{"id":25053,"date":"2022-09-27T07:01:23","date_gmt":"2022-09-27T11:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/?p=25053"},"modified":"2025-05-14T09:03:18","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T13:03:18","slug":"azure-virtual-desktop-monitoring-avd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/azure-virtual-desktop-monitoring-avd\/","title":{"rendered":"Monitoring Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How to Monitor Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) Technology<\/h2>\n

One question many administrators are asking is: How can I effectively and efficiently monitor Azure Virtual Desktop technology? There are several options for monitoring Azure Virtual Desktop technology<\/a> and this blog will cover some of the most popular ones.<\/p>\n

In this blog, we will focus on multi-session, native Azure virtual desktops. Since Citrix and Omnissa Horizon have been adopted for several years, monitoring capabilities and best practices for these technologies are well documented in blogs<\/a> and whitepapers.<\/a><\/p>\n

Four Big Challenges When Monitoring Azure Virtual Desktop Technology<\/h2>\n

While AVD technology is simple to provision, it can be quite challenging to monitor Azure Virtual Desktop, and to operate and troubleshoot it. There are many reasons for this:<\/p>\n

\"Complaints<\/p>\n

Figure 1: Common AVD performance complaints that IT admins receive<\/div>\n
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  1. IT teams must troubleshoot AVD problems with limited visibility.<\/strong> With on-premises technologies like Citrix and Omnissa Horizon, the IT team had complete control over every layer and every tier of the infrastructure, servers, storage and other technologies supporting the digital workspace service. With AVD, the underlying infrastructure is controlled by Microsoft. The applications being accessed may be under the control of a different service provider.<\/li>\n
  2. The distributed nature of AVD makes monitoring more difficult.<\/strong> AVD deployments are also more distributed than on-premises digital workspaces. The applications being accessed and the virtual desktop that the user is connected to could be in different geo locations. Even for authentication, synchronization between AD Connect in the cloud and an on-premises AD is required.<\/li>\n
  3. The pay-as-you-go model of AVD means that cloud costs increase with usage.<\/strong> Tracking any wasteful resource usage and providing recommendations for optimization also falls under the purview of monitoring technologies for AVD.<\/li>\n
  4. When a problem happens, it is a challenge to determine where the cause of the problem lies.<\/strong> Like other digital workspace technologies, AVD is extremely performance sensitive since users connect to their digital workspaces from remote locations, with limited resources on the client. The problem could be with the user\u2019s network, with the application being accessed, a bottleneck with Azure resources, an Active Directory issue, etc.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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    What SLAs does Microsoft provide for Azure?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    A significant attraction of Microsoft Azure is Microsoft\u2019s commitments via service level agreements (SLAs) to high-availability and uptime with most Azure services guaranteeing availability 99.9% of the time or higher. For AVD itself though Microsoft does not offer a financially backed SLA and the commitment is to \u201cstrive to attain at least 99.9% availability for the Azure Virtual Desktop service URLs\u201d. The availability of the session host virtual machines in your subscription is covered by the Virtual Machines SLA.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

     <\/p>\n

    10 Questions that a Tool for Monitoring Azure Virtual Desktop Technology Must Answer<\/h2>\n

    Before you begin your search for tools to monitor AVD, you must be able to answer these key questions. Knowing the answer to these performance-related questions will mean that you can troubleshoot problems faster, reducing MTTR, spot problems before they impact end-user experience, and empower your helpdesk.<\/p>\n

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    1. Like all digital workspace technologies, the success of AVD is measured by user experience. The first question to answer is how is the user experience for desktop users? Is the AVD service available throughout and how long does it take to access a desktop?<\/li>\n
    2. Getting logon to work is like getting a dial-tone on your old landline telephone. A key question is whether AVD logon is working and how long does it take for a user to login? If the logon duration is high, why is it so high?<\/li>\n
    3. Once a user is connected to their virtual desktop, if access is slow, it will affect user productivity. Is there any lag during user access? Are there any packet losses or retransmissions while the session is in progress?<\/li>\n
    4. What is the resource usage level on the session hosts that the users are connected to and is there a bottleneck on the hosts?<\/li>\n
    5. Are there many disconnected sessions (i.e., sessions taking up resources but do not have an active user) on the session hosts?<\/li>\n
    6. Is the workload balanced across all the session hosts?<\/li>\n
    7. Is any session host idle (i.e., there is cost wastage), and is any session host without a heartbeat (i.e., can\u2019t get any new sessions)?<\/li>\n
    8. Are there any connection failures occurring to the AVD service?<\/li>\n
    9. Has any unusual sign-in activity been detected through Azure AD?<\/li>\n
    10. Are there sufficient session hosts to handle the workload, or do you need to provision additional capacity?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      These are just some of the many questions that come to mind when tracking the performance of an AVD deployment.<\/p>\n

