Gain valuable insights into VDI monitoring with a focus on baseline metrics. In this informative guide, we explore the key foundational metrics you need to know when utilizing VDI monitoring tools. Understand the vital performance indicators and benchmarks that help ensure optimal VDI performance and identify areas for improvement. Stay ahead of potential issues and maximize the efficiency of your virtual desktop infrastructure with a deep understanding of baseline metrics and their significance in VDI monitoring.
Enterprise IT networks are becoming dense and complex as organizations are deploying more information systems to remain relevant and address the needs of their clients. However, haphazard adoption is doing more harm than good and causing setbacks.
Most businesses understand that adopting technology will be defined by their potential to leverage huge workloads when supporting critical business decisions. However, this has put high demands on IT teams to deploy, secure, and monitor the systems in order to deliver virtualization-centric solutions such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). VDI is a self-managed solution, IT has to deploy, implement, and manage it in-house which put loads on budgets and teams too.
Therefore. the decision to implement virtualization in a firm is not an easy one. Migrating the VDI workloads to a cloud-centric approach is precisely a better decision.
Monitoring VDI solution is one of the most important aspects of maintaining it. Clearly, it is a platform that delivers applications to the users centralizing access. Thus, this technology requires monitoring and administration. Undoubtedly, ACE as a hosted VDI service provider manages, hosts, secures, and scales the infrastructure for your firm, and you can also monitor the infrastructure on your own with few dashboard accesses.
See How You Can Achieve Zero Trust With ACE VDI
The first question that IT specialists have about VDI deployment is “What is there to be monitored?” Although it looks like it is an architecture that fulfills their requirements, the architecture has major elements that require monitoring. If a business has critical demands, then be sure to know what is included in the SLA. For instance, if the user needs a fast logon process that gets completed within 30 seconds, then you know what to monitor.
In this scenario, let’s evaluate how VDI monitoring works and how your IT can troubleshoot sites, infrastructure, and sessions.
VDI Monitoring Tools: How Does VDI Monitoring Work?
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) monitoring tools play a crucial role in ensuring the optimal performance and seamless operation of virtual desktop environments. These tools provide valuable insights into the health, availability, and performance of virtual desktops, enabling IT administrators to proactively identify and resolve issues. Let’s explore the different types of VDI monitoring tools available today.
1. Everything Starts With Service Monitoring
The ultimate goal of implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure is to be compliant with an SLA. That’s what service monitoring does.
Service monitoring works on the concept of the binary value. Either the service is available or not. It’s either on or off. What items to include in your monitoring solution depend on the definition of your service, your SLA, and availability requirements.
In the beginning, the following metrics could be great for VDI monitoring:
- The external URL of your VDI service
- The internal URL of your VDI service
- The URL of your App
- Volumes service
- All services running on your vCenter Appliances & PSCs
- All infrastructure services such as DHCP, DNS, AD, and NTP
- The capacity of data stores becoming less than XX%in a cluster
- Memory resources becoming less than XX% on a host
- CPU resources becoming less than XX% on a host
- All services running on ESXi hosts
Since all your workloads are in VDI, it’s very important to respond quickly to the issues and ensure that services are up and running. For the availability and disaster recovery category, the number of nines determines how much time the service might be unavailable. This makes it easier to stick to the SLA compliance where IT can respond to possible outages during the night and weekend.
Recommended Reading: Are You Disaster Recovery ready? – Know How Virtualization Can Help You Out!
What if the virtual desktop stops because of snapshots in the middle of the night that weren’t removed after an upgrade? Here, the connection servers ran out of capacity and thus the virtual machines stopped working and the on-call engineer didn’t get an alert for the same on the mobile device.
So, this can lead to disruption in work processes as the failover needs to be performed manually where no official was updated about it. So, VDI monitoring helps out to redesign the solution and automate an alert whenever service goes down. Moreover, executing a data center after three attempts to know if the service is available again.
2. User Experience Metrics For VDI Monitoring
What’s the primary goal of any infrastructure? To offer a user experience that makes users happy and satisfied while working. Although VDI comes with deep learning technology, to analyze what sort of experience a user gets, user experience monitoring is a good start.
