The Azure Well-Architected Framework for Azure Virtual Desktop Workloads details certain key considerations that you should include when architecting the monitoring of your AVD workloads and deployments. These key considerations are:

  • Health and availability monitoring
  • Performance monitoring
  • Security monitoring
  • Reporting
  • Alerting

Whilst native tools are provided, to meet the criteria of the Azure Well-Architected Framework, significant configuration is needed to leverage Azure Monitor. Monitoring AVD requires you to configure at least one Log Analytics workspace. But beyond this you will also need to enable data collection for the following items of your Log Analytics workspace:

  • Diagnostics from your Azure Virtual Desktop environment
  • Recommended performance counters from your Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts
  • Recommended Windows event logs from your Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts

And beyond this you will probably need to set up a bunch of stuff such as:

  • Azure Virtual Desktop Insights
  • Some mechanism to ensure monitoring agents are installed

Why Native Azure Tools Don’t Suit Some Organizations for Monitoring AVD Workloads

Many of our customers have chosen to avoid the complexity and effort of setting up Azure native monitoring by using eG Enterprise for a wide range of reasons and factors, these include:

  • The organization has long-term hybrid cloud and / or cloud agnostic strategies. Increasingly organizations have formal cloud exit strategies which require workloads and monitoring tooling to be portable to other clouds or back on-prem, see: The Importance of a Cloud Exit Strategy: What It Is, Who Needs It, and How to Plan It | eG Innovations. Investing in Azure only tooling, for monitoring AVD, doesn’t fit with such strategies. Being able to monitor before and after migrations and / or exits is a fundamental need.
  • AVD is used alongside other DaaS and VDI technologies such as Citrix / VMware or AWS technologies, for surge capacity. Many organizations spin up AVD desktops and apps to support short term or contract projects. Other organizations use them to support seasonal surges such as term times in universities or “Black Friday” type events impacting retail call centers. Aside from automating spinning up day-zero monitoring alongside AVD, eG Enterprise allows orgs to monitor all of their apps and desktops in a single pane of glass – i.e. Citrix alongside VMware, AVD or whatever.
  • In-house AVD skills (or a lack thereof!). AVD is a relatively new and rapidly changing technology. Not only does it take considerable manual effort to setup and maintain Azure native monitoring – it requires considerable experience and skills to do it well and cost-effectively. Such experts are hard to find!

9 Qualities of eG Enterprise to Help You Meet the Azure Well-Architected Framework Monitoring Criteria Out-of-the-Box

Quality 1: Auto-deploy, Auto-discovery and Topology Mapping

An interactive topology map of the components and their relationships in a typical AVD deployment. If a problem occurs the root-cause problem is indicated by a colored alert - in this case on the Azure AD Connector.

Figure 1: Note how eG Enterprise’s AIOps domain-aware intelligence generates a rich interactive topology map of all the dependencies in an AVD deployment

eG Enterprise is simple to implement and easily integrated with Nerdio Manager and other automation tooling, scripts and IaC (Infrastructure-as-Code) workflows.

Quality 2: Observability for Health and Availability Monitoring

Microsoft recommends that you leverage Azure services such as Azure Service Health and Azure Resource Health to keep you informed about your cloud resources’ health.

They recommend you manually or otherwise configure alerting the Service Health service, details on how to do this are available, here: Set up service alerts.

They also recommend you do similar on the Resource Health service and in particular monitor:

  • Azure Storage solutions for Azure Virtual Desktop FSLogix and App Attach
  • Session hosts, or virtual machines (VMs)

With eG Enterprise you get all this and more, out-of-the-box with no fiddly configuration or metric threshold calculations – just end-to-end visibility into the performance of your Azure Virtual Desktops. You can monitor the entire AVD service delivery chain: Azure subscription, Azure AD, Azure Host Pools, brokering, session hosts, FSLogix profiles, Azure storage and more. Learn more from our solution pages and briefs, see: Azure Virtual Desktop Monitoring | eG Innovations and avd-monitoring.pdf (eginnovations.com).

Simple Overview Dashboard showing the health of AVD Infrastructure - these can be useful to management and help desk beyond system administrators monitoring AVD workloads

Figure 2: Simple dashboards offer instant overviews of the AVD Infrastructure

Wen monitoring AVD workloads it important to monitor the Azure dependencies as shown in this screenshot - such as Azure Billing, Azure Data Services, Azure Compute, Azure Storage.

Figure 3: eG Enterprise automatically monitors and raises alerts on Azure infrastructure issues in Azure AVD dependencies such as networking, storage and other key services that can cause connection problems. This means admins can avert issues before users are affected. eG Enterprise will also keep track of the billing, costs and subscription limits on these resources.

