When you are troubleshooting or when you have a life environment. It is important that your environment is performing well. We would say “Measuring is Knowing”. Some of the most commonly used monitoring tools for VDI out there are:
- ControlUp: Is specialized in monitoring IT Virtualization products. It is a very impressive product, designed to help the VDI SysAdmins understand their environment.
- Uberagent: Initially created by @HelgeKlein one of the EUC community members with an impressive knowledge about anything VDI. Uber agent is a Splunk agent for end-user computing.
- eG Innovations: A more general monitoring tool, but well known and appreciated within the EUC community.
- Lakeside Software: Monitoring, quantifying and analyzing end-user experience.
- Other more general tools like Microsoft SCOM, PRTG, Zabbix, …
But what help is it to have a wonderful measuring/monitoring tool if you don’t understand what those figures actually mean. Below I list some of the more important and interesting metrics when it comes to a well performing Virtual Desktop:
User Experience
These are 2 Citrix metrics. In short:
- ICA Latency is your network. How long does a package take to travel between your Endpoint (Citrix Workspace App) and your VDA.
- ICA RTT is your network + the application: The application takes it processing time to show something on the screen, this delay is added to the ICA Latency to give a number in milliseconds that a user is waiting for a return on his/her screen.
And since Windows 2019 / Windows 10 1809 there is also a Microsoft Metric:
- User Input Delay, which is the amount of time any user input (such as mouse or keyboard usage) stays in the queue before it is picked up by a process, and the counter works in both local and remote sessions.
- It is important to know that this will not work out of the box. You need to enable the performance counter through a registry update and a reboot.
Some very good, detailed explanations can be found:
https://www.controlup.com/controlup-automation-user-input-delay-vs-citrix-ica-round-trip-time-rtt/