eG Monitoring
 

The XenDesktop Broker - 5 Application Dashboard

In order to ascertain how well an application is/has been performing, analysis of the performance of the System and Network layers of that application alone might not suffice. A closer look at the health of the Application Layers is also necessary, so as to promptly detect instantaneous operational issues with the target application, and also proactively identify persistent problems or a consistent performance degradation experienced by the application. To provide administrators with such in-depth insights into overall application performance and to enable them to accurately isolate the root-cause of any application-level slowdown, eG Enterprise offers the Application Dashboard. Each of the critical applications monitored by eG Enterprise is accompanied by an exclusive application dashboard. The contents of the dashboard will therefore primarily vary depending upon the application being monitored.

Unlike the System and Network dashboards, the Application dashboard of the XenDesktop Broker - 5 is not driven by the Sub-System. Instead the dashboard is designed in such a way that drilling down each section would provide you with the required information.

The Application dashboard of a XenDesktop Broker - 5 provides an all-round view of the health of the broker being monitored, and helps administrators pinpoint the problem areas. Using this dashboard therefore, you can determine the following quickly and easily:

  • Is the application encountering any issue currently? If so, what is the issue and how critical is it?
  • How problem-prone has the application been during the last 24 hours? Which application layer has been badly hit?
  • Has the administrative staff been able to resolve all past issues? On an average, how long do the administrative personnel take to resolve an issue?
  • How many desktops are hosted through this broker? What are the states of the desktops?
  • How many catalogs have been configured on the broker? What are they? What is the type of each catalog?
  • How many desktop groups are made available on this broker? How many desktops are hosted within each of the desktop group?
  • Have physical machines been included in any catalog? If so, which catalog is it?
  • How many desktops in each catalog have been assigned to users, and how many are unassigned?
  • Does any catalog consist of desktops that do not belong to any desktop group?
  • Is the License server available in the site?
  • Is the broker able to connect to the SQL database server?
  • Is any desktop group in maintenance mode?
  • Is any desktop group unavailable?
  • Are there adequate idle desktops in every group, or is any group over-utilized?
  • Have any desktops disconnected from their groups? Which groups have such disconnected desktops?
  • Does any desktop group consist of unregistered desktops?
  • Which desktop group is managing CPU-intensive desktops? Which desktops are these? Which controller is managing these desktop groups?
  • Are too many desktops in a group experiencing network latencies?
  • Did the connection attempt to any desktop fail recently? If so, which desktop is this? Which desktop group and controller are managing this desktop?
  • Are any desktops in a group powered off currently?
  • Is the broker overloaded with sessions?
  • Have published applications been accessed in any session?
  • Have too many user sessions disconnected from the broker?
  • Are too many sessions to virtual desktops logging out?
  • Is any desktop in an Unavailable state currently?
  • Is the virtual desktop agent unavailable on any desktop?
  • Is any desktop in the maintenance mode?

The contents of the XenDesktop Broker - 5 Dashboard have been elaborated on hereunder:

  1. The Application Alerts section of the Application Dashboard reveals the number and type of issues currently affecting the performance of the XenDesktop Broker - 5 that is being monitored. To know more about the current issues, click on any cell against Distribution that represents the problem priority of interest to you; the details of the current problems of that priority will then appear in a pop-up window.

    If the pop-up window reveals too many problems, you can use the Search text boxes that have been provided at the end of the Description, Layer, and StartTime columns to run quick searches on the contents of these columns, so that the alarm of your interest can be easily located. For instance, to find the alarm with a specific description, you can provide the whole/part of the alarm description in the text box at the end of the Description column in the pop-up window; this will result in the automatic display of all the alarms with descriptions that contain the specified search string.

  2. To zoom into the exact layer, test, and measure that reported any of the listed problems, click on a particular alarm in the Alarms window. Doing so will introduce an Alarm Details section into the Alarms window, which provides the complete information related to the problem clicked on. These details include the Layer affected by the problem for which the alarm was raised, the test that reported the problem, and the last measure that was reported will be reported in the Last Measure.

  3. Suppose if the Detailed Diagnosis capability is enabled for a particular measure for which an alarm was generated, a magnifying glass icon will appear in the DD column of the alarm. Clicking on that icon will lead you to a detailed diagnosis page of the measure using which you could figure out any abnormal activity that has occurred in this Xen Desktop Broker - 5.

The XenDesktop Broker - 5 dashboard has been separated into four sections that will provide you with the required information upon drilling down each of the section. The sections of this dashboard are discussed elaborately hereunder:

  1. Machines

    The Machines section of this dashboard, comprises of a table that lists out the number of desktops that are currently made available through this broker. This table further provides the detailed numerical statistics of the desktops based on their category. For instance, you could see the number of desktops that are currently registered in this farm at a single glance by viewing the value against the Unregistered row from this table. Likewise you can view the desktops based on different categories such as High CPU, High Latency etc. This section also helps you to view the total number of Desktops, Catalogs and Desktop Groups at a single glance by clicking on the corresponding icon.

    Clicking on the Desktops icon in Application Dashboard will lead you to the Matching Machines page that displays the details of the desktops that are available through this broker.