      \"Expert<\/a><\/p>\n

      4 Key Capabilities Your Tool for Monitoring Azure Virtual Desktop Technology Must Have<\/h2>\n

      \"AVD<\/p>\n

      Figure 2: Key challenges IT admins face when deploying AVD<\/div>\n

      1. Ability to monitor the experience of AVD users<\/strong><\/h4>\n

      In the AVD adoption survey, respondents told us that the biggest challenge in an AVD deployment is end-user experience. Most monitoring tools can tell you the resource usage of your IT infrastructure (CPU, memory, network, storage, etc.) but don\u2019t translate that into end-user experience.<\/p>\n

      User experience monitoring can be performed using synthetic transactions<\/a> \u2013 i.e., simulating a user logging in and accessing AVD. It can also be performed by monitoring real users. Ideally, your monitoring solution for AVD must support both synthetic and real user monitoring.<\/p>\n

      2. Ability to monitor every layer and every AVD tier is important<\/strong><\/h4>\n

      When user experience is poor, e.g., logon time is 2 mins, the immediate question is: why is the AVD user experience poor?<\/p>\n

      Answering this question is difficult. Sometimes the issue could be in Active Directory, sometimes it could happen because the storage tier is slow, or it could be because the FSLogix profile management<\/a> container has not been attached.<\/p>\n

      Only by monitoring every layer and every tier can you quickly and accurately identify where the root-cause of the performance problem is.<\/p>\n

      This means just monitoring the AVD session hosts is not enough.<\/strong> Every AVD tier \u2013 i.e., the AVD broker<\/a>, the Azure AD, network connectivity, Azure subscription, etc. \u2013 must also be monitored.<\/div>\n

      3. Embedded AIOps capabilities that use machine learning<\/strong><\/h4>\n

      When monitoring an AVD deployment with hundreds of concurrent users, a monitoring tool may collect several thousand metrics. Analyzing these metrics manually is time-consuming and cumbersome. Monitoring tools for AVD must possess the capabilities to analyze thousands of real time metrics at scale.<\/p>\n

      They must embed AIOps capabilities that use machine learning<\/a><\/strong> to analyze metrics and highlight where the abnormalities lie. Ideally, when analyzing the dependencies of an AVD service the monitoring tool should be able to do root-cause analysis and pin-point where the real problems lie.<\/strong> This is so IT admins can focus on them and not be distracted by the symptoms rippling out from that root-cause.<\/p>\n

      4. Embedded intelligence to detect unusual usage patterns, wasted resources,1 and insufficient provision capacity<\/strong><\/h4>\n

      Finally, as we discussed earlier, cost is an important roadblock to wide-spread AVD adoption. AVD monitoring tools should have embedded intelligence to detect abnormal usage patterns, wasted resources, insufficient provisioned capacity,<\/strong> etc. They should also provide recommendations, so IT admins can optimize their AVD deployments for maximum performance at minimal cost.<\/p>\n

      What Tools Can You Use for Monitoring Azure Virtual Desktop Technology<\/h2>\n

      Azure Virtual Desktop adoption is still in the nascent stages, so there are not the variety of tools to monitor AVD as there are monitoring tools for Citrix.<\/a> There are two main options at the moment:<\/p>\n

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      1. Azure Monitor,<\/a> which is the native cloud monitoring service from Azure<\/li>\n
      2. A third-party tool like eG Enterprise.<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Using Azure Monitor for AVD Monitoring<\/h3>\n
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        \"\"<\/p>\n

        Azure Monitor<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

        Azure Monitor for Azure Virtual Desktop is a dashboard built on Azure Monitor Workbooks that helps IT professionals understand their Azure Virtual Desktop environments.<\/p>\n

        \"Azure<\/p>\n

        Figure 3: High level view of Azure Monitor<\/div>\n

        Before you start using Azure Monitor for AVD, you’ll need:<\/p>\n