Windows virtual desktop is awesome but you may have come into some challenges
when setting up wvd monitoring there's a lot of moving parts here and it's tough
to know exactly what we should be monitoring in the first place and how we
can leverage that in our environments join the Azure Academy for the next few
minutes and I'm going to show you how to leverage as your monitor and the new wvd
monitoring workbook
I'm Dean Cefola and this is the Azure Academy if you want to master the azure
cloud you can start right now by clicking the subscribe button and the
notification bell so you don't miss anything
now the monitoring story around Windows virtual desktop has kind of been a
piecemeal type solution you had to add a little bit of this that a little bit of
that and put it all together yourself and with feedback from the community as
well as some hard work by a lot of folks around Microsoft we've now got a
workbook put together that will help you to take advantage of all of this great
information that you've been collecting visualize it understand the data and be
able to take action and as always with monitoring you can put all this together
in a dashboard so that you can get the best use out of all of this information
now the details for what we're gonna walk through today are out in the
Microsoft tech community blog and I will have this linked in the description down
below this blog was written by Christiaan brink off who is a Microsoft
global black belt wvd expert and all-around great guy the workbook in
particular that we're diving into today was written by some colleagues of mine
in the fast track team so big shout out to Vanessa Jason and Thomas for their
efforts to the community and with that let's get to work now the main
components of wbd are the host pools the application groups and the workspace and
every one of these items all have diagnostic settings and you need to
configure all of them to be pointing at an azure log analytics workspace and
check all of the boxes over here in the log section so that you can send your
data to log analytics that's step number one now if you have no idea what I'm
talking about then you should go back and watch our video on the new wvd admin
portal and get familiar with the basics here before you step into this video
step number two in the azure monitor under the virtual machines you're going
to have all of your VMs that you have built in your host pools listed here
either in the monitored section or in the not monitored section and if they're
not currently monitored you can do that easily by clicking enable and then you
go through the enable wizard here to set all of that up once they're here in the
monitored section they would have had the
log analytics agent installed onto them you should be able to see all of their
data from the performance tab as well as be able to go to the service map tag and
be able to see what ports and services are being used by your systems step
number three is inside log analytics itself we want to go to the Advanced
section go to data and then the windows performance counters now if you're
unfamiliar with this section of log analytics this is a great way to
customize what information log analytics is capturing from your systems and the
blog post tells you which of these items we need to add so you just copy those
and paste them in here kind of like this at the top and then click our plus
button alternatively you can just type into the box and when you do you can
just click on the particular metric that you are interested in either way once
you get all of those metrics added here you click the Save button at the top and
then you can change their sample intervals as well and the recommendation
for this is 60 seconds and one final prerequisite is over in Azure Active
Directory we scroll down and there is a diagnostic settings here as well and
you've got to have your azure ad logs being sent into log analytics so
whatever options you have here just go ahead and check them select the
particular log analytics workspace and this all should be going to the same
workspace by the way and you just hit save to bring all of your data into log
analytics and with that we're ready to set up our workbook so in the azure
monitor we'll go to our workbooks and we'll go to create a new workbook and at
the top we'll click the advanced code editor button we'll just select
everything that's here and delete it back in our blog we have a section here
for creating the workbook and azure monitor and then there is a link out to
github and this is where we can get the code for the workbook we'll just click
the raw button select everything copy and then back in the portal we'll paste
and hit apply and we'll just select which workspaces we want to have and
click the Save button at the top and we need to give this workbook a name I'll
just call it wbd monitoring workbook and filled out the subscription
resource group and location information and click Save and when you're good to
go with all that you can click done editing so as long as you've got all of
your data set up going into login analytics in less than five minutes
we're able to set up this whole solution now if you've never used an azure
Monitor workbook before what they do is help you to understand and visualize
your data that you already have inside your log Analytics database so the setup
here across the top has your subscription workspace resource group
host pool the particular hosts and the time range in which we are analyzing the
information so if you want to switch between host pools you just have a
drop-down with all of your host pools selected and this is the host pools that
are within this particular resource group that you're looking at and then I
can switch to a pooled host pool now I see all the connections over that
particular pool that 19 sessions have been implemented from the Allentown
area which is where I'm located as well as the average duration by my users in
each of those sessions under the session details section we've got the top hits
for all of our computers and active users which client devices they're
