This article provides steps for accessing the Aria (formerly vRealize) Operations Management Pack for Horizon, a high level introduction to the Management Pack, and a walkthrough of various dashboards.
Before You Begin
In order to access the end to end demo please ensure you have the following:
- A valid account in the VMware TestDrive environment, sign up here if you don't yet have an account.
- A valid VMware Cloud Services account, sign up here if you don't yet have an account.
Additionally, if you will be launching your own Horizon desktop and/or application sessions in TestDrive to monitor in Aria Operations, please ensure the following:
- Network access from your device and TCP ports 80, 443, 4172, 8443 and UDP ports 443, 4172, 8443 enabled.
- Latest Horizon Clients installed, available via direct download here.
- Detailed instructions for launching Horizon desktops and applications in TestDrive can be found at in the Digital Workspace > Horizon section of the TestDrive Walkthrough Guides site.
TestDrive Portal Login
Open a new Chrome Incognito browser window and navigate to the TestDrive Portal at https://portal.vmtestdrive.com/login
Login with your TestDrive credentials.
Enable VMware Aria Operations Product Tile
Once you've logged in, select Digital Workspace under My Products. Then scroll down to VMware Aria Operations and click the Enable Product button.
Enabling Status
Allow a few minutes for the product to be enabled. During this time, your VMware Cloud Services Console (CSP) Account is being added to the Cloud Services organization for the TestDrive environment.
After a few minutes, you will receive emails from VMware Cloud Services that confirm your roles have been added.
NOTE: You must have your own VMware Cloud Services account before proceeding with the next steps. This account is completely separate from your TestDrive account.
If you do not have a VMware Cloud Services account, the email you receive will contain a link named JOIN VMWARE CLOUD SERVICES. Please follow the link to create your Cloud Services Account OR go to https://console.cloud.vmware.com/ and choose the option "Create Your VMware Account".
Also, your Cloud Services account will be active in the organization for 30 days. If you receive an email that your account has been removed from the organization and you still need access, you can re-enable your access in the Aria Operations product tile, as mentioned in the the previous steps.
Expand Enabled Product Tile
After your Aria Operations access has been enabled, click the product tile to expand it, then click on the Launch button.
Cloud Services Console User Login
Enter YOUR OWN email address of your VMware Cloud Services account, then hit Next.
Cloud Services Console User Password
Enter the password for your VMware Cloud Services account, then hit Sign In.
After login, in the upper right corner, make sure the Organization is set to Global Platform Engineering. If it is set to VMware, Inc. or any other Organization (depending on your Cloud Services account, you might have access to multiple Cloud Services Organizations), you must change it to Global Platform Engineering in order to see the VMware Aria Operations Cloud service.
Management Pack for Horizon Demo Flow
- Recommended starting Dashboard is the Horizon World User Performance.
- Next click on a User to show the new Horizon User Summary Page and available metrics.
- Next demo the Horizon World VDI Session Performance Dashboard.
- Next demo the Horizon User Troubleshooting Dashboard for targeted user troubleshooting.
- Hi-level touch on the the other OOB dashboards, demo any relevant to customer use cases.
Horizon World User Performance | Demo Video
This dashboard provides a distribution breakdown of the performance of all Horizon Users by the User Performance metric and by KPI category (CPU, Disk, Memory, Protocol). It allows an Administrator to see the related VDI sessions that are impacted by the performance issues, as well provides alerts and KPI breakdown of the performance metrics impacting the User and Horizon Session(s).
Horizon World User Performance: Design Consideration
To provide a global view into User Performance across the Horizon deployment, and to quickly identify KPIs and Alerts impacting the performance of the user.
Horizon World User Performance: How to Use
The Horizon World and Horizon User Scoreboard widgets provide a quick glance into the overall performance issues impacting the users from both a Datacenter and Network Protocol perspective. These widget can be used to show current overall performance, as well how the performance is trending over time.
Horizon World User Performance: How to Use (continued)
Horizon Users with degraded performance can easily be identified in the User Performance KPI and Worst Performing KPI widgets using single User Performance KPI metric (Worst KPI (%)).
Horizon World User Performance: How to Use (continued)
Clicking a distribution from the doughnut chart will allow and administrator to see the users within the performance KPI bucket. Selecting a user within the widget will update the User Object Relationship and display the Horizon Sessions for that User. The critical Performance KPIs and alerts on the User object will be displayed in the corresponding widgets.
