ControlUp 8.1 Native VMware Horizon integration

January 16, 2020

In part 2 we highlight the native support for VMware Horizon 7 and higher environments in ControlUp 8.1. The integration is based on the SOAP API. Adding a VMware Horizon environment is easy, click on the Add EUC environment and enter the name a Horizon Connection Server and click ‘OK’. ControlUp discovers Horizon components such as Connection Servers, Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA), desktop pools and sessions automatically.

Horizon Connection Servers

On the top level, you see the stress of all the Horizon Connection Servers and in the view below that each individually Horizon Connection Server is listed with there metrics.

For all the Connection Servers, the following metrics are added to the view:

Horizon Pods
Stress Level
Connection Servers
Connection Server health
Connection Server Max connections
Average machine memory
Machine disk IO average latency
Machine Disk Transfers/sec
Machine Net Total

Per Horizon Connection Server, the following metrics are added such as:

Connection server Health
Amount of connection Servers
Active connections
Connection Server health
External URL
Connection Server certificate valid
Connection Server certificate expiration date
License model
Connection Server version
Horizon Pod
Horizon Site

When installing the ControlUp agent on the Connection Servers or VDI desktop, the hypervisor and in-guest metrics are combined with the Horizon metrics.

Desktop Pools

Below the Connection Servers, the desktop pools are displayed.

Each Desktop pool in the Horizon environment is displayed with metrics such as:

Pool name
Pools type
Stress level
Pool state
Provisioning enabled
Number of machines
Number of machines enabled
Sessions
Disconnects
Problem machines
Default protocol
Power policy
Logoff timeout

Per Horizon pool you can view the VDI desktop and Horizon Session with metrics such as:

Pool name
Session type
Machine name
State
Session start time
Protocol
Desktop source
Client name
Horizon client version
Horizon agent version

And from the Horizon session, you can dive deeper into the processes view to troubleshoot further.

The Virtual Expert in ControlUp includes Horizon specific suggestions such as for example the available desktops remaining in a desktop pool.

As you can see, the Horizon integration adds a lot of Horizon specific metrics. All these metrics gives great insight into what happens in the Horizon environment.

Automation

ControlUp can use automation to solve Horizon issues for you. For example, it is possible the check the Horizon agent state of each VDI desktop. If the Horizon agent state goes bad (such as agent unreachable, error, unknown and already used for example) an automated action can be configured to resolve the problem. To configure automated actions, triggers are used in ControlUp.

In this example (demoed by Trentent Tyle), 3 automation triggers are created:

Trigger 1 operate at 10 minutes, action: Horizon Agent restart if the horizon state is wrong
Trigger 2 operate at 15 minutes, action: VM restart if the horizon state is wrong
Trigger 3 operate at 20 minutes, action: Cold Boot VM if the horizon state is wrong

Trigger 1: operate at 10 minutes

When the VDI machine boots up it has 10 minutes to register the Horizon agent state in the Horizon Connection server. A normal VDI desktop has a READY state and is available. After 10 minutes, the trigger looks if the Horizon agent reports the wrong state such as:

UNKOWN
*ERROR
ALREADY USED
DOMAIN FAILURE
AGENT UNREACHABLE

If the Horizon agent state is wrong, the following action is executed: Restart the VMware Horizon Agent.

The restart VMware Horizon Agent is a PowerShell script that restarts the VMware Horizon Agent service.

It’s easy to create scripts such as PowerShell, VBS, BAT, and CMD. ControlUp itself offers a huge library of predefined/community scripts that can be used also.

Trigger 2: operate at 15 minutes

This trigger looks at the same wrong Horizon Agent states used in the 10 minutes trigger. As an action, the VDI desktop VM is restarted using a simple command.

Trigger 3: operate at 20 minutes

This trigger looks at the same wrong Horizon Agent states used in the 10 minutes trigger. As an action, a hard reboot (cold boot) is executed using a simple command on the VDI Desktop.

Because of all the Horizon metrics available, it is possible to check and repair the Horizon agent states. For IT departments, morning checks can be easily automated to ensure the VDI desktops are ready for accepting connections.