coming from as well as which version of their client and browser that they are
using and on the session Diagnostics screen thankfully most of this data is
empty for me because this is all of the errors and then we have the user
specific reporting now for this one you've got this bubble here for a
username and us type in my user Nova and hit enter and then it will parse that
user against all of the other data and show you the number of connections that
they have over time and then you can scroll down a little more and see which
session host they landed on the IP of that host what kind of client they
connected from what the version was what type of session it was and what they did
on that session so in this case I was running paint or I was running a session
desktop and if we scroll down a little bit more you can see each one of the
sessions and how long that session lasted course mine were relatively short
because I was doing this for testing and then down here is the errors section of
which thankfully again I do not have any back at the top we go to session
performance this is going to look at the hosts that are within the pool we've got
several graphs here for showing processor usage on the host as well as
disk i/o and then the host performance tab show
not only processor but also memory network which hosts are the most active
what the free space is of each of the hosts and then different graphs breaking
down the disk processor memory and network usage then of course if I flip
to a different host pool you can see that the graphs all change instantly to
show you all of that relevant information and this monitoring workbook
will help you in finding all of the important bits of data but it's not your
only tool everything as I said exists inside as your log analytics so in my
log analytics workspace I'm going to go on the left here to my workspace summary
and if you saw our original video on wbd monitoring then you are familiar with
this and these different tiles that are set up through the SAP ago monitoring
agent which you can go check out up here if you miss that and I've pinned some of
these to my dashboard as well and now I'll click the logs button up here at
the top and if you haven't spent a lot of time in log in analytics lately this
will be a new screen for you where we show example queries and over here on
the left if you scroll down a little bit you'll see a few here for desktop
virtualization these are pre-written queries by the product team to help you
to understand the data a little better so if I click on this published
applications used and I just click run you can see it's got the query already
written for me and it's showing me a graphical representation of the data and
you can just mouse over the chart like I have here and you can see that this is
using the new edge browser as well as Microsoft Paint and the quick assist
tool for session shadowing and then if I want to I can change the representation
from a stacked bar chart to something like a pie chart and then when I find
the form that I like I can pin that to my dashboard if you already have a
dashboard in your environment then you'll be able to click the drop down
and select that and if not then you do have the option to build a new dashboard
here but since I've already got one I'll just click apply there's another example
query for your RD client version and the comments at the top here tell you
exactly what's going on this is looking at the Rd client version in the last 24
hours and then you've got the query that's actually processing the data down
below that and the results pane at the bottom and you of course can do all of
this yourself just by writing your own queries for example
here's a query that I wrote that shows how long it took the users to log on to
their sessions we've got a 400 seconds and then in the end the result was that
the connection failed and the client did not connect and underneath that we have
a connection that took 0 seconds and I can expand it to dig into more of the
information which shows that Nova tried to log in to a personal desktop but did
not have a personal desktop assigned to him so the session failed and in order
to know how to do that you've got to start with something which is why under
the queries section on the Left we have all the built-in queries here to help
you to get started to understand out to write cousteau queries and parse the
data and build together for myself a nice dashboard that lets me see visually
all that's going on in the environment because a picture tells a thousand words
and these are all the things that I care about so your dashboard will look
different based on what it is you're interested in monitoring and that's ok
because we all have different requirements so set the monitoring
workbook up in your environment build yourself a dashboard and start making
wvd monitoring easier today I hope this has encouraged you to take a look again
at WBD monitoring definitely necessary to have an enterprise-class solution
like Windows virtual desktop in these work-from-home days and then we
certainly need to monitor and care for that environment so that our users can
keep on doing what they need to be doing and you just need to visualize it and
see what's going on so if you like this video today or learn something new go
ahead and click that thumbs up and just like the journey of a thousand miles
begins with a single step your first step to mastering Azure is clicking
that subscribe button and joining us at the Azure Academy where we try to make
learning a sure fun and engaging and as always everything here is completely
free so that you can learn what you're interested in learning and if you have
any comments on today's video or any requests for new videos go ahead and put
those in the description down below I'd love to hear from you and I'd like you
to keep on learning at the Azure Academy today so over on the right we've got our
latest video that we posted here as well as another one that we picked out just
for you and I think you'll enjoy that very much
thanks for joining us for today's video and we will catch you in the next one
happy learning