At the end of March 2021, Azure Monitor for Windows Virtual Desktop went GA. It will provide a dashboard built on Azure Monitor Workbooks that gives you insides of your Windows Virtual Desktop environment, including; Connection Diagnostics, Connection Performance, Host Diagnostics, Host Performance, Utilizations, Users, Clients and Alerts.
In this blog post I will guide you step-by-step how to enable monitoring for Windows Virtual Desktop.
Requirements
Make sure you have the following in place before you start with Azure Monitor for Windows Virtual Desktop.
- A Windows Virtual Desktop environment up-and-running
- Rights for creating and configuring a Log Analytics Workspace in Azure
In this blog
In this blog I will cover the following steps.
- Create a Log Analytics Workspace
- Enable Windows Virtual Desktop monitoring
- Adding new VMs to the existing Azure Monitor
Step 1 : Create a Log Analytics Workspace
To enable Azure Monitor for Windows Virtual Desktop, an Azure Log Analytics Workspace is required. It is highly recommended to use a designated Log Analytics Workspace for your Windows Virtual Desktop environment. The reason behind this is that performance counters and event logs will be configured within the Log Analytics Workspace. The data from this performance counters and event logs will be collected from every VM connected to this database. To avoid collecting unnecessary data in the Log Analytics Workspace, connect only the VMs used for Windows Virtual Desktop.
To create the Log Analytics Workspace, login the Microsoft Azure Portal and open the Log Analytics Workspaces blade.
Click the + Create button
Select your Subscription and the Resource group. Give the Log Analytics Workspace a Name and select the Region you want to use.
Click Review + Create
Click Create
After the deployment, open the created Log Analytics Workspace. Open the Usage and estimated costs tab and click Data Retention.
Here you can indicate how long you want to store the data in the Log Analytics Workspace. By default this is 30 days, but you can increase this to a maximum of 730 days. Keep in mind that the costs for the Log Analytics Workspace will increase as you increase the amount of days.
Step 2 : Enable Windows Virtual Desktop monitoring
The next step is to enable Windows Virtual Desktop monitoring. Open the Windows Virtual Desktop blade in the Microsoft Azure Portal.
Open the Insights tab (1) and select the Host Pool (2) which you want to enable monitoring. Click Open Configuration Workbook (3).
On the Resources diagnostic settings page, select the just created Log Analytics Workspace (1) and click Configure host pool.
Click Deploy.
After the deployment, click Configure workspace.
Click Deploy
After the deployment, open the Session host data settings tab (1) and select the Log Analytics Workspace again. This will connect the VMs from the Host Pool with the Log Analytics Workspace. Click Add hosts to workspace.
Click Deploy
If this is your first Host Pool you enable for Windows Virtual Desktop monitoring in this Log Analytics Workspace, you need to add the performance counters and events first. To do so, click Configure performance counters.
Click Apply Config
After the deployment, scroll down and click Configure events.
Click Deploy.
After this deployment Azure Monitor is enabled for Windows Virtual Desktop. If you want to enable monitoring for more Host Pools and Workspaces you need to repeat the previous steps (Step 2). If you go back to the Windows Virtual Desktop blade and open the Insights tab (1) you can see the dashboard. In the first row (step 2 in screenshot) you can select the Host Pool and in row 2 (step 3 in screenshot) you can select which data you want to display.
Step 3 : Adding new VMs to the existing Azure Monitor
When you deploy new session host VMs to your Host Pool after you have enabled the logging, you also need to add them to the Log Analytics Workspace.
When opening the Insights tab after you have added new session host VMs, a message will be displayed as you can see in the screenshot above. To add the new VMs, click Configure workbook.
Open the Session host data settings tab and click Add hosts to workspace.
Click Deploy.
After this deployment, the new session hosts VMs are also connected to the Log Analytics Workspace.