Besides the example above, there is a huge list of other Horizon items/metrics that can be used for automated actions. Here is a short overview of some:

This huge list of Horizon metrics/items in combination with custom scripted actions that can be used makes ControlUp very powerful.

Conclusion

ControlUp 8.1 adds support for VMware Horizon integration and discovers Horizon components such as Connection Servers, Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA), pools and sessions automatically. This integration gives great insight into what happens in the Horizon environment. Using automated actions (triggers) with the Horizon metrics and scripted actions makes it a very powerful tool for automating actions and solve specific issues as displayed for example in the example above.

More information and a trail can be found here, link.

ControlUp 8.1 Monitor Cluster

January 14, 2020January 14, 2020

Today ControlUp version 8.1 is released with two new major features:

Monitor Cluster. This new cluster model adds support for monitoring more VDI endpoints per site.
VMware Horizon integration. ControlUp has now native integration with VMware Horizon environments.

In this part of the blog post, I explain the basics of the new Monitor Cluster.

Monitor Cluster

The new cluster monitor model enables adding more active monitor nodes to the monitor cluster to increase VDI scalability. Each node can support up to 5000 VDI endpoints. The amount of supported VDI endpoint depends on the processes that are active in the VDI. Below is a simple overview of the new cluster monitor model.

Monitors that belong to the same site automatically balance monitoring loads. With this new model, more VDI endpoints per site can be monitored than previous versions.

Adding extra sites allows monitors to monitor resources on an isolated network or on remote networks with low bandwidth links. All monitors deployed to these sites must be able to route back to the initial site to receive instructions.

For a monitor node with support up to 5000 VDI endpoints ControlUp recommends the following sizing:

Windows Server OS with
8 vCPUs
32 GB memory for up to 5000 VDI endpoints. When designing for High Availability, use the N+1 rule. For example, a customer with 8000 VMs needs three monitor nodes.

The amount of VDI endpoints a monitor node supports depends on the processes that are active in the VDI endpoint. For example, a Windows 7 VDI has an average of 120 processes. For Windows 10 an average is 200 processes.

More information on sizing ControlUp can be found here, link.

In the screenshots below an extra monitor node is added to the monitor cluster. After adding it you see two dedicated monitor nodes in the same site. The loads is automatically balanced between the nodes.

In the Manage ControlUp monitors (see right screenshot above) you have now the ability to manage monitors and sites.

Data Collector

A Data Collector is responsible for collecting metrics from VMware vCenter, VMware Horizon, Citrix Delivery Controllers, XenServer Poolmasters, AHV Clusters, and NetScaler appliances. By default, the ControlUp Monitor/Console will be the Data Collector. In the screenshot below we see that the Data Collector for the VMware Horizon environment is the ControlUp Console / Monitor.

This means when having more Data Collectors for example to the VMware Hypervisor the console initiates several API requests each interval. In larger environment the traffic can be substantial. When managing over 500 VDI endpoints it’s recommended to use dedicated Data Collector(s). Per data collector, you can designate another machine on your network to gather data from the VMware Horizon environment for example. More on sizing Data Collectors can be found here, link.

For a Data Collector make sure the ControlUp agent (including the .NET framework) is installed on the machine(s).

After adding the new Data Collector remove the ControlUp Console/Monitor.

More information on the data collector can be found here, link.

Conclusion

With ControlUp 8.1 it is now possible to add more VDI endpoints with the new Monitor Cluster model. Because of this, it’s now possible to monitor large VMware Horizon environments with ControlUp. In part 2 of this blog post, I will highlight the new VMware Horizon integration.

Tested: VDI End User Experience monitoring tools

December 30, 2016August 26, 2016

The success and effectiveness of a VDI environment depends on the End User Experience (UX). When the End User Experience isn’t good, users will complain and the VDI project will fail. So the ability to analyze, report and troubleshoot when a problem occurs is critical in a VDI environment. To get this insight I tested ControlUp v6 and VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon v6.3. Both tools are tested against the following subjects:

Architecture
Troubleshoot performance problems
Reporting
End User Experience monitoring
Supporting End-Users
Licensing

The features of ControlUp and VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon are tested against a VMware Horizon View 7 environment.

