Getting started with VDI Experience

Virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) have many layers that can affect user experience. The source of poor performance can be, for example, the endpoint device, its network connection, the data center host, the VM, or the application connectivity. VDI Experience allows you to quickly and accurately identify the origin of performance degradation by showing issues as patterns in the connection, allowing you to drill down to the root cause.

This documentation guides you through preparing your infrastructure and client devices for VDI Experience and shows you how to maximize the benefits of this powerful solution.

Prerequisites for using VDI Experience

Monitoring virtual desktop sessions with VDI Experience requires installing specific components on VMs, client devices, and any integrations you might have. These components are:

• Collector — An endpoint agent that provides the full range of VDI metrics, giving you everything from virtual infrastructure insights to comprehensive information about your Nexthink instance. This agent is intended for company-managed client devices and VMs, and enables comprehensive visibility into user experience.

• VDI Client Extension — A lightweight agent that offers a limited set of metrics. It is designed for personal or self-managed employee devices where full Collector installation is not feasible.

• Inbound connectors — Integration components that allow external systems to send data to the Nexthink platform. Their purpose is to enrich the existing data collected by Nexthink by bringing in additional context from third-party tools or enterprise systems.

The choice of which components to deploy depends on your organization’s infrastructure and internal policies. The following figure shows a simple representation of a typical on-premises hosted VDI infrastructure, indicating which components to install on each node in your virtual infrastructure.

If your VDI infrastructure is cloud-hosted and you do not have on-premises integrations, the following image is more applicable to your setup.

To understand how to install and test each of these components, see the Configuring VDI Experience documentation.

Accessing VDI Experience

VDI Experience is a concept that encompasses solutions focused on monitoring the health, performance, and usability of virtual infrastructures. See the VDI Experience document to learn what this comprehensive collection of solutions includes.

You can access VDI Experience from the following modules:

• Desktop Virtualization — The dedicated module of VDI Experience that acts as the central hub for monitoring virtual experience.

• Live dashboards — Specific dashboards for Citrix VM status monitoring

• Alerts

• Device View

Desktop Virtualization

This dedicated module features two dashboards:

• Session overview

• Session view

To access Desktop Virtualization, navigate to the main menu and select Desktop Virtualization > Sessions:

Citrix VM status monitoring dashboards

These dashboards are part of the preinstalled library packs that come with VDI Experience. They provide a centralized view of your Citrix environment. See the Citrix library packs documentation to learn about Citrix monitoring essentials.

To access the dashboards, select Desktop Virtualization > Virtual machines under Citrix CVAD or Citrix DaaS in the main menu.

Alerts

You can access VDI Experience from Alerts when a monitor detects issues originating from virtual desktops.

See the Use case 4: The monitor detects issues for virtual desktops (VDI) documentation.

Device View

You can access VDI Experience from any session or device list in Device View by selecting a specific device.

See the Device View documentation.

Granting permissions for VDI Experience

To grant proper permissions for VDI Experience as an administrator:

1. Select Administration > Roles from the main navigation panel.

2. Create a New Role or edit an existing role by hovering over it.

3. In the Permissions section, scroll down to the VDI section to enable the appropriate permissions for the role.

View domain impact on VDI Experience-related permissions

The table below shows what users with full and limited View domain access can do, assuming the necessary permissions are enabled.

Getting familiar with VDI Experience

Read the Using Sessions overview and Using Session view documentation to discover how you can use the VDI Experience module to enhance visibility, streamline troubleshooting and ensure a seamless user experience across your virtual desktop environments.

For system administrators, the Configuring VDI Experience page explains how to install and test the different components that enable data collection in the VDI Experience module.