Using Sessions overview
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The Sessions overview dashboard allows you to gain insights into all Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) sessions in your organization. The top-to-bottom arrangement of widgets provides an intuitive solution to quickly identify problematic sessions in your entire virtual infrastructure, giving you the ability to gradually locate the root cause by identifying issue patterns that have developed over time. This progressive approach provides you with all the relevant data needed for effective troubleshooting without overwhelming you with irrelevant information.
Use filters at the top of the dashboard to analyze sessions based on the topology of your environment. Active filters affect all widgets on the dashboard, meaning that only sessions that fall within the scope of every active filter are visible in the widgets and the sessions list.
The system preserves active filters across all tabs.
Use the timeframe picker in the top-right corner to select the time interval you want to investigate. The default timeframe is 4 hours.
Drag the cursor over an area on the timeline to zoom in on a specific period.
The dashboard automatically applies the timeframe selection to the Metrics graph.
The system preserves the selected timeframe across all tabs.
The following tabs are available in the Sessions overview dashboard:
Sessions displays metrics and per-session trends for all VDI sessions to identify issue patterns.
Session map displays an overview of connections between the endpoint devices and VMs.
Executions displays a list of all executions on the VMs in all active sessions.
Connections displays an overview of connections between the VMs and backend systems in all sessions.
The following sections explain the components and functionalities of each tab.
The Sessions overview tab allows you to investigate all active and inactive sessions in your environment.
Use the following filters at the top of the page to view relevant sessions:
Username of the client to focus on a single user
Virtual machine name to which the clients connect
Desktop pool name to which the clients connect
Environment name to which the desktop pools belong
The single-metric gauge chart shows the number of sessions in the selected timeframe, including both active and passive sessions.
The bar chart shows activity across all sessions, broken down into time intervals. Each interval displays only those sessions contained in that time slice. The resolution of the chart is affected by the timeframe picker in the following way:
For a 1-day resolution, set the timeframe as days, up to 30 days.
For a 5-minute resolution, set the timeframe as hours and minutes between 48 hours and 30 days.
For a 30-second resolution, set the timeframe as hours and minutes, up to 48 hours.
Hover over the gauge or chart to see a breakdown of session health percentages as a tooltip. The colors on both the gauge and bar chart indicate the following statuses:
Green indicates periods when the sessions had good health.
Yellow indicates periods when the sessions had average health.
Red indicates periods when the sessions had bad health.
The following sections explain how to use the widgets on this dashboard to narrow down troubleshooting to specific sessions.
Health indicator groups are sets of metrics related to a specific issue that help you identify which session properties need troubleshooting.
You can select the following health groups:
Session health shows how interactions with the session evolved:
Responsiveness shows how fast applications in sessions respond to user input.
Logon duration shows the time it takes for a client to log in to a session.
Client device health shows the hardware load on physical client devices that access the sessions:
Processor shows the CPU usage on endpoint devices.
Network health shows the network connection strength between endpoint devices and VMs:
Remoting latency shows how latency round-trip time (RTT) evolved to detect issues, such as network latency and failed requests.
Virtual machine health shows the hardware load of VMs:
Processor indicates the CPU usage.
Storage indicates the virtual storage usage.
Memory indicates the memory usage.
Select the health group that contains the metrics you wish to investigate to enable detailed metrics analysis.
Select the action menu on a health group to enable filtering. The selected filter is visible in the filter menu at the top of the dashboard. The health group filter also affects the sessions list, meaning only the sessions that fall within the filter's scope are visible in the list.
Once you select a health group, you will see additional widgets, such as metric evolution over time and metric breakdowns.
Default metrics that are a part of the actively selected health group appear as a list on the left side and a graph on the right. Select a metric name to either hide it or make it visible both on the graph and in the segmented list below.
Add additional metrics from outside the selected health group using the drop-down list. Some metrics are visible by default—toggle their visibility by clicking on them.
Use the timeline graph to analyze the metric evolution over time to identify any changes or spikes. The line represents the average metric value for all sessions within the selected filters, while the shaded area shows the minimum and maximum values.
Use the By drop-down list to break down the metrics by specific properties. Select a breakdown to apply it as a filter, which will also be visible in the filter menu at the top of the dashboard.
The session list at the bottom of the page shows all active sessions that fall within the scope of the selected filters.
The list shows the following details about each session:
Session name to which the client is connected; select a session name to access Session view.
Username of the client.
Client device name used by the client.
Device -> Name of the device that is hosting the session; select a device name to access Device view.