Quality 3: Performance Monitoring

The framework also advises that you retrieve key performance indicators and necessary logs from your Azure Virtual Desktop entities, configure the following diagnostics data to be sent to Log Analytics:

  • Azure Virtual Desktop host pool logs
  • Azure Virtual Desktop workspace diagnostics
  • Azure Virtual Desktop application group diagnostics
  • Storage diagnostics
  • Data about session hosts from a Monitor agent or Log Analytics agent
  • Performance and event log data that’s collected according to Monitor or Log Analytics agent data collection rules
  • Azure VM insights data

Details of how to configure an AVD deployment to achieve this using native tools are covered, here: Monitoring considerations for Azure Virtual Desktop workloads – Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework | Microsoft Learn. Again, these are fairly complex and lengthy. Beyond metric and log collection, there is another section on deployment configuration and templates – covers ARM templates, BICEP, Terraform and agent deployments / agent extensions. Avoiding this complexity and overhead is precisely the reason that many of our customers choose to use eG Enterprise as a turnkey, ready-to-go, simple single-pane-of-glass GUI alternative.

Our AVD users, can monitor and optimize user experience and application performance out-of-the-box, see:

Image of eG Enterprise's User Experience Dashboard - this per user view is particularly useful for troubleshooting user support tickets

Figure 4: The AVD user experience dashboard is ideal for help desk operators handling end user support calls and tickets about application performance issues.

Quality 4: Security – Microsoft Entra ID Authentication and Audit Logs Monitoring

Microsoft Entra ID (was Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)) is the first-line authentication solution for Azure Virtual Desktop no matter which connection method a client uses. As a result, it’s important to collect Microsoft Entra ID authentication and audit logs. Using native Azure tools you can do this in a few ways:

  • In your diagnostics settings, configure audit logs and sign-in logs to be sent to Log Analytics, where the data can be queried and alerted on.
  • Use a connector in Microsoft Sentinel (an additional pay for service) to collect data from Microsoft Entra ID and stream it into Microsoft Sentinel.

eG Enterprise automatically proactively monitors and alerts on Entra ID issues and monitors all the relevant metrics, events and logs that might impact your AVD and Azure landscape. My colleague Babu Sundaram has written widely, showcasing our support for Entra ID / Azure AD, see:

Figure 5: Steep and sudden spikes in failures often indicate a service failure and such failures often impact users in specific locations. Daily working patterns e.g., the 9 am morning logon or 1pm back from lunch surge become very clear. Anomalous behavior such as users logging on at 3am from unusual locations should trigger red flags

Quality 5: Security Event Log Monitoring for AVD Workloads

The Well-Architected Framework states that you should collect security event logs from your Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts and advises you to add these logs to a centralized repository for security events that involve your Azure Virtual Desktop hosts. To do this using native tools Microsoft advises that you use a Monitor agent data collection rule for collecting security event logs. You will then need to put in place a mechanism to query those logs as required.

Monitoring Windows Security Event Logs is a good idea when monitoring AVD workloads, here eG Enterpise is shown monitoring many logs and services including the AVD Security Log and FSLogix Services

Figure 6: eG Enterprise captures and proactively alerts on all the key events, processes and event logs, that may affect AVD availability, performance or security for deployed AVD workloads.

Out-of-the-box eG Enterprise proactively and continuously monitors logs including:

Quality 6: Out-of-the-box Alerts and Root-cause Observability Diagnostics

The Azure Well-Architected Framework recommends that you leverage the Azure Monitor alert framework or an equivalent or comparable functionality. They recommend you configure custom alerts for the following types of Azure Virtual Desktop events, diagnostics, and resources:

  • VM performance
  • Critical events, such as application events with IDs 3702 or 3703 for unavailable-state problems on session hosts
  • Service Health
  • Resource Health
  • Azure Virtual Desktop diagnostic data
  • Profile and App Attach packages
  • Defender for Cloud

If using Azure Monitor, you will need to do this manually or via implementing some sort of automation or scripting in addition to the Azure native tooling.

One of eG Enterprise’s strengths is its extremely strong AIOps-powered alerting. Domain-aware of Azure, AVD and other components, alerting is configured out-of-the-box and includes features beyond Azure Monitor alerting to automatically set thresholds, reduce false positives and eliminate manual tuning. Alerting is critical for reducing MTTR, so we’ve released a comprehensive whitepaper on assessing this area of functionality, see: White Paper | Make IT Service Monitoring Simple & Proactive with AIOps Powered Intelligent Thresholding & Alerting (eginnovations.com).

Alerting in native Azure Monitor does not allow you to combine static and dynamic thresholds currently, eG Enterprise does – a strategy that helps avoid alarm storms or false positives, see: Static vs Dynamic Alert Thresholds for Monitoring | eG Innovations. ITSM integrations within eG Enterprise allow you to easily track Azure and AVD issues within the de facto ISTM or ticketing system used by your organization, see: Integration with multiple ITSM tools at the same time (eginnovations.com).

For more details on monitoring the end-to-end AVD user experience for users accessing applications, you might like to explore these articles:

Beyond Alerting – Root-cause Diagnostics for Observability

Beyond alerting, which will tell you that something is wrong. The eG Enterprise AIOps engine correlates alarms and the signals of potential issues and performs additional diagnostic tests if needed. This information is used to differentiate primary root-cause alarms (for example, a host availability failure due to a DNS issue) from secondary symptom alarms (100 user experience alerts caused by the host failure). Where possible detailed diagnostics are supplied identifying the root cause, remedial suggestions are made, and automatic remediation performed.

