Azure Virtual Desktop monitoring

Get unparalleled visibility into the performance of your Azure Virtual Desktops (AVDs). Monitor the entire AVD service delivery chain: Azure portal, Azure AD, Azure Host Pools, brokering and session hosts. Monitor all aspects of AVD user experience: logon time, launch time, screen latency, input delay and more.

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The need for Azure Virtual Desktop monitoring

Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop is a popular cloud-hosted virtual desktop service that organizations worldwide are adopting. AVD provides a number of features including multi-session Windows 10 experience, simplified management, optimizations for Office 365, support for Microsoft RDS and much more at a very affordable price.

Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop logo

For Azure - AVD to become the preferred means of providing digital workspaces, it must be simple to monitor, diagnose and report on. Microsoft's Azure Monitor, the administration tool for AVD can be used for monitoring. However, setting up monitoring dashboards is tedious and time consuming and the web navigation is not intuitive. Hence, IT operations teams need a simple to use, purpose-built monitoring, diagnosis and analytics solution for Azure - AVD.

eG Enterprise for Azure Virtual Desktops (AVD) monitoring

eG Enterprise is an end-to-end monitoring solution that provides incredible in-depth AVD monitoring to help you provide an excellent end-user experience by spotting performance issues before they become problems. With eG Enterprise you can:

  • Monitor and optimize digital user experience
  • Get visibility into every layer and every tier of your IT infrastructure
  • Get to the root-cause of performance problems in one click
  • Understand your future capacity requirements based on historical usage
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I'm impressed what eG Enterprise has to offer in end-to-end monitoring for Azure Virtual Desktop. The auto discovery capabilities, including out of the box thresholds, allow for easy and fast configuration. Getting detailed insights in logon duration, application launch times and the perceived end user experience is great. The ability to gather load simulation tests details using a synthetic user is super helpful and the way they are displayed in the console is great.

Freek Berson Azure Virtual Desktop evangelist
and enthusiast, Wortell
Read Review

Key questions that Azure Virtual Desktop monitoring must address

Different IT stakeholders are involved in a Azure - AVD deployment and each of them has different requirements for a monitoring solution:

  • IT operations teams need to know the utilization levels of all the AVD session hosts. If any of the session hosts is unusually slow to respond or has high utilization, they need to determine which user/application is responsible.
  • When helpdesk teams receive complaints from users about slow response, they need to be able to see quickly if there is a known problem affecting service performance. If the problem is specific to a user, they need to see within a user session and identify if there are any bottlenecks affecting session performance.
  • IT architects take a long term view of performance and are interested in knowing if the load is balanced across all the session hosts, if a specific group of users is taking more resources than others, if specific applications are resource intensive, etc. They also need to determine how they can optimize the infrastructure for improved ROI.
wvd-monitoring
  • Executives are interested in tracking service levels being provided to users. They are also interested in the overall utilization of the service and whether users are satisfied with the service and productive.

eG Enterprise - The complete user experience monitoring tool for Azure Virtual Desktops

eG Enterprise is a purpose-built monitoring solution for digital workspaces. Its integration with Azure - AVD allows IT administrators monitor and manage all aspects of user experience - from ensuring fast response to troubleshooting problems quickly and rapidly to proactively planning their deployments.

With eG Enterprise for Azure - AVD, IT teams can:

  • Monitor all aspects of user experience - logon time, application launch time, frame rate, connection bandwidth - using a combination of synthetic and real user monitoring.
  • Get end-to-end visibility into the performance of all the IT tiers supporting Azure - AVD including the Azure cloud infrastructure, network connectivity, virtual desktops, session hosts and host pools and the user endpoints.
  • Be proactively and accurately alerted to the root-cause of problems using a combination of AIOps technologies including out-of-the-box configurations of alert thresholds, dynamic automatic baselining of metric thresholds and intelligent dependency-based correlation rules.
eG Enterprise User Experience Monitoring diagram
  • Obtain analytics and insights using which they can determine how to optimize the AVD infrastructure to accommodate more users and thereby deliver greater ROI for the organization.

