Appsense Citrix Hook Recommendations

TN-150517 - Recommended AppSense Excludes for Citrix Hooks

Date added: 19 Oct 2011

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Applies To

Products:	Application Manager ALL, Environment Manager ALL, Performance Manager ALL
Windows:	*All versions of Windows

Symptom

We have seen a range or Performance / Stability issues to date that have been related to various Citrix Hooks, including:

High PTE usage for all AppSense executables

Environment Manager crashes / hangs

General instability or unpredicted behaviour with AppSense products

Cause

In many of these cases, the symptoms have been caused by the presence of various Citrix hooks within our processes, most commonly the Citrix Multi Monitor Hook (mmhook.dll) and the EdgeSight Monitoring components.

PTE Usage, for example, for EMAgentAssist.exe (roughly equivalent to EMUser.exe in Environment Manager 8.1.x), dropped from 12,000 to 4200 when excluded from MMHook.dll, and dropped to 4100 when excluded from all Citrix hooks.

Solution

Add the following entries to the Citrix Hook exclusions within the following key(s) depending on OS / Citrix Version (Comma separated):

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Citrix\CtxHook

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\CtxHook64

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\CtxHook

Value Name: ExcludedImageNames

Value Type: REG_SZ

Value Data:AMAgent.exe,Cca.exe,WatchdogAgent.exe,WatchdogAgent64.exe,EMAgent.exe,EMAgentAssist.exe,EMNotify.exe,EmCoreService.exe,EmExit.exe,EmLoggedOnUser.exe,EmSystem.exe,EmUser.exe,EmUserLogoff.exe,PmAgent.exe,PmAgentAssist.exe

Add the same processes to the EdgeSight Exclusions (note these entries are semi-colon separated rather than comma as above):

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\rskcore

Value Name: UviProcessExcludes

Value Type: REG_SZ

Value Data:AMAgent.exe;Cca.exe;WatchdogAgent.exe;WatchdogAgent64.exe;EMAgent.exe;EMAgentAssist.exe;EMNotify.exe;EmCoreService.exe;EmExit.exe;EmLoggedOnUser.exe;EmSystem.exe;EmUser.exe;EmUserLogoff.exe;PmAgent.exe;PmAgentAssist.exe

 

In addition, please Note that by installing Hotfix ES540XA6AgentWX64001 for EdgeSight for XenApp Agents, Version 5.4.7.1, the above UVIProcessExcludes Value will be deprecated on the Server.

During the Hotfix installation, any value data within UVIProcessExcludes will be migrated to the new UviProcessisExcluded location (please see citrix article http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX131261 for more information).

 

To exclude specific processes if the above Edgesight 5.4.7.1 ES540XA6AgentWX64001 Hotfix is in place:

1. Add a list of processes to be excluded from being monitored by EdgeSight (separate the processes by a semi-colon) to the UviProcessList registry key.
2. Set the UviProcessIsExcluded registry key to 1 to exclude the processes in the list:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\rskcore
Name: UviProcessList
Type: REG_SZ
Data:

AMAgent.exe;Cca.exe;WatchdogAgent.exe;WatchdogAgent64.exe;EMAgent.exe;EMAgentAssist.exe;EMNotify.exe;EmCoreService.exe;EmExit.exe;EmLoggedOnUser.exe;EmSystem.exe;EmUser.exe;EmUserLogoff.exe;PmAgent.exe;PmAgentAssist.exe

Name: UviProcessIsExcluded
Type: REG_DWORD
Data: 1 (to exclude the listed processes from being monitored, this is set to 1 by default)