vRealize for Horizon - Report resource usage based on user?

[alsmk2]

I'm hoping someone could shed some light on whether it is possible to extract info / a report that shows utilisation of a VM based on user?

In a non-persistent environment I'm finding that the inbuilt Horizon reports & dashboards are pretty useless at doing anything other than help diagnose logon process issues. What I really want to see is data related to a particular user to ascertain if there is resource contention or stress based on the desktops they have used over a period of time (I.E. properly identify and group users who may need a desktop with more or less resource assigned, and modify pools and entitlements accordingly). As it stands, I can only see a way to look at the environment from a VM object level.

The various reports/ alerts/ dashboards may say that a VM has shown stress / contention over the course of a few days, but without any noticeable way to see what users accessed that desktop at what times.

I'm sure the metric are probably already there - any help on how to extract them would be grand

[dtaliafe]

As far as I know there isn't a good way to do this in a non-persistent environment.  I think you're right about it being more useful overall in persistent desktop environments. You've probably seen that there are some resource metrics (CPU, memory, disk) for the VDI Desktop Session objects.  With a persistent desktop this will show the workload for that particular user on that desktop over time. The Horizon adapter creates a new VDI Desktop Session for each user and desktop combination. In a non-persistent environment where the user gets a new desktop every time they login a new VDI desktop session is created every logon.  I don't know of a good way to tie the metrics from all those sessions together.  You could create an alert for the VDI Desktop sessions and see if you frequently get an alert for the same users.  I haven't upgraded to the 6.4 version of the Horizon adapter so there might be something new there, but I don't recall seeing anything related to this.

[alsmk2]

Thanks for the response - that's pretty much as I expected.

The alerts suggestion is a good shout, though not ideal, as it involves more effort and attention to find trends based on users.

It would be nice to see more attention paid to metrics that are collected on a user basis in the future. I'm sure the majority of deployments are now based around non-persistent pools, so it would make sense to collate stats based on users over time, as well as desktops.