Hello,

 

Is there anybody out there that is using the Citrix Access Gateway Advanced edtion who is incredibly frustrated with the naff built in reporting utilities? 

 

Knowing who accessed what and when is pretty important stuff don’t you think?  But have you actually tried to produce a report for your security team yet with all that information in there?  Not unless you have exported the event log entries and have managed to take multiple screen shots of the event log consolidator… Nice but no thanks…

 

A quick Google of “Access Gateway Reporting” returns a product called ‘Clear 2 View’ which claims to fill the void of historical and advanced reporting which is a much needed (a no brainer to be honest) feature of the Access Gateway product range.  

 

Here is how to install it:

 

Goto www.clear2view.com and register for an evaluation and download the software.

 

First of all, you need to capture some basic information about the access gateway farm that you wish to report on.  We need the service account details and the farm database details.

 

Both of these details can be found in the ’server configuration’ utility  (make a note of them for later)

 

 

 

•  Service Account Information

 

 

 

•  Database Details

 

 

Installation

 

Clear2view should ideally be installed on the same server as the advanced access components (it has a small footprint and requires minimal resource to run).

 

1. Create a database for Clear 2 View

 

 

•  Create a new database in either SQL2000 or SQL2005 and call it ‘clear2view’  (I am being creative here).  

• Once complete, highlight the database, right click and choose new database user. 

 

• Using the information gathered from above, add the access gateway advanced service account and grant it dbo_owner privilages. 

 

 

2.  Citrix Access gateway advanced AD service account configuration  

• Ensure that the access gateway advanced service account has the right to ‘log on as a service’ and ‘log on as a batch job’ rights.

 

 

 

 

• Now ensure that the service account is a member of local administrators (if Clear2View is running on the same server then this will be the case).

 

3. Installing Crystal Reports Runtime

 

 

• Log onto the advanced access control server as the service account and launch [installmedia]\crystalreports\crredist2005_x86.msi.  

 

• Accept the licence agreement and choose next

 

 

 

 

• Select all defaults and select Finish

 

4. Installing Clear2View

 

 

• Launch [installmedia]\setup.exe

 

• Select Next

 

 

 

 

• Accept the License Agreement 

 

• Accept the default location for the installation and allow everyone

 

 

 

 

• Select Next to start the installation

 

 

 

 

• Once installation has finished, choose close.

 

 

 

 

Now that Clear2View has been installed, we need to configure it.

 

1. From the start menu, launch Clear2View (the configuration wizard will start)

 

 

2. Select a location for the configuration files to be stored, now choose a password to protect the configuration.

 

 

3. Next you need to give Clear2View the database settings for the Clear2View database.  Click ‘test’.

 

 

4. Click Next to create the required database tables, select yes and ignore the warning as this database has not yet been populated.

 

 

5. Select OK to the database schema update and then Next to continue

 

 

6. Insert the details of the citrix advanced access control server database and hit Next, hit Next again to test the database connectivity

 

 

 

 

7. Select OK to the success dialog and then Next to start the Clear2View services.

 

 

 

 

That’s it.  So what’s next?

 

Get over to http://www.clear2view.com/Demo/tabid/60/Default.aspx and check out the demonstration video on creating and viewing reports.

 

Regards,

Lee