State of the session, which is either active or inactive.
Idle duration of the session, which shows how much time has passed since the last client interaction.
Active metrics in the Metrics section are also visible as columns on the right side of the list.
Select a session name to access the Session view dashboard. See the Using Session view section to learn how to examine details of a specific session to assist in troubleshooting.
Select Client device name or Device -> Name to access Device view for the endpoint device or the VM respectively.
The Session map tab gives you a visual representation of the connection between endpoint devices and VMs across all sessions.
Connection issues can occur across different devices, users and destinations. Session map accelerates troubleshooting and helps you identify the appropriate team to fix network-related issues by providing an interactive visualization of session.vdi_events data.
Session map breaks down the selected metrics for session.vdi_events into multiple properties and uses connection paths to display the relationships between properties. Nodes and lines represent these relationships.
The Session map connection paths display four columns by default, allowing you to click on nodes or lines to drill down to lower levels of breakdowns.
To switch from the displayed metrics and begin troubleshooting issues:
Select the Display drop-down above the Session map visualization.
Select one of the available metrics for the particular connection data set.
The thickness of a line, which connects two nodes, is proportional to the metric value between those respective nodes when compared to the same metric values between different nodes in the same two columns.
When viewing issue-related metrics, thick lines help you identify the most problematic areas.
The system sorts nodes in descending order within each column. This makes it likely that thicker lines appear towards the top, but this is not always true.
Session map shows the top eight nodes in each column. If a column has more than eight nodes, the values are aggregated into the Others node at the bottom of the column:
Click on More to open another eight nodes in a column.
Click Less to hide additional nodes.
To facilitate data interpretation, each node is associated with all paths going through it.
Hover over a node or a line to highlight the connection metric value that goes through that node or line.
Session map displays four columns by default. Each column is associated with a hierarchy of fields to reduce the number of nodes shown on the screen.
The following table lists the hierarchy of fields for each column, which goes from general to specific:
AD -> Department
Country location
Virtualization -> Desktop broker
Virtualization -> Hypervisor name
Username
State location
Virtualization -> Environment name
Virtualization hostname
Client device name
VDI session -> Desktop pool
Device -> Name
To drill down on a Session map field, you have the following options:
After clicking on a node or line, navigate back up the hierarchy using the expandable drop-downs in each column heading in Session map.
Select a node to:
Apply a filter for the selected node.
Drill down one level in the column hierarchy.
Select a line to:
Apply a filter for the selected line, which is equivalent to selecting the two nodes it connects.
Drill down one level in the hierarchy of the connected columns.
To navigate back up the hierarchy of the Session map fields after selecting nodes or lines:
Select the drop-down in the Session map column heading.
Select any field name above the current level in the hierarchy.
The Connections timeline displays the selected metric’s development over time. For example, if you select Network RTT, it shows the number of failed connections across the timeframe selected in the timeframe picker.
The timeline is synchronized with the connection paths. When you drill down or up on nodes, the timeline chart updates accordingly.
The Connections timeline is interactive. To focus on a specific period of interest, click and drag your cursor over that timeframe in the timeline.
This action loads both the Session map chart and the timeline for that period, allowing you to analyze connections data during that time.
Currently, dragging to select a period on the timeline does NOT update the timeframe picker at the top of the page. To align the displayed data with the selection in the timeframe picker, click the Reset timeframe button located above the Connections timeline.
See a list of all binary executions on VMs in all active sessions.
Select a device name in the Device -> Name column to access Device view for the specific VM.
Use the contextual action menu to refine your troubleshooting by allowing different data exploration paths.
In the Username, Device -> Name and Binary -> Name columns, select the action menu on the right side of the selected binary to open a new contextual investigation to Retrieve all connected devices, users, or events.
In the Device -> Name and Binary -> Name columns, Diagnose execution crashes or high CPU usage.
In the following columns, select Drill down to in the action menu to open a new contextual investigation to further diagnose issues and remediate them using remote actions:
Username
CPU time
Memory used
Page faults
Incoming traffic
Outgoing traffic
Number of freezes
Use the Invoke Kill Process remote action to shut down a running process. Make sure you complete the following prerequisites:
Install and configure the Kill Process remote action
Obtain the necessary permissions
To shut down a process, select the pertaining binary and open the action menu:
The Connections tab includes a visualization of connection.events data and metrics specific to connections between VMs and backend systems in the sessions.
See the Network view documentation to learn how to uncover network issues with this interactive map and timeline.