Horizon World User Performance: How to Use (continued)
If the user has one or more active Sessions, you can select the individual sessions in the Object Relationship widget to see the specific KPIs and Alerts impacting the user’s individual sessions. You can also navigate the Object Relationship widget for to other Horizon objects (Pools, Farms, Pods, etc.) to see the relevant KPIs for those objects as well.
Inactive or Disconnected sessions will be displayed with a Grey Box or not have an associated VM or RDS Host.
Horizon World User Performance: How to Use (continued)
Any KPIs that are not green (yellow, orange, red) are considered to have a performance impact on the User and their corresponding sessions. Additional supporting KPIs are provided for additional performance analysis, but may not have configured color thresholds.
All KPI thresholds available in the widget may be adjusted directly in the widget’s edit section.
Additionally, administrators can also visually the global User performance per KPI Distribution (Protocol or DC), and select the underperforming users from the additional widgets to begin their root cause analysis.
Horizon World User Performance: Points to Note
The users KPI score is an aggregated KPI of multiple performance impacting metrics (CPU, Disk, Memory, Protocol), and the score reflected will be directly impacted by the number of sessions the user has and how many of them are experiencing issues.
The performance KPI widgets are currently configured to change color based on symptoms from the defined Alerts, but they can be set to hard coded values by editing the widget.
Horizon World VDI Session Performance
This dashboard provides a distribution breakdown of the performance of all Horizon VDI Sessions by Pods and Pools based on the Datacenter KPI and Network KPI metrics. It allows an Administrator to see the performance of related VDI sessions that are impacted by the performance issues, as well provides alerts and KPI breakdown of the performance metrics impacting the Horizon VDI Session(s).
Horizon World VDI Session Performance: Design Consideration
To provide a global view into VDI Session Performance across the Horizon deployment by Pod and by Pool, and to quickly identify KPIs and Alerts impacting the performance of the VDI Session.
Horizon World VDI Session Performance: How to Use
The Horizon World Performance and Horizon Session Scoreboard widgets provide a quick glance into the overall performance issues impacting the VDI Sessions from both a Datacenter and Network Protocol perspective. These widget can be used to show current overall performance, as well how the performance is trending over time.
Horizon World VDI Session Performance: How to Use (continued)
Horizon Pods with degraded performance can be viewed by their Datacenter KPI(%) and Network KPI (%) in the Pod DC Performance and Pod Network Performance widgets. By selecting a distribution performance bucket and selecting a Pod from the available list, the dashboard will update to provide a quick distribution analysis of all related KPIs and alerts, and break down the performance impact by pool in the Pool DC and Pool Network Performance widgets, as well as provide a breakdown of the KPI types (Protocol, CPU, Disk, Mem) for that pod .
Horizon World VDI Session Performance: How to Use (continued)
The Pool Performance Widgets are designed to highlight specific pools that may be having performance issues within a particular category, Datacenter or Network Protocol. Simply select a performance distribution bucket to see the Pools that fall within the selected range, and select an individual pool for further analysis. The dashboard will update to provide a quick distribution analysis of the selected pool by Trending KPIs, Alerts, and full KPI breakdown (Protocol, CPU, Disk, Memory).
Horizon World VDI Session Performance: How to Use (continued)
To continue the analysis, you can select a specific KPI widget to determine which sessions are having issues and select a VDI session to perform a quick analysis of all impacting KPIs.
Horizon World VDI Session Performance: Points to Note
The dashboard is designed so that any distribution will update relevant sections of the dashboard and provide the associated object analysis.
The Datacenter % and Network % KPI’s are a combination of multiple performance metrics (CPU, Disk, Memory, Protocol), and the score reflected will be directly impacted by the total number of sessions and performance issues measured in the Horizon environment.
The performance KPI widgets are currently configured to change color based on symptoms from the defined Alerts, but they can be set to hard coded values by editing the widget.
If you only have a single or small number of pods, you can remove the Pod distributions, so that only the Pool performance widgets are shown. Their configuration will need to be updated to so that they are a self-provider, and the Input Data Object should be set to Horizon World.
Horizon User Troubleshooting
Provides a User search functionality and allows for quick root cause analysis as to performance issues impacting a users Horizon sessions.
Horizon User Troubleshooting (continued)
In addition, a User performance distribution and Top analysis of all Horizon users is provided to quickly identify users with performance issues, and provides a KPI breakdown by performance category (CPU, Disk, Memory, Protocol). Allows you to see the related VDI sessions that are there.