to-End Monitoring services. It gives you infrastructure and application-level data about the user experience of an application and the surrounding environment. You can create your own dashboards or use the dashboards delivered by LoadGen. Read more about the dashboards in this article. For information on which data is sent from the LoadGen Agent during a monitoring session read this article. By default, after logging in to the LoadGen End-to-End Monitoring cloud environment, your default dashboard will be shown. Read more about adding new dashboards in this article.
- Profiles: here you can create or edit End-to-End Monitoring Profiles by using a very intuitive wizard to easily create your End-to-End Monitoring Profile. With several steps, we lead you to the process to set up your LoadGen End-to-End Monitoring environment.
- Repository: the place to find all the End-to-End Monitoring settings. Read more about the repository in this article.
Profiles
In this menu option, you can use the End-to-End Monitoring Profile wizard to easily create your End-to-End Monitoring Profile. With several steps, we lead you to the process to set up your LoadGen End-to-End Monitoring environment.
Step 1: Name
In the first step of creating your End-to-End Monitoring Profile, besides naming your profile, you now have additional options to ensure data privacy and gather visual insights. Here's a brief description of each:
- Send screenshots to LoadGen Cloud: Enabling this option allows the system to capture screenshots during the monitoring process and send them to LoadGen Cloud. These screenshots can serve as valuable visual aids when diagnosing issues or understanding user experiences in a more intuitive way.
- Anonymize LoadGen Agent IP address: If this option is enabled, the IP address of the LoadGen Agent is anonymized before any data is sent to the LoadGen Cloud. This can be important for maintaining the privacy of your network and complying with certain data protection regulations.
- Anonymize Remote Server: Enabling this option ensures that the identity of the remote server is anonymized before data is sent to LoadGen Cloud. This helps protect the identity and specifics of your servers.
- Anonymize Username: When this option is turned on, the username associated with each monitoring session is anonymized before data is sent to LoadGen Cloud. This is a crucial feature for preserving user privacy and adhering to data protection standards.
These options are part of LoadGen's commitment to providing valuable performance insights while ensuring the privacy and security of your data.
Step 2: Agents
Date and times will be sent from the LoadGen Agents in UTC format
All of the dates and times which are retrieved from the LoadGen Agents are stored in UTC date and time format. To convert this to your time zone you can use the AddHours( [ActualTime], +n or -n) function. Read more about working with this data in this article.
LoadGen Agents are used to launching the actual session to the Target Environment (Citrix, Azure Virtual Desktop, Microsoft Remote Desktop, VMware Horizon, or Windows 7, Windows 10, or Windows 11 FAT client) and/or collect Performance Counters from the System Under Test machines. The LoadGen Agent can be installed anywhere you like (on-premises, public or private cloud) but of course, will need a connection to your own infrastructure. The LoadGen Agents only need a TCP 443 connection outbound. All the sensitive user information is stored in a Microsoft Azure Key Vault which is set up per tenant, LoadGen Agents are directly requesting sensitive information from the Key Vault and are not sent via the LoadGen Cloud.
The first time you run this wizard you must perform a couple of steps:
- Create the new LoadGen Agent: the LoadGen Agent will launch each monitoring session in the Target Environment.
- Create a Run as Profile: the Run as Profile is the local administrator account that can perform Operating System actions such as logon, logoff, lock, unlock and restart the machine. Read more about Run as Profiles in this article.
- Install the LoadGen Agent service: after you have set up the LoadGen Agent in the wizard, you can click the download icon. This will download the LoadGen installer executable, with a couple of steps you have the LoadGen Agent service up and running and the status of the LoadGen Agent will be set to Online. Read more about installing your LoadGen Agent in this article.
- Add a Test user: the session will be launched, and the workload will be executed in the context of the test user. When using Windows 7, Windows 10, or Windows 11 FAT Client this test user, can be the same user as the user added to the Run as Profile. Read more about test users in this article.
Step 3: LoadGen Studio Cloud
The LoadGen Studio is our groundbreaking application that allows you to build workloads for testing and monitoring. With the LoadGen Studio, you can build workloads, including user actions, measurements, synchronization points, loops, validations, and other useful actions for interacting with the session. These flows are interchangeable between Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Azure Virtual Desktop, VMware Horizon, and Local FAT Client solutions.
LoadGen Studio is so comprehensive and intuitive that the end-user doesn't need to write or see any code to create complex workloads.
The LoadGen Studio can be installed anywhere you like (on-premises, public or private cloud) but of course, will need a connection to your own infrastructure.
Step 4: Workload
In the next step, you can select the workload to use in your monitoring sessions. You can either use the default LoadGen End-to-End Monitoring workload (read more about this workload in this article) or create your own workload with the LoadGen Studio.
Step 5: Schedule
In this step, we will need to set up the schedule. When do we want to run the monitoring sessions and at which time interval? You can tailor your schedule to your needs:
- On which days.
- Start and end time, or all day.
- Start and end date, or indefinitely.
- The time interval.
Step 6: Target Environment
LoadGen can monitor environments that offer Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Azure Virtual Desktop, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, VMware Horizon, and FAT Client (i.e. Windows 7, Windows 10, or Windows 11).
LoadGen separates the Target Environments into 5 sections:
- Citrix or Citrix Enhanced: Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, and Azure RemoteApp. Read more about the difference between Basic and Enhanced.
- RDS: Microsoft Remote Desktop Services.
- Windows 7, Windows 10, or Windows 11 (Windows FAT Client): Windows 7 and later or Windows Server 2008 and later.
- VMware Horizon: VMware Horizon.
- Azure Virtual Desktop: aka Azure Virtual Desktop.
The Citrix Enhanced and Microsoft Remote Desktop Target Environments require the LoadGen Add-in to be installed on the endpoint machine. Read more about installing the LoadGen Cloud Add-in in this article.
Step 7: Systems under Test
You can monitor the performance of a machine in your environment during Load and Performance testing or End-to-End monitoring. This will give you diagnostic information and insight into how your environment is performing in correlation to application performance/user experience.
Step 8: Summary
Here you can find a summary of the current End-to-End Monitoring Profile. After clicking Finish, everything is set and the End-to-End Monitoring will start running and sessions will be launched based on your schedule.