Root-cause Diagnostics for AVD – An Example

The CPU time used by user sessions (%) indicates the percentage of time, across all processors, that a user used the CPU. In contrast, the CPU usage for a user’s processes measure indicates the percentage of overall CPU time that a user is using. For example, if a user is taking up one of the CPUs for 100% of the time and there are 8 CPUs on the AVD, CPU usage for user’s processes will be 12.5% (100/800). While 12.5% may seem to be a low number, the fact that the user is taking up one of the CPUs of the AVD is significant.

Hence, CPU time used by user’s session measure is a better indicator of CPU usage by users. In the above example, since the user is consuming 100% of one processor, CPU time used by user’s session will be 100%. A high value of this measure or a consistent increase in the value of this measure demands attention. Use the detailed diagnosis to know what CPU intensive activities are being performed by the user.

eG Enterprise screenshot showing the monitoring of RemoteFX metrics and some other metrics useful for troubleshooting user experience problems.

Figure 7: Note the detailed diagnostics icon (the magnifying glass) is available for CPU time used by user sessions (%). Clicking on this will give you instant access to detailed information on the individual applications and processes that are using the CPU and affecting the metrics value.

Figure 8:The root-cause diagnostics showing what is using the CPU and affecting the value of the CPU time used by user sessions (%) value.

Quality 7: Pre-packaged Reports and Dashboards for AVD

To meet the Azure Well-architected Framework criteria, organizations are recommended (see: Reporting – Monitoring considerations for Azure Virtual Desktop workloads – Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework | Microsoft Learn) to

  • Activate and use the Azure Virtual Desktop Insights Dashboard
  • Create their own reports or workbooks by using Log Analytics tables and Azure Resource Graph query results as data sources. Resource Graph is a service that can be used to report on Azure Virtual Desktop objects such as host pools, workspaces, compute components, and storage solutions.

With eG Enterprise you don’t get one dashboard but dozens and dozens, including many tailored for different personas and roles within an organization beyond the IT administrator, for example for L1/L2 frontline Helpdesk operators, or MSPs assessing SLA / KPI compliance. Many are showcased in my other blogs, see: Babu Sundaram, Author at eG Innovations, some AVD User Experience dashboards are shown in: Troubleshooting Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) Sessions – Key User Experience and Graphics Metrics to Monitor | eG Innovations. A simple GUI WYSIWYG dashboard builder is provided for organization with bespoke needs.

Figure 9: A wealth of dashboards will be populated for you as soon as you install eG Enterprise to monitor your AVD workloads, infrastructure and their dependencies.

Similarly, numerous ready-made reports are supplied for AVD reporting, these can be customized or custom reports added as needed via a simple GUI report builder.

Figure 10: The top of a “Connection Failure” report allows the administrator to quickly identify the most problematic areas of their AVD deployment to target effort where most effective. Instant visibility on whether certain Host Pools, Session Hosts, Users or Session Desktops experience connection problems.

Figure 11: Logon Performance reports for AVD deployments help management track SLA adherence and KPIs.

Quality 8: Alerts

I’ve added this section for completeness and so that the reader can directly compare the manual configuration steps detailed in Monitoring considerations for Azure Virtual Desktop workloads – Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework | Microsoft Learn.

eG Enterprise’s alerting is again out-of-the-box. Moreover though, eG Enterprise’s AIOps engine provides significantly enhanced alert correlation above native tooling to avoid alert storms when monitoring AVD workloads. eG Enterprise also overcomes some fundamental limitations in Azure Monitor alerting. For the complete story, please see:

Quality 9: Cost-effective Monitoring for AVD Workloads and Azure Infrastructures

The Azure Well-Architected Framework for Azure contains many configuration recommendations for metrics to collect and mechanism to use. The framework is however extremely lightweight on details of which metrics and frequency of collection. Monitoring in Azure can get very expensive and is complex to budget for. eG Enterprise can dramatically decrease costs over native Azure monitoring, enabling predictable budgeting and accounting.

If you want to understand for yourself the issues around the costs of Azure Log Analytics, Monitor and Insights for AVD, we’ve previously written some detailed articles, please see: How to Reduce Azure Log Analytics Costs | eG Innovations and Reduce Azure costs by finding unused and wasted resources (eginnovations.com).

Conclusions on Monitoring AVD Workloads

Microsoft’s Azure Well-Architected Framework for Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) workloads makes it clear that monitoring is essential functionality. However, if you are one of the many organizations who’d find it challenging to adopt. Please do consider contacting us or arranging a demo to see how eG Enterprise can take away those pain points.

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About the Author

Rachel has worked as developer, product manager and marketing manager at Cloud, EUC, application and hardware vendors such as Citrix, IBM, NVIDIA and Siemens PLM. Rachel now works on technical content and engineering and partner liaison for eG Enterprise