    If too many desktops are made available through this broker, then it will be tedious to find out the desktop of your choice from this page. Therefore to make your search comfortable, you can use the Filter Machine Name, Filter DNS Name and the Filter IP Address text boxes in this page. Using these text boxes, you can search the desktop of your choice based on the Machine Name, DNS Name and the IP Address of the desktop.

    When you click on a desktop from the Machine Name column of Matching Machines tab, the VM of your choice providing you with a more detailed information will then appear.

    The Machine Details section will provide the detailed configuration of the desktop as well as provide a detailed status report of the chosen desktop. The next section, Session Details will explain the session related activity of the chosen desktop such as the Log on time, End point time etc. The Activity section will display individual graphs for the Power state of desktop i.e., how long the chosen desktop has been powered on and the Registration state of desktop i.e., the current state of the chosen desktop in the XenDesktop farm

    Upon clicking the name of the Desktop Group from the Machine Details section, the detailed analysis of the desktop group of the chosen desktop will then appear.

    From the detailed analysis of the desktop group, you could figure out the configuration of the chosen desktop. If you would like to find out the configuration details of other desktops that are part of the same desktop group, select the desktop of your interest from the Machines drop down list. The Status section of provides you with the details of the overall number of desktops within the desktop group in the XenDesktop farm and this section also lists out the number of desktops in each state i.e., Unregistered, High CPU, High Latency etc. The Usage section shows the total number of desktops present in the desktop group and lists out the percentage of desktops that are currently utilized. Also the Usage section lists out the numerical statistics of the desktops that are currently Available, Unregistered etc. Clicking on any of the value in the Status and Usage section will lead you to the Matching Machines page that lists out all the desktops available in the corresponding state. Say for example, you would like to know which are the desktops that are currently in the Disconnected state in the chosen desktop group, clicking on the value 9 against the Disconnected column in the Usage section will lead you to the following pop-up window which lists out all the disconnected desktops and their current configuration information.

    The next section reveals a series of graphs that provides the following information for each desktop group present in the XenDesktop farm:

    • The number of desktops in each desktop group.
    • The number of desktop groups by desktop usage.
    • The number of desktops that are registered in each desktop group.
    • The percentage of desktops that are utilized in each desktop group.
    • The desktops that are utilizing high CPU in each desktop group and
    • The number of desktops with high latency.

    Using the graphs from the desktop group, you can figure out if there is any drastic change in the performance of the desktop groups and if so what is the possible factor causing such an issue? Clicking on a graph from the desktop group will enlarge the graph.

    Similarly, clicking on the Catalogs and Desktop Groups icon in the Application Dashboard will lead you to the Matching Machines page that will list out the corresponding desktops that are currently associated with the chosen catalog and the chosen desktop group. You can once again drill down the details of the desktop of your choice from the Matching Machines page as explained above.

  2. Desktop Details

    The Desktop Details section in the Application Dashboard will provide an overall view of all the desktop groups within the XenDesktop farm in a tabular format. For each individual desktop group in the XenDesktop farm, the number of desktops, the percentage of used desktops, the available number of desktops etc, will be listed in the table. Besides the individual statistics of the desktop groups in the XenDesktop farm, the overall desktop group statistics are also provided in this section. Clicking on the All option in the table of this Desktop Details section will lead you to the Desktop Group page which shows the Comparison graph for all the desktop groups within a farm.

    Clicking on the History tab will lead you to the History graph page of all desktop groups. You can enlarge a graph to view the details of the desktop group as per your choice.

    Clicking on an individual desktop group of the Desktop Details section will lead you back to the History graph and apart from this; by default, a graph is shown for the Desktop groups by usage - All to the right of the table. This graph is a representation of the overall percentage of desktops that are currently utilized by all the desktop groups in the XenDesktop farm. To view the percent utilization of desktops of each individual desktop group as a graph, just click on the value in the Usage column of the table against the desktop group of your choice.

  3. Desktop Controller service

    Below the Desktop Details section is the Desktop Controller service section which lists out all the services that are enabled in the Desktop Controller of the XenDesktop farm. From this section you can figure out how well each of the service communicates with the MS SQL database and how well the queries made by each service are handled by the database server. Additionally, you can also figure out if any of the service in the desktop controller is currently down. This section also provides hands-on-details on the time taken by each service for a database transaction.

  4. Infrastructure

    The Infrastructure section of XenDesktop Broker - 5 Application Dashboard consists of two tables - these tables lists out the hypervisors and the controllers in the XenDesktop farm along with their connectivity status. The Host column of the hypervisor section lists out all the Hypervisors that are hosting the desktops in the XenDesktop farm and reports whether each of the hypervisor is connected to the farm properly. The Controller column of this section lists out all the controllers in this farm and the status of each controller will be reported in the state column of the table.

    The sections mentioned above explain only about the XenDesktop farm level details. To view the dashboard for each individual controller in the XenDesktop farm, click on the Show Controller Level Details button present adjacent to the Distribution column. Alternately, if you are viewing the dashboard for the controller, you can shift to view the farm level details by simply clicking on the Show Farm Level Details button.