Monitoring Applications Running in Virtual Desktop Environments

Understanding Real End User Experience in Virtual Environments with Aternity

Virtualization is a key disruptive technology for IT requiring radical changes in thinking and operating procedures to better plan, manage, provision and orchestrate resources throughout the enterprise. In an environment where traditional system metrics, such as CPU, memory and network utilization, are marginal indicators of performance, user experience becomes the only quantifiable measurement to manage against.

Using fact-based assessments to empirically understand the resources required to support multiple users, each running a variety of different applications across virtual desktop servers, greatly improves an organization’s ability to choose the best virtualization solution for their needs.

A strategy that combines experiential-based virtualization assessment and planning, together with real-time performance deviation detection, promotes optimization of guest virtual machine mappings in VDI scenarios.  This ultimately creates a dramatic agility boost for adding new applications and desktops to the VDI pool.  In addition, such a strategy can also significantly reduce the hardware and management costs typically associated with manual or semi-automatic resource allocation.

Application Performance Monitoring for the Virtual Desktop

Because virtualization essentially disrupts the traditional relationships among PC hardware, the client operating system, and desktop applications, it’s crucial that enterprises understand how to plan for and support this emerging environment.  IT and Line of Business (LOB) management need precise, comprehensive metrics describing real end user experience, before and after going “virtual”, in order to support strategic desktop virtualization and consolidation decisions.  To do so, enterprises will require a comprehensive Frontline Performance Intelligence solution that offers these four key capabilities:

• Ubiquitous Application Coverage for performance monitoring of packaged and/or custom Thick Client, Web/HTTP, Rich Internet (RIA), Java and .NET applications running in a virtualized desktop environment.
• Comprehensive Performance Metrics for every business process running in a virtualized environment, including response time, throughput, latency, and end-to-end transaction time, from the end users’ perspective.  This translates into the ability to capture application performance metrics associated with each ICA or RDP session published from a VDI-based server, including identifying all the servers that a specific End Point is connected to, identifying the connected End Points of a particular server, and associating the specific processes serving an End Point session on each server.
• Application Usage and User Productivity for gaining in-depth insight into end user application usage, usability, and quality of service, as well as user productivity.
• Advanced Real-time Analytics and Correlation of virtual desktop, application, and user performance metrics.  This enables preemptive problem detection and probable cause analysis across all three primary components of user experience.  In addition, enterprises are able to immediately isolate impacted users and their associated virtualized desktops, while also being able to differentiate between the affected users and the affected service consumers.

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