DEX Monitoring for AVD

As more and more companies elect to use Azure Virtual Desktop to host their line of business applications and/or provide full desktop environments for their remote workforce, having a quick and cost-effective way to troubleshoot poor Digital Employee eXperience, or DEX for short, is critical. In this article, we discuss our approach to DEX monitoring for AVD, and also discuss how our solution provides many more features than Azure Virtual Desktop insights at a much lower total cost.

Key Factors That Impact DEX in AVD

We’re sure you’ve received the support desk ticket – an employee in your organization is complaining that their AVD desktop or RemoteApp is slow, laggy, or otherwise unreliable. However, a user can seldom articulate the true problem to any level of meaningful detail. What they are trying to convey is an issue in one of the following areas that is impacting their productivity (e.g. their DEX), and it’s now up to you to figure out which one or two are causing the greatest problems. Specifically, is the issue related to:

• High latency between their client endpoint and the AVD host they’ve been brokered on to in a particular Azure region?
• High RDP packet loss and packet retransmission between their client and the AVD host?
• Lack of UDP connectivity between client and host?
• High user input delay when they interact with applications on the session host, caused by things like slow returning database queries, under resourced Azure Files hosting FSLogix user profile disks, or Azure file shares hosting small files with poor SMB performance?
• Too many users being brokered on to a single host, in turn generating high context switching and high privilege CPU times due to OS multitasking (aka thrashing)?
• Service applications running on the AVD host that are periodically using high resources and “slowing down” their line of business applications?
• Client-side network issues, specifically poor or weak WiFi signals on the end users home network, or their local router dropping packets?
• Client-side endpoint issues, specifically is the end user’s PC experiencing high CPU, high memory, or high disk/network IO, that is impacting the responsiveness of the AVD client application?
• Frequent disconnections/drops, related to high jitter, poor routing, or upstream router issues?

As you’re starting to realize, unless you have a specialized tool that can quickly and clearly zero in on the actual cause of poor digital employee experience (DEX), your end users will remain frustrated and your support ticket count will stay elevated.

How RDPSoft Monitors DEX in AVD

Our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution is a highly affordable way to quickly pinpoint the root causes of poor DEX in AVD. Starting at only $14.99 USD per monitored AVD multi-session host per month, or $155.99 USD per monitored AVD multi-session host per year, it ships with a specialized DEX Dashboard that is custom designed for RDS, AVD, and Parallels RAS deployments. Most significantly, it lets you review both historical DEX metrics it collects AND lets you observe a live AVD user session to see what is happening in real time when a user interacts with applications. And we’re not joking about the observability features – you can both watch critical DEX metrics by themselves, OR, coupled with our Premium Management Features product, you can shadow their user session AND watch their DEX metrics in a sub-window. How cool is that?

If you suspect the problem instead relates to the client’s PC, or the client’s home network, you can send them a lightweight applet to run on their PC which, after just a quick double click, installs our specialized libraries that work with the Windows App AVD client to send diagnostic data upstream to the AVD host, where our DEX dashboard can display it to you. With the RDPSoft Client Side Diagnostics applet installed on their PC, now you can review client metrics like WiFi signal strength, CPU, memory, disk/network IO, jitter, differential traceroutes between AVD gateways and other points on the Internet, disconnect reasons, and much more.

Yet, sometimes a user doesn’t raise a support ticket right away and chooses to complain several days after the fact about poor user experience. In this scenario, it is important to be able to summon historical DEX data from the time period in question, and that DEX data must be granular and individualized enough to be useful for troubleshooting. Fortunately, our DEX dashboard for AVD sessions meets that goal, as you can review data like latency, user input delay, packet loss, and AVD host load around the time of the issue. With our host-side agent deployed, you can also dive deeper pinpoint which users (or services) were also on the AVD host at the time of the problem, and the level of resources those other users and processes were using.