Track the experience
of AVD users

  • Use the purpose-built AVD logon simulator to simulate user sessions and identify times when user logon is slow or not working. Learn more about the AVD logon simulator here.
  • Simulate full user sessions with the eG Enterprise full session simulator. Provide insights that IT teams can use to evaluate compliance with SLAs. Identify if slowness is due to specific backend applications being accessed through AVD.
  • Passively observe user activity on multi-user Windows desktops and report when slowness in application launches, application crashes or network connectivity issues are observed.
AVD User Experience monitoring diagram

Get at-a-glance views of your AVD environment

  • No need to spend hours configuring dashboards or manually adding metrics, events, logs and traces. Out-of-the box pre-configured metric and event thresholds provide instant intelligent alerting. Pre-defined dashboards provide a consistent view of workspace workloads and performance. Monitor Citrix, VMware Horizon, Amazon WorkSpaces and AVD sessions from a single pane of glass.
  • Get comprehensive monitoring of all AVD components - Azure account, Azure Active Directory, Host pools, Session hosts, etc. - from one single pane of glass.
  • Get insights into all aspects of user activity - session logon, application launch, active/idle times, resources and bandwidth usage, session disconnections, logoffs, etc.
AVD Monitoring results table

eG Enterprise provides a single pane of glass view across
heterogeneous digital workspace technologies


Pre-built AVD performance and usage reports for compliance and infrastructure optimization

Historical reports provide AVD administrators with all the details they need for compliance reporting and infrastructure optimization.

  • Report on who logged in, at what times, what applications they accessed, what resources they used and how their digital employee experience (DEX) was. Track active/idle times to report time periods when the user was not active.
  • Monitor all aspects of resource usage on the session hosts. Identify bottlenecks including under-sized hosts, applications with resource usage issues, and users generating unusual activity on the shared hosts.
  • Get insights to right-size and optimize the infrastructure to deliver better performance and to enhance the infrastructure to accommodate additional users.
AVD Monitoring dashboard

Why eG Enterprise for Azure Virtual Desktop monitoring?

  • eG Enterprise is the industry leading digital workspace monitoring solution. Built by digital workspace experts based on over a decade of experience with some of the largest virtual desktop deployments, eG Enterprise provides granular insights into VDI performance, like no other monitoring tool can.
  • If you are using Azure - AVD in conjunction with any other digital workspace solution, get the same capabilities, consistent reporting and alerting across these technologies. This makes the learning curve short for IT administrators.
  • Leverage eG Enterprise SaaS to get started with Azure - AVD monitoring in minutes. There is no infrastructure to provision, get started in minutes and pay per use.
What's New in eG Enterprise v7

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
about Microsoft AVD

The main questions that customers have about AVD services include:

  • Is the service available, and are users able to login and access their virtual desktops?
  • Is the response time for users within the expected bounds/SLAs? What is the average logon time or application launch time?
  • How many session hosts are in use and is the load balanced across all the hosts?
  • Is there sufficient capacity in each AVD host pool?
  • Who logged in, when and what applications did they use?
  • Are any users taking up excessive resources and why?

Yes, it does. Azure Monitor is very laborious to set up. The out of the box capabilities are limited. Administrators will not be able to get ready answers to the questions they have about AVD availability, user experience, usage and performance. Hence, the need for out of the box, specialized monitoring tools like eG Enterprise.

There are three aspects of Microsoft AVD monitoring. Synthetic monitoring is agent-less and is based on simulating user actions. Monitoring of the Azure account is agent-less using Azure APIs - this provides information on desktop pools, session hosts status, sessions and billing. Azure AD can also be monitored using these APIs and logs. Monitoring of session hosts is agent-based and provides details on real user experience, usage and performance of the session hosts.

No. eG Enterprise's universal agent is capable of monitoring Microsoft AVD services.

Synthetic monitoring and monitoring of Azure services require an application license each. Monitoring of session hosts is based on the number of unique or concurrent users accessing the virtual desktop service. Speak to us about your requirements.

No, the only requirements are that the agents deployed on Microsoft AVD session hosts should be able to communicate using SSL to an eG manager (whether it is in the cloud or on-premises). Users can choose to deploy eG Enterprise themselves on-premises or to a cloud of their choice, or take advantage of eG’s managed SaaS option if they prefer to free themselves from the demands of infrastructure and/or management and maintenance.

eG Enterprise provides reports targeted at different stakeholders across the organization. There are executive reports for management outlining where the performance bottlenecks lie, and operations reports that provide the detailed insights that IT admins need. Domain-specific reports for AVD provide all the details that administrators need for compliance reporting and infrastructure optimization. Reports on who logged in, at what times, which applications they accessed, resources they used and how their user experience was. Additionally, user active/idle times during a session are also tracked. Users can also define custom reports on all metrics, signals and logs that eG Enterprise collects.

Organizations can boost user satisfaction and productivity by reducing downtime and slowtime. IT support cost can be reduced and operational efficiency can be enhanced because problem diagnosis is streamlined, involves less finger-pointing and is more effective. Empirical insights also help with right-sizing, optimization and capacity planning as well.


Start your free trial or schedule a custom demo with an engineer

  • Works on cloud environments, hybrid cloud setups and on-premises deployments
  • Deploy eG Enterprise using our SaaS platform or on-premises
  • Suitable for monitoring cloud applications, digital workspaces and IT infrastructures
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