How to add Historic User Session Latency to vROPs for Horizon.

VROPs for Horizon provides end-to-end visibility into key User session statistics that make it easy for Horizon admins to visualize and alert on performance problems impacting the user’s of their environment. One of the key metrics used in determining how well user’s are connected to their virtual app or desktop session is Session Latency (ms), as it most visually impacts the user’s perspective of their session performance.  The lower the session latency, the quicker video, keyboard, and mouse inputs are redirected to and from a user’s endpoint client, giving the user a more native-like PC experience.

As the latency trends higher (>180ms), the experience begins to degrade, and the user can begin to notice “sluggishness“ – slow keyboard, mouse, and video responsiveness.

VROPs for Horizon gives us direct visibility into when these issues are occurring across all of the Active User Sessions of the Horizon View environment.  However, once the session becomes inactive, it will go into a stale object state and be removed from vROPs during a clean-up window.

To be able to view this information historically on Pools and User objects, you can create Super Metrics that simply maps the session latency to the objects you want to report on.

Creating the Super Metric

To create the Super Metric, Navigate to Administration -> Configuration -> Super Metrics.  Click the green + sign to create a new Super Metric.

Provide the Super Metric a unique name, in this case we are using “Avg App Session Latency”.  Search for the  “Application Session” Object Type, and click “Round Trip Latency (ms)” to add it to the Super Metric.  Since, we are looking for the average latency, select “avg” from the available functions list, making sure that the average function applies to the metric by encapsulating it parenthesis as demonstrated in the image below.  Click Save to finish the Super Metric.

Next, you will need to add the Super Metric to the “User” object type.  Click the green + sign under the “Object Types” section.  Search and select the “User” object type.

Before the Super Metric will begin collecting data, you will need to navigate to Administration-> Policies, and edit the active monitoring policy to enable the metric for collection.

Once the metric has started to collect data, you can view the data on a individual “User” object by selecting “All Metrics” -> Super Metric -> select metric.

You can also create custom Views that display the historical latency for all users of the environment, as well as perform simple roll-up statistics.

vROPs for Horizon – User Application Threshold Alerts

In the latest vROPs for Horizon 6.4, the ability to track user launched desktop applications was added.  (See 6.4 release notes)  This new addition gives customers the capability of providing reports of which users have launched specific windows applications over time.

A lesser known capability, is that this new feature also gives customers the ability to alert on these same processes when they have reached a certain CPU and Memory threshold.  To take advantage of this feature, the vROPs administrator needs to perform the following steps:

  1. Add the specific processes  that  you want to monitor to your vROPs for Horizon configuration. (Process Outline Click Here).


  2. Create a new alert, and the define the appropriate CPU and Memory symptom thresholds that you want to track.

A sample alert can be downloaded using the following link:  User Process Alert.xml

To import my sample Alert and customize it for your environment, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to Content-> Alert Definitions, and click Import.

  2. Click Browse and select the User Process Alert.xml file previously downloaded, and click Open to import.

  3. Confirm that the Alert Definition was imported successfully.  If the alert was skipped for some reason, you can re-attempt the process and select the “Overwrite existing Alert Definition” option before clicking Browse and opening the file.

  4. Click Done to finish the import process.

Congratulations!  You now have visibility into in-guest processes, and how they are impacting the users of your Horizon View environment.


V4H Custom Content 8.2 now available for download!

The latest V4H Custom Content 8.2 is now available for download at http://cameronfore.com/v4hcustom.

This includes an updated End User Experience Dashboard, a new Horizon Help Desk dashboard, and a new Root Cause Analysis dashboard.  Other dashboards include Horizon Pool Utilization Stats and Horizon Capacity Analysis.

Horizon Help Desk:

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Horizon Root Cause Analysis:

Root Cause Analysis_captioned

End User Experience v2:

eucexperiencev2_captioned

Horizon Pool Utilization:

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Horizon Capacity Analysis:

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How to import:

To successfully import the content, a new Metric Config must be created under ReskndMetric,and named  “Config_Session_Desktop_stats”.

MetricConfig

Three additional Views must also be imported for the dashboards to work correctly.  In some cases a View may need to be associated with specific Horizon View Pod, such as the View_VDI Desktop Pool Usable Statusv2 view, which is used on the Horizon Pool Utilization dashboard.

Views2import