How We Monitor AVD Digital Employee Experience Differently Than Azure Virtual Desktop Insights with Azure Log Analytics

As you may be aware, Microsoft does provide some monitoring dashboards natively for AVD like Azure Virtual Desktop Insights. These are generally basic in scope, highlighting statistic outliers (e.g. users with high latency or similar types of data). The challenge with this approach to monitoring is that requires storing the collected performance counters and event log data into Azure Log Analytics. Azure Log Analytics is priced based on the amount of data ingested, retention durations, and other factors. The more granular and more frequently you want to collect the data for the reporting, the more money you pay.

For instance, Microsoft’s own article on the subject indicates that even with monitoring of very basic performance counters, such as user input delay, latency, session counts, and related event logs, a single session host can easily generate 3 to 5 GBs of data a month. That’s easily $12 per month in retention costs alone per session host. And it doesn’t give you much of the more granular information you need for troubleshooting, such as per-process impact on memory and CPU usage, per-user impact on memory and CPU usage, etc.

Similarly, these dashboards primarily work on historically collected data, as compared to monitoring a “live” session to see what the user is experiencing that instant.

When troubleshooting a digital employee experience issue in AVD in an attempt to determine the root cause, it is vital to collect more granular sets of data historically, and you must have an option for live monitoring as well, which often reveals problems that historically sampled data may miss.

In contrast to Azure Virtual Desktop Insights, our Remote Desktop Commander Suite confers many advantages for the AVD admin. Specifically:

• We support Microsoft SQL (or Azure SQL) as our data storage backend, and we have multiple configuration options for retention of different classes of data, the ability to disable collection of certain metrics you are not interested in, the ability to change the polling cadence, and automatic database tuning.
• Our software ships with SQL Express 2025, which supports database sizes of up to 50 GBs. Using Azure Log Analytics, you would be paying nearly $115 per month just in ingestion costs for 50 GBs, or approximately 10 session hosts’ worth of monthly data. With SQL Express 2025, there are no costs for ingestion and no costs for SQL licensing, making it a perfect option for AVD environments between 1 to 20 hosts.
• For larger AVD environments, you can leverage Azure SQL or SQL Server Standard (with a 2 vCore minimum) for approximately $1800 a year. In this scenario, your retention and database size is only limited based on the amount of storage you want to allocate to the VM hosting SQL. That is orders of magnitude less expensive than paying for ongoing Azure Log Analytics ingestion costs. We also offer promotional discounts to help you defray some of your SQL costs for larger environments – just ask us about them!
• Our Remote Desktop Commander Suite’s DEX dashboard for AVD also provides real time monitoring of AVD user sessions, providing the ability to watch the user’s session while observing key performance counters, and also being able to summon extremely granular historic data from the user’s previous sessions.
• At $14.99 per monitored AVD host per month, with volume discounts available, the Remote Desktop Commander Suite provides a feature set well in excess of Azure Virtual Desktop Insights. For instance, active session management features are included (logout, improved shadowing, drain mode operations), over 100 reports are available in many different categories which can be run manually or scheduled, and detailed user activity monitoring features are included as well.
• Similarly, starting at only $26.99 per monitored AVD host per month, you can have access to all 5 of our commercial tools, providing additional features like synthetic RDP login monitoring of AVD hosts, automatic remediation of locked FSLogix profile disks and frozen, hung, or black-screened AVD sessions, delegation of AVD session management tasks to non-admins, and much more.
• Our monthly subscription models make it easy to do limited time troubleshooting with no long-term commitment, and our annual subscription models allow you make our solutions a continuous part of your AVD monitoring and management stack. This flexibility helps both MSPs and business who manage their own AVD infrastructure.

Ready to Start Monitoring Digital Employee Experience in AVD?

It’s easy to get started. You can take one of the following paths to begin:

• Request a Zoom demo or a quote from our sales team prior to purchase, or
• Start a monthly subscription to either the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, or our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for EUC.

We love talking to our customers, so you can also call-in during business hours to chat with a sales representative. Call 1-855-738-8457 x1 inside the US, or 1-702-749-4325 x1 internationally, and we’ll answer all of your questions.