Architecture

ControlUp

In the on-premises datacenter reside two components:

ControlUp Management Console. This is a .NET Windows application which connects to the vCenter Server/vSphere clusters and VDI desktops.
ControlUp Monitor Service. This Windows service is responsible for alerting, reporting and uploading historical data to the Insight database which resides in the ControlUp Cloud.

The ControlUp installation is very simple. On a management server simply execute a single executable (ControlUpConsole.exe). It runs in memory, so there is no installation needed. For alerting and uploading data the ControlUp Monitor Service is needed. Here is an overview how a ControlUp hybrid (cloud and in-prem) infrastructure looks like:

On the left is the Enterprise Network displayed. This is the on-premises datacenter where the hypervisors and Horizon environment resides and where the ControlUp Monitor and Console are installed. There is a very minimal infrastructure needed for deploying ControlUp. All the backend components are hosted in ControlUp cloud that is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It’s possible to have the backend components installed on-premises with a special version of ControlUp if you have special compliance requirements. With this version everything runs on-premises.

VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon

VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon is a monitoring solution that extends the capability of VMware vRealize Operations Manager to troubleshoot, monitor, and manage the health, capacity, and performance of VMware Horizon View environments. The architecture of vROps looks like:

The main components are:

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps). vROps can be deployed on Windows, Linux or when using the appliance.
VMware vRealize Operations Horizon management pack (PAK). After the vROps is installed and configured add the VMware vRealize Operations Horizon management pack to vROps.
vRealize Operations for Horizon broker agent. On one Horizon View Connection Server install the agent and pair this with vROps Horizon adapter.
vRealize Operations for Horizon Desktop Agent. In the Horizon View Agent enable this feature.

After installing and configuring these main components the gathering of statistics, events and performance data can begin. All the components are installed in the on-premises datacenter. Besides the VMware vRealize Operations Horizon management pack there are other management packs available that can be imported in vROps such as the Virtual SAN and NSX management pack. This improves the end-to-end visibility and monitoring.

User Interface

ControlUp

When executing the ControlUp Management Console the following UI is displayed after adding the central vCenter server.

This is a real-time performance dashboard.

On the left the managed hypervisor(s), vCenter(s) and servers and desktops are listed. On the managed Windows desktops a lightweight agent is pushed.

The following dashboards are available:

Folders
Hosts
Computers
Sessions
Processes
Accounts
Applications

You can easily search, filter, sort, group by, customize and organize the columns that will be displayed in each dashboard.

vROPS for Horizon

The User Interface (UI) for vROps is accessible from the internet browser.

After logging-in there are Horizon specific dashboards available such as:

Horizon Overview
Horizon Help Desk
Horizon Infrastructure
Horizon User Sessions
Horizon VDI Pools
Horizon RDS Pools
Horizon Applications
Horizon Desktop Usage
Horizon User Session details
Horizon RDS Host Details
Horizon End User Experience

These are the default dashboards but it is possible to create own personalized dashboards with widgets and metrics you need.

Troubleshoot performance problems

To demonstrate performance troubleshooting with both products we use a Windows 10 VDI desktop and run the tool “Heavyload.exe” to generate 100% CPU utilization.

ControlUp

With ControlUp Management Console we can troubleshoot performance problems on hosts, computers and,-sessions in real-time and identify the process that is causing the 100% CPU utilization.

vROPS for Horizon

With vROps we filter on “Percent Processor Time%”, select the session and perform a manual “Get Desktop Processes”.

The “Get Desktop Processes” task takes between 10-30 seconds to generate a list of process information per desktop. In ControlUp getting the processes list is in real-time. Besides identifying high CPU utilization other performance counters can be identified with both products.

