Monitoring and diagnostics of virtual desktop infrastructure
Why do I need to monitor the state of virtual desktops?
The use of desktop virtualization technologies (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, VDI) or application publishing (Terminal Services, TS) helps companies solve a variety of tasks. For example, you can use a single reference corporate image of the Windows operating system with the necessary set of application software to significantly simplify the installation of service packs or migration to current versions of operating systems. Russian companies often use VDI and TS solutions to simplify the implementation of projects for compliance organization (# 152-) or industry standards (PCI DSS). This list of applications, of course, is not limited.
However, in addition to solving a specific business or IT problem, it is important to pay increased attention to the effectiveness of support for users of virtual desktops and applications. This is due to the fact that now the user's work environment is not just a personal computer connected to the network, but a whole set of components: end device, network devices and protocols, connection balancers and brokers, servers and storage systems, management services. And in the event of a problem, it becomes especially difficult to locate and eliminate the cause at a reasonable time. That is why Dell has integrated into its solution for building a virtual workplace vWorkspace a monitoring, diagnostic and reporting tool based on its own product Foglight for Virtual Desktops.
An example of the work of support services using Foglight.
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Let's look at the ease of use of Foglight for Virtual Desktops in relation to the work of support services. This option was not chosen in vain, since it is here that the employee will contact who has “slows down application A” or “does not have access to desktop B”. The mean time to resolution of an MTTR (mean time to resolution) incident will directly affect the duration of an employee’s downtime and the loss of profits to companies as a result of a decrease in labor productivity.
When a support request comes in from a user, the request validation procedure starts. In an amicable way, a level 1 support specialist has one or two minutes to gather the necessary information before deciding to send a request to level 2. It is necessary to have time to collect as much information as possible about what exactly is stopping the user, what information system he used and when, what the connection conditions were, whether such problems have happened before. It is important not to rely solely on information from the user, which may be unreliable or subjective. In addition, many people understand how much time and effort can be spent on, for example, remotely explaining to Elena Petrovna from the regional office accounting department how to look at the virtual ip-address of the VPN connection, or which gateway the session is currently set to.
With Foglight for Virtual Desktops, collecting detailed information turns into an easy walk: we select the desired object of study and go to the required level of detail through the context menus.
How it might look:
• select the application that the user complains about and go to the Diagnostics & Monitoring section through the context menu:
• find the session of the user who is experiencing difficulties, and look at its details:
• get access to the panel with a lot of information that can be useful for diagnostics:
Having such a set of data at hand, the analyst can conclude: “Elena Petrova, I see that you are using an outdated version of client software, or that there are problems with signal delay, which today is noticeably higher than the average over the past month. This is what causes the observed problems. This is what we can do in this case ... ”.
Pay attention to the opportunity to quickly see the historical information and visually determine what is wrong, compared with the time when everything was fine. Looking at the parameters of the server itself, it will be possible to draw conclusions: “Elena Petrovna, I see that this is a regular problem on Thursday after lunch and in time it coincides with the launch of additional applications. I will notify the software department, and we will try to ensure that this does not happen again. ”
The interface gives access to a variety of parameters and information that would otherwise have to be requested from the infrastructure administrators, distracting them from more important matters, and not forcing highly-paid specialists to do work that a cheaper first line of support can handle. Now the first line of support will not only be able to create and transfer applications to a higher level, but will also be able to supply them with detailed information on complex cases that cannot be solved simply by restarting or stopping the process.
Monitoring infrastructure in the data center.
The monitoring and diagnostics capabilities of vWorkspace (latest version 8.0 MR1) are not limited to virtual desktops. They affect all service services, including, hypervisors (MicrosoftHyper-V and VMwarevSphere), storage systems, vWorkspace service servers. Having this information at hand, you definitely will not be caught unaware by the news that the connection server has run out of RAM and you need to raise an additional copy or allocate the required resources.
The use of desktop virtualization technologies (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, VDI) or application publishing (Terminal Services, TS) helps companies solve a variety of tasks. For example, you can use a single reference corporate image of the Windows operating system with the necessary set of application software to significantly simplify the installation of service packs or migration to current versions of operating systems. Russian companies often use VDI and TS solutions to simplify the implementation of projects for compliance organization (# 152-) or industry standards (PCI DSS). This list of applications, of course, is not limited.
However, in addition to solving a specific business or IT problem, it is important to pay increased attention to the effectiveness of support for users of virtual desktops and applications. This is due to the fact that now the user's work environment is not just a personal computer connected to the network, but a whole set of components: end device, network devices and protocols, connection balancers and brokers, servers and storage systems, management services. And in the event of a problem, it becomes especially difficult to locate and eliminate the cause at a reasonable time. That is why Dell has integrated into its solution for building a virtual workplace vWorkspace a monitoring, diagnostic and reporting tool based on its own product Foglight for Virtual Desktops.
An example of the work of support services using Foglight.
')
Let's look at the ease of use of Foglight for Virtual Desktops in relation to the work of support services. This option was not chosen in vain, since it is here that the employee will contact who has “slows down application A” or “does not have access to desktop B”. The mean time to resolution of an MTTR (mean time to resolution) incident will directly affect the duration of an employee’s downtime and the loss of profits to companies as a result of a decrease in labor productivity.
When a support request comes in from a user, the request validation procedure starts. In an amicable way, a level 1 support specialist has one or two minutes to gather the necessary information before deciding to send a request to level 2. It is necessary to have time to collect as much information as possible about what exactly is stopping the user, what information system he used and when, what the connection conditions were, whether such problems have happened before. It is important not to rely solely on information from the user, which may be unreliable or subjective. In addition, many people understand how much time and effort can be spent on, for example, remotely explaining to Elena Petrovna from the regional office accounting department how to look at the virtual ip-address of the VPN connection, or which gateway the session is currently set to.
With Foglight for Virtual Desktops, collecting detailed information turns into an easy walk: we select the desired object of study and go to the required level of detail through the context menus.
How it might look:
• select the application that the user complains about and go to the Diagnostics & Monitoring section through the context menu:
• find the session of the user who is experiencing difficulties, and look at its details:
• get access to the panel with a lot of information that can be useful for diagnostics:
Having such a set of data at hand, the analyst can conclude: “Elena Petrova, I see that you are using an outdated version of client software, or that there are problems with signal delay, which today is noticeably higher than the average over the past month. This is what causes the observed problems. This is what we can do in this case ... ”.
Pay attention to the opportunity to quickly see the historical information and visually determine what is wrong, compared with the time when everything was fine. Looking at the parameters of the server itself, it will be possible to draw conclusions: “Elena Petrovna, I see that this is a regular problem on Thursday after lunch and in time it coincides with the launch of additional applications. I will notify the software department, and we will try to ensure that this does not happen again. ”
The interface gives access to a variety of parameters and information that would otherwise have to be requested from the infrastructure administrators, distracting them from more important matters, and not forcing highly-paid specialists to do work that a cheaper first line of support can handle. Now the first line of support will not only be able to create and transfer applications to a higher level, but will also be able to supply them with detailed information on complex cases that cannot be solved simply by restarting or stopping the process.
Monitoring infrastructure in the data center.
The monitoring and diagnostics capabilities of vWorkspace (latest version 8.0 MR1) are not limited to virtual desktops. They affect all service services, including, hypervisors (MicrosoftHyper-V and VMwarevSphere), storage systems, vWorkspace service servers. Having this information at hand, you definitely will not be caught unaware by the news that the connection server has run out of RAM and you need to raise an additional copy or allocate the required resources.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/219261/
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