Purpose of this post
If you use Citrix Director for sessions reporting and analysis, you may have noted that sessions data are retained for 3 months. Often this is not enough. Let’s see how to increase it.
IMPORTANT: if you don’t have Premium license, sessions data are retained for 7 days and you can’t change it. Increasing data retention will increase Citrix DB size.
The easy way: use XDAS
I’ve developed an application named “XenDesktop Advanced Settings” (XDAS). Just download and run it following this guide, it’s free. As you will see, there is an intuitive GUI, so you just need to insert the value you want in the “Sessions data retention (days)” and “Summaries data retention (days)” fields. You have to change both fields or it will not works. Summaries value must be equal or higher than Sessions value. Restart Citrix Monitor service on all your Delivery Controllers.
XDAS have other features you could find useful if you are a Citrix administrator.
The Powershell way
If you want to use Powershell, below are the steps to follow. I kept it simple.
DISCLAIMER: Do it at your own risk. I’m not responsible for any damage. Make a backup before proceed.
- From any of your Delivery Controllers open Powershell console.
- Run the following command to load the Citrix Modules:
Add-PSSnapin Citrix*
- Run the following command to set sessions data retention to 180 days. Valid values are from 7 to 1000 but I suggest to not go over 365:
Set-MonitorConfiguration -GroomSessionsRetentionDays 180
- Run the following commands to set the summaries data retention to 180 days. You must change also this field or it will not works. Set a value equal or greater than GroomSessionsRetentionDays:
Set-MonitorConfiguration -GroomSummariesRetentionDays 180
- Restart Citrix Monitor service on all Delivery Controllers.
Conclusions
If you want to know more about Citrix Director and data retention read this article: Data granularity and Retention | Director
That’s all.