Reporting

ControlUp Insights

With ControlUp v5 ControlUp Insights was introduced. ControlUp Insights is historical reporting and analytics platform in the cloud. In v6 ControlUp Insights is extended with new reports. Each month new reports are added to the portal. The portal is accessible from the following URL:

https://insights.controlup.com

When logging-in there are three main sections with a couple of sub-sections:

User Activity
- Session Count
- Session Activity
- Session Details
- Session Resources
- Logon Duration
- Protocol Latency
System Health
- Computer Trends
- Computer Statistics
- Host Trends
- Top Windows Errors
Application Usage
- App Usage Details
- Citrix License Usage

Each section has a several reports with information about user activity, user experience, resource consumption, application activity, system health and license information. The reports are simple, interactive and good-looking. In addition, where applicable, ControlUp Insights presents global benchmark values for performance and user experience metrics. These metrics are calculated based on anonymize metadata sent to ControlUp Insights from the customers that use this platform

Here are 4 examples reports of Insights:

The report data can be exported as CSV files.

vROPS for Horizon

There are several predefined Horizon reports that can be run or scheduled on regular basis. These reports provide information about remote desktop and application usage, desktop and application pool configuration details, and license compliance. Here are some examples:

The reports aren’t as fancy and interactive as in ControlUp. The reports can be exported as CSV or PDF files.

End User Experience (UX) monitoring

Besides performance metrics User Experience (UX) metrics are very important in a VDI and SBC environment.

ControlUp UX metrics

PCoIP Session bandwidth usage and latency.
Desktop Load Time.
Group Policy Load Time.

Application Load Time.

vROps for Horizon

PCoIP and Blast extreme protocol metrics
Profile Load Time
Shell Load Time

Both products offer UI metrics. The Application Load Time is a new cool feature in ControlUp 6 that measures the time that it takes that an application become available for the end user. This is good indicator for the User Experience.

Supporting End-Users

ControlUp

Besides monitoring and reporting there are other features built-in to support the End-users. The following screenshot show some of these features:

Script-Based Actions (SBA) allows the admin to extend ControlUp functionality. Scripts (either developed internally or by the community and then sanitized by ControlUp before being published), can be written using Batch, VBScript or PowerShell.
These scripts can be used and executed on one or more target computers. This following SBA list the PCoIP bandwidth usage for example

The Application usage report lists the number of concurrent instances and named users for the selected application.

This helps identifying who is using what application(s) and licensing applications.

The “top 10 Windows errors” report shows the most frequently occurring errors on all managed computers. If the error is known, it has a link with a possible solution and how to fix it.

All the errors are benchmarkend against other organizations.

vROps for Horizon

vROps focuses primarily on monitoring and reporting. So no other end-user supporting features are available as in ControlUp. Other unique features are:

Horizon VDI and application pool indicator metrics
Besides PCoIP Blast Extreme protocol metrics are available in vROps for Horizon 6.3
Management Packs. There is a lot (VMware and third party) management packs available such as Virtual SAN and NSX. This improves the end-to-end visibility and monitoring with there own metrics.

Licensing

ControlUp

ControlUp is available as Pro, Enterprise, or Platinum edition. The main differences between these versions are in:

Insights retention data (1 Day for Pro, 1 Month for Enterprise, 1 Year for Platinum)
Multi Tenancy Support (Enterprise and above)
Multi AD support (Enterprise and above)

vROPS for Horizon

vROps for Horizon is licensed as:

standalone product.
Included in the Horizon Enterprise license

Conclusion

In this blogpost I tried to give a impression of both products. ControlUp and VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon are both great products for monitoring and reporting on your Horizon environment. Each products has several pros against the other such as:

ControlUp:

Less infra structure is needed than vROps for Horizon.
Simplicity of the product with an easy learning curve.
Great tool for real-time troubleshooting. Process information is available is real-time.
Pre-defined interactive reports available for troubleshooting and management information.
Offers other functions such as: killing services, Script Based Actions, chatting, managing the file system and registry, application usage, top Windows events etc.

VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon:

Besides the VMware vRealize Operations Horizon management pack, there are other management packs (VMware and third party) available that can be imported in vROps such as the Virtual SAN and NSX management pack. Such components become more and more common in a VMware Horizon environment. Adding these management packs improves the end-to-end visibility and monitoring.
Ability to create personalized dashboards.
vSphere and Horizon Infrastructure related counters such as VDI and Horizon applications pool information.

What product do I need for Horizon environment? This depends on your requirements, use case and what licenses you already have. For example when having a Horizon Enterprise license, vROps for Horizon is included. Even when having a vROps environment, ControlUp adds great value by it’s unique features such as the interactive ControlUp Insights reports and complement vROps.