User experience itself is hard to measure, besides just asking the user on a regular basis what their experience is (which is a great idea by the way). Measuring things that could predict a good user experience is something that actually is possible.
The following metrics could be used as a starting point:
- CPU usage in a virtual desktop
- CPU wait times on the host for a specific desktop
- Memory usage in a virtual desktop
- IOPS of the virtual desktop
- Disk latency of the virtual desktop
- Round trip latency between the virtual desktop and the endpoint
- Packet drops between the virtual desktop and the endpoint
- Logon time of the session
- GPO loading time of the user
- Application start time
- GPU utilization
- Framebuffer utilization
Recommended Read: VDI Use Cases: Top 6 Real-World Benefits and Applications
3. Get A Hold On Applications Published
Imagine if the IT admin doesn’t have any information related to applications published in an environment across several contexts. How would they check for backend faults or error metrics?
Administrators can view a number of metrics like the number of instances, backend faults, and error metrics for all published applications. VDI monitoring tool includes these built-in filters:
- Application type (Hosted on desktop vs. installed on clients)
- Associated user
- Connection type
- Delivery group
- Idle time
- Machine name
- Session state
4. Capacity Management Impacts the User Experience
Managing your capacity is critical to ensure a good user experience and running services.
Users can only get an enhanced user experience if the capacity and resources are distributed properly. As a service owner, it’s very important to be in control of the resources that ensure a healthy service otherwise applications or virtual desktops become slow and sometimes unresponsive.
Just like a farmer feeds the cows to keep them healthy. Similar is the case with virtualization, you need to maintain the ideal capacity to know that system doesn’t perform as a never-ending resource.
Recommended Reading: Sizing a virtual desktop solution: What are the VDI requirements?
A VDI platform consists of a lot of resources. Not every one of them is measured in the same way, so know what to look for. The following metrics can be used as a good starting point to manage your capacity:
- RAM capacity in the cluster
- Average CPU usage per host
- Average CPU ready times per host (keep them under the 10% level at all times)
- Remaining datastore capacity per datastore
- Throughput on network components such as switches, load balancers, firewalls, etc.
- Available GPU resources per cluster (GPU profiles and encoder resources)
- The capacity of your file shares (for profiles, applications, etc.)
- Reclaimable resources from existing virtual machines
5. Security Monitoring Tools
Security is a paramount concern in VDI environments. Security monitoring tools track and analyze activities within the virtual desktop environment to detect potential security threats, such as unauthorized access attempts, malware infections, or data breaches. These tools provide real-time alerts and actionable insights to help administrators mitigate risks and ensure data integrity.
6. Compliance Monitoring Tools
Compliance monitoring tools help organizations meet regulatory requirements by monitoring and reporting on activities within the VDI environment. These tools track and audit user access, application usage, data transfers, and other relevant activities, ensuring compliance with industry-specific regulations and internal policies.
7. End-to-End Monitoring Tools
End-to-end monitoring tools provide comprehensive visibility across the entire VDI infrastructure stack, from the virtualization layer to the endpoint devices. These tools offer a unified view of performance, user experience, application health, and security across all components, enabling administrators to troubleshoot issues quickly and efficiently.
Recommended Read: Best VDI Software 2023: Reviews, Pricing, and Demo
Enhance Your VDI Monitoring Capabilities with Our Assistance
In conclusion, VDI monitoring tools are essential for maintaining the performance, availability, and security of virtual desktop environments. By leveraging these tools, organizations can proactively identify and resolve issues, optimize resource allocation, enhance user experience, ensure compliance, and maximize the overall efficiency of their VDI deployments. Selecting the right combination of monitoring tools based on specific requirements is crucial to achieving a robust and well-managed VDI infrastructure.
Ace Hosted VDI is a solution that works upon the fully scalable, secure, and reliable infrastructure requirements. Our team of experts will deploy an architecture for you that suits your needs, keeping in mind the other challenges you might face while operating with that infrastructure.
Experience our VDI Monitoring Tools with a Complimentary 7-Day Trial & and explore VDI pricing options for seamless management.
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