What features should IT look for in VDI monitoring tools?

VDI monitoring tools can vary significantly, and IT needs to evaluate each tool to ensure it meets the organization's needs.

A virtual desktop environment can be complex. VDI monitoring tools help IT oversee every component to achieve visibility and an understanding of the end-user experience.

When evaluating VDI monitoring tools, IT should examine five categories of functionality:

Insight into VDI layers. An effective monitoring tool should provide insight into all layers of the VDI stack, starting with the infrastructure itself, which includes the components that support the VDI environment, such networking and storage resources. Next come the server environments that host the VDI components, which include the physical servers, the hypervisors running on those servers and the virtual machines. The monitoring tool should have clear visibility into the endpoints and user sessions.

Comprehensive metrics. VDI monitoring tools should produce meaningful and comprehensive metrics and include a wide range of information, such as login performance, protocol latencies, peak usage, network bottlenecks, Active Directory authentication, session durations and hardware resource utilization. The metrics should also include application and workload data, such as memory usage or response times, as well as details about failures, configuration changes or any other metrics necessary to get a complete picture of the VDI environment.

Security information. The tool should collect the metrics necessary to identify potential security issues, such as tracking access to sensitive resources. It should also be able to identify security vulnerabilities and detect potential threats. In addition, the tool should track compliance and privacy issues to ensure an organization is meeting applicable regulations and internal corporate policies.

Centralized management. The monitoring tool should provide a centralized, intuitive dashboard for easily accessing features and data, as well as carrying out monitoring-related operations, with support for point-and-click functionality wherever possible. The product should also provide drill-down capabilities to get more granular information and include a natural-language search feature for quick and easy discovery.

Reporting and alerting. VDI monitoring tools should offer a wide range of preconfigured reports that are comprehensive, customizable, simple to understand and easily accessible. The tool should also include dashboard key performance indicators that provide real-time insights into VDI-related issues and the status of various components. In addition, the tool should support root-cause diagnostics; provide configurable alerting capabilities; and offer actionable insights, optimization recommendations and capacity planning. It should also track historical data to establish baselines and trends and to compare systems at different intervals.