In today’s blog we are going to learn about managing the AVD end user experience and infrastructure monitoring using NexThink. Before we get into the AVD monitoring capabilities of NexThink, let us talk for a minute to understand what is NexThink?
NexThink is an end user experience monitoring software with analytics and automation capabilities. Many organizations are using NexThink as their preferred end user monitoring software. NexThink works in a Client-Server architecture where the data from nexthink agent(termed as NexThink collector) is lively gathered by the NexThink Portal and Engine situation in either NexThink SaaS cloud or in customer’s datacenter.
What all NexThink can do for AVD?
- Gather properties of AVD session host including hardware information, system drives, free space, logged in user etc.
- Capture AVD Session Host performance including user interactions, CPU, and I/O throughput, software installs, user level execution, system warnings etc.
- Session Host registration status
- Host pool details, resource group details etc.
- Intelligent auto heal/self-heal on session hosts
- Gather End user sentiments via targeted campaigns
Licensing requirement
NexThink comes with two different licenses for end point devices, desktop and server licenses. In order to monitor Windows 10 /Windows 11 multi session desktops, the customer need to purchase server licenses as NexThink detects multi session OS as server OS.
NexThink Agent requirement
No specific configuration change is required to support Windows 10/Windows 11 multi session desktops. The same workstation agent will work on multi session desktops.
Session Host Properties
NexThink console will display the properties of the session host including the hardware details, domain details, startup details, local drives status and security overview. The below diagram shows the granular information displayed by
Timeline view
Timeline view is an excellent option in NexThink to determine the activities happened during a particular time period.
For example, users in a session host complains extreme slowness at 10:14 AM local time and the admin can easily find out the activities happened during that time slot using NexThink timeline view. It provides information about any software crashes, top CPU and Memory consumed processes, active user interactions etc. The below diagram shows a particular software installation activity happened during a particular time frame which caused the slowness in the system.
The below diagram shows the CPU activities happening during the particular timeslot.
The other cool feature of NexThink is the one click investigations. You will be able to get the device errors, warnings generated in a session host using the one click investigation. Using the deep dive console you can go to granular level of logging. The below diagram shows an example of one click investigation to find the device warnings.
The one-click investigations and nexthink alerts can be configured to find out the historical logon duration for a user specific to a device or to a group of devices. The below diagram shows the logon duration of my historical logon performance.
NexThink’s built in intelligence will auto suggest the actions need to be performed to find out issues respective to user/device. In the below diagram NexThink automatically suggesting the key investigations which can be performed against a device/user.
Remote actions (Self Heal Automation)
NexThink has an out of the box remote action which captures the session host registration status, host pool details. You can target the remote action to all the AVD session hosts and schedule the script to execute every 15-30minutes to capture the real state of the session hosts. The below diagram shows the result of a remote action extracted from AVD session hosts.
Alerting using NexThink
NexThink can be used to alert the admin or create an ITSM incident if any abnormalities has been observed. For example, we can alert the admins if the AVD session hosts are showing “unregistered”. The below example shows a custom alert created to alert the administrators via email to find session hosts which are showing as unregistered.
NexThink campaigns(User surveys) & Dashboard
NexThink can be used to do targeted end user campaigns. The Admin can send campaigns to gain the user sentiments and can be used against in measuring the success of AVD deployments. The below diagram shows an example of end user campaign sent to an AVD user.
The campaigns can be even targeted to a remote action or an alert. For example, if user is facing issues with AVD performance we can target those users and send customized campaign to confirm the user performance issues. The below diagram illustrates a custom campaign send to users who are facing performance issues.
Dashboards
NexThink provides cool dashboard’s which shows the hard metrics and soft metrics. The AVD dashboard provides the summary of AVD Session hosts not registered and also shows the customer sentiments.
NexThink can do more granular level of end user monitoring. Hope you have like this blog. Please feel free to drop your comments and queries.
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