Why Monitor VMware Horizon VDI?
VMware Horizon (formerly VMware View) delivers state-of-the-art virtual client computing capabilities that allow organizations to provide end-users with easy remote access to virtualized desktops and applications. For VDI implementation success, the user experience should be on par with that of physical workstations.
- Performance problems such as slow logons, session disconnects, slow application launches, crashes, and poor responsiveness will have a direct impact on end-user productivity and, ultimately, affect the business
- VDI administrators need continuous monitoring of the Horizon environment and deep visibility into virtual desktop sessions and user experience to diagnose problems and provide quick resolution
Challenges
Horizon infrastructures are typically heterogeneous and multi-tiered. All components in the Horizon environment need to work well to deliver seamless virtual desktop and application delivery. The interdependencies between various Horizon tiers and the underlying infrastructure makes monitoring a challenge. Without holistic performance visibility across all tiers, it is extremely tedious and time-consuming for VDI administrators to monitor and troubleshoot performance issues.
Performance Assurance for VMware Horizon Environments with eG Enterprise
eG Enterprise is a total performance management solution that enables VDI administrators to monitor the health, availability and performance of VMware Horizon environment from end to end. All components of the Horizon infrastructure—such as the Connection Server, Active Directory, VMware vCenter, RDS hosts, vSphere hypervisor, Identity Manager, Security Server, Composer, etc.—are monitored and actionable insights are delivered to resolve issues and improve virtual desktop performance for end-users. Simplify VDI management by monitoring virtual desktops and applications as a service:
- Auto-discover the Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure and visualize interdependencies on intuitive topology maps
- Leverage out-of-the-box dashboards, intelligent alerts and auto-baselining for performance monitoring and issue diagnosis
- Auto-correlate performance across all Horizon tiers and the supporting infrastructure, to highlight the source of the problem for faster troubleshooting
- Optimize and right-size the Horizon infrastructure to meet the demand of growing VDI workloads
Features
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Track User Experience on Horizon Desktops & Applications
eG Enterprise continuously tracks the experience of end-users as they access virtualized applications and desktops on Horizon. When a user complains of slow application/desktop access, helpdesk staff and VDI administrators can get actionable insights to triage the issue.
- Leverage the built-in Horizon logon simulator to proactively monitor logon performance
- Gain detailed visibility into real user logon performance and view the break-up of logon steps and the time taken to process each step (for e.g., user profile, Group Policy, script loading, etc.)
- View the breakdown of Group Policy and identify what is affecting logon: is it due to slow user account discovery, LDAP bind time, or client-side processing?
- For each application and desktop accessed, monitor the launch time to detect slowdowns and which users were affected
- Find out in real time if the end-user is experiencing high client network latency
- Use synthetic session simulation to test user transactions in a session and proactively detect issues
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In-Depth VMware Horizon Session Diagnostics
eG Enterprise provides in-depth metrics to monitor session performance in real time. Use out-of-the-box reports to analyze historical data and trends.
- Track CPU, memory, disk space, handles and network traffic for every user session
- See which protocol is being used to initiate the session (PCoIP, Blast Extreme, RDP)
- For users connected over Blast protocol, monitor bandwidth, frame rate, round-trip time and throughput
- Capture details of application crashes, hangs and service errors
- Track GPU utilization to see is a virtual desktop is running low on GPU, or has excess GPU provisioned
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Comprehensive Connection Server Monitoring
The Connection Server is at the heart of the VMware Horizon infrastructure. eG Enterprise monitors all aspects of the Connection Server and provides performance metrics enabling effective application and desktop management.
- Easily classify user sessions based on PCoIP, Blast Extreme, or RDP protocols
- For each desktop/application pool, RDS host, and RDS farm, get details of desktops that are connected, disconnected, idle, available, ready, provisioned, used, unknown, on maintenance, having errors, etc.
- Monitor Active Directory connectivity and replication status
- Proactively get alerted to SSL certificate expiry
- View Connection Broker events and identify errors, warnings and audit failure
- Monitor the Security Server’s connectivity to the Connection Server
eG Enterprise has purpose-built monitoring models for Horizon Identity Manager, Security Server, Composer, RDS Hosts, vSphere hypervisor, and more.
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Actionable Insight into Virtual Desktops
eG Enterprise uses a patented ‘inside-outside’ monitoring technology to monitor virtual desktops from two important perspectives:
- Outside view of desktops: Measure resource usage levels of all desktops and find out which virtual machine is consuming most resources. This helps in right-sizing VMs and optimizing resource allocation. Use out-of-the-box capacity planning reports to forecast when VMs will run out of resources.
- Inside view of desktops: Look inside a virtual desktop, reveal which user is connected to the VM, and highlight resource usage of applications running inside the VM, providing critical insights for diagnosing why a VM is taking up excessive resources (e.g., a malfunctioning application, high workload, unexpected application usage, etc.)
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Answer Key Performance Questions
- Are any of the Horizon end-users experiencing poor user experience (slow logon, slow desktop/application launch time, crashes, errors, high latency, etc.)?
- Is any Horizon session reporting spikes in resource usage (network bandwidth, memory, disk, etc.)? If so, which applications/processes are causing this?
- How many sessions are connected via Blast Extreme, PCoIP and RDP?
- Is any virtual desktop running low on GPU?
- Is AD replication successful at the Connection Broker?
Benefits
- Achieve desktop and application virtualization success by delivering excellent experience to end-users
- Pinpoint performance abnormalities using total performance visibility across every tier, and every layer of VMware Horizon service
- Accelerate troubleshooting using auto-correlation of performance events and root cause visualization
- Assure virtual desktop user satisfaction by preemptively detecting and resolving performance issues before users are affected
- Ensure maximum ROI by right-sizing your VMware Horizon infrastructure, using powerful reporting & analytics
Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.
- eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor
- Only eG Enterprise automatically provides actionable answers to performance issues, wherever they originate, from application code to bare metal
- Understand the impact of infrastructure issues on application performance and user experience
- Unify performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosing, reporting, and capacity-planning in a single console
- Ensure a great user experience and dramatically improve IT efficiency
- Benefit from flexible deployment options (on-premises and SaaS) and monitoring approaches (agentless and agent-based)
