Use Azure Virtual Desktop Insights to monitor your AVD deployment | Azure Friday

Summary

In this Azure Friday episode, Scott Hanselman explores Azure Virtual Desktop Insights with Ben Murphy, highlighting its built-in diagnostic capabilities. The discussion covers the importance of observability for virtual desktop environments, the ability to perform both macro and micro analysis, and the insights provided for understanding resource utilization, connection diagnostics, performance, and user experience. They delve into features like the Connection Diagnostics tab, connection performance analysis, overall utilization, max users per core, and scaling plans, emphasizing the tool's role in optimizing costs and enhancing user connectivity.

Takeaways

• 🌐 Azure Virtual Desktop Insights is a built-in monitoring tool that provides a secure, remote desktop experience with diagnostic capabilities.
• 🔍 The dashboard allows for both macro and micro analysis, enabling users to observe the health of the entire company and debug individual issues.
• 📊 It offers an overview of resources, including host pools and session hosts, along with user activity and capacity over time.
• 🚀 Users can identify connection issues through the Connection Diagnostics tab, which shows the success or failure of connections across the environment.
• 🕒 The Connection Performance area highlights latency issues, identifying regions and users affected by high latency.
• 💡 Insights on overall utilization help with cost optimization and understanding user productivity through session host usage.
• 🛠️ Administrators can use the provided metrics to make informed decisions on scaling, including auto-scaling for cost efficiency.
• 📈 The max users per core metric indicates the efficiency of workloads and can aid in saving costs in multi-session environments.
• 🔄 The Scaling Plan provides a view of active versus idle session hosts, allowing for better management of Azure compute resource costs.
• 🌟 Clients tab gives visibility on how users are connecting to the service, including the types of clients used and the versions of those clients.
• 🔧 Azure Virtual Desktop Insights is available out-of-the-box with no additional configuration required, but does require diagnostic settings and data collection agents.

Q & A

What is Azure Virtual Desktop Insights?

Azure Virtual Desktop Insights is a native monitoring tool for Azure Virtual Desktop that provides a dashboard to understand and manage your AVD environments. It allows you to monitor the health and performance of your virtual desktops and session hosts, enabling both macro and micro analysis.

How does Azure Virtual Desktop Insights help with observability?

Azure Virtual Desktop Insights enhances observability by providing insights into the performance characteristics of session hosts, user connectivity issues, and overall utilization. It allows administrators to monitor the health of the entire company and individual user sessions, aiding in both diagnostics and performance optimization.

What kind of data can I view with Azure Virtual Desktop Insights?

With Azure Virtual Desktop Insights, you can view data such as active hosts and users, capacity over time, user connection issues, session start times, latency, utilization, idle sessions, and the number of users per core for efficiency analysis.

How does Azure Virtual Desktop Insights help with cost optimization?

Azure Virtual Desktop Insights assists with cost optimization by providing utilization charts and the ability to analyze idle sessions. This information helps administrators decide when to scale down session hosts, thus saving on Azure compute resource costs.

What is the Connection Diagnostics tab in Azure Virtual Desktop Insights?

The Connection Diagnostics tab is designed to show the success or failure of user connections to AVD resources. It provides a trend view to quickly identify points in time where there are failures and allows for detailed diagnosis of impacted users and the specific errors they encountered.

How does latency affect session host performance in Azure Virtual Desktop Insights?

Latency, measured as roundtrip time, significantly influences session host performance. Azure Virtual Desktop Insights identifies regions with higher latency and the users impacted by it, helping administrators understand where performance issues may arise and take corrective actions.

What is the purpose of the Scaling plan in Azure Virtual Desktop Insights?

The Scaling plan provides an overview of active versus idle session hosts, helping administrators decide whether to keep devices on and available or to turn them off to save costs when not needed. It supports the creation of schedules to manage session host availability based on activity patterns.

How can Azure Virtual Desktop Insights help identify outdated client versions?

Azure Virtual Desktop Insights has a Clients tab that shows the types of clients being used to connect to the service and identifies outdated versions. It provides detailed information on specific users with outdated clients, enabling administrators to propagate updates effectively.

What are the prerequisites for using Azure Virtual Desktop Insights?

To use Azure Virtual Desktop Insights, diagnostic settings for the host pools must be enabled, and data collection on the session host through an agent, such as the Azure Monitor Agent or the Microsoft Monitoring Agent, is required.

How often is Azure Virtual Desktop Insights updated with new features and diagnostics?

Azure Virtual Desktop Insights is continuously updated with new features and diagnostics. For example, connection graphics data is in preview and will be surfaced in Insights in the future, so users are encouraged to keep an eye out for updates and check back in to update their customized workbooks.

What is the cost associated with using Azure Virtual Desktop Insights?

Azure Virtual Desktop Insights itself does not require additional configuration or deployment and comes out of the box with AVD. The only cost associated is the ingestion cost for the diagnostics data.