5 Ways Real-Time VDI Performance Monitoring

Saves Admin Time

Xangati Blog

Atchison Frazer Vice President, Marketing

April 7, 2015

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According to a recent report by IDC, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best

Practice Metrics Quantified,” the average number of application deployments per month is expected

to double in two years and the average cost percentage (per year) of a single application’s

development, testing, deployment and operations lifecycle considered wasteful and unnecessary is

25 percent.

Virtualization admins and DevOps professionals have the opportunity to collaborate around the

same set of data from a single reliable source that automates the way in which infrastructure

performance can be predicted and future capacity planning allocated. Here are five really good ways

to save time with an IPM or infrastructure performance management system like Xangati that is

optimized for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.

Remote Office Monitoring: Communication issues between remote office thin clients and central

resources can be very difficult to trace with retrospective tools. Real-time views within the IPM can

be used to see if there are any changes in behaviour between elements that might be affecting

performance. And, IPMs can validate there is not another interaction with the server affecting

performance, for example, an unscheduled back-up occurring in the middle of the day or LAN-to-

LAN latency.

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Customer Loyalty Applications: Most customer loyalty apps that run on a mobile client are

virtualized, thus the desktop or endpoint is the smartphone. A major issue in brick and mortar retail is

how to harness the concept of ‘showrooming’ to channel your own sales rather than a competitor’s

solely based on price. Thus, the zero-moment purchase decision spurred by a mobile customer

loyalty app must not suffer from latency or degradation, ideally measured in seconds-by-seconds.

With an IPM, you can instantly identify storms tied to back-end storage, and to what degree that is

impacting database servers that support the app.

Multi-platform Healthcare Applications: Medical professionals are required to access virtualized

applications several times a day, as much as 30 times or more, on a plethora of multiple platforms,

not just one fixed device or desktop. If the initial logon time exceeds 30 seconds and the reconnect

times accumulate at 15 seconds or more each time, the productivity drain and inhibition to speedily

care is palatable for all medical professionals, especially highly compensated specialty physicians.

Properly provisioned IPMs can not only track the login, app-open and reconnect times, but they can

also measure the precise latency intervals between each and pinpoint exact locations that suffer

degradation outside the stated services levels, and offer automate remediation action.

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Network Physical Infrastructure: Given that everything that’s virtualized runs off an underlying

physical infrastructure, networking layer optimization is a key element to ensuring optimal VDI

performance. Poor and unpredictable performance over wide area networks (WANs), can directly

affect employee productivity in terms of access times to VDI resources. Additionally, if provisioning

more hardware or higher bandwidth consumption is the answer, ensure that you’re not reducing VDI

user density and increasing solution costs. Additionally, increased use of media-rich applications,

and limitations of virtual desktop display technologies, adds to the risk of user dissatisfaction. IPMs

that take into account all functional components of the virtual infrastructure, including VMs and

physical assets, are able to save you time, rather than having to peer into each siloed management

console whether it be networking, or server/compute.

Security Policy and Control: Clearly a key market driver in moving away from physical equipment

is the desire to uniformly manage security policy and IS control, which includes the goals of

mitigating risk to data loss and leakage (moving off of the PC/HDD paradigm), managing security

and policy management at the VM level, and transitioning from the PC hardware refresh, legacy,

break/fix cycle.

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How IPMs can help you save time is by satisfying the universal need for granular data, through

analyzing anomalous activity or behavioral characteristics, to determine compliance to corporate

security and policy management standards – at a virtual machine level – while minimizing the threat

of untrusted user security actions by relying upon more predictive analytics that help identify and

manage the possibility of failure domains in a virtual environment.

Adopting VDI can certainly help reduce equipment and maintenance refresh or upgrade costs, while

providing greater controls over IT operation and capital expenditures, and at the same time,

embracing a BYOD orthodoxy. However, to ensure end-user quality of experience so that time is not

wasted waiting around for virtual desktops to load or virtual applications to open, or to ensure that

virtualization admins are not caught between silos draining productivity with bottleneck-guesswork at

best, deploy sophisticated IPMs like Xangati to realize the time-saving benefits of the most

comprehensive amount of fast, meaningful performance data.

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