Graphing View sessions

[pieterjanheyse]

Has anyone found a good way to graph the current number of active sessions in View (per Desktop pool?)? I would like to add the kind of graph to our cacti monitoring solution, but don't really know where to start.

Is this data exported through snmp? How can I read this kind of data from a linux server?

[pieterjanheyse]

Can I give this a subtle bomp, to get more attention? Or is this inappropriate here?

[six4rm]

Hey.

Did you ever get anywhere with this at all? I'm looking at doing exactly the same.

I've managed to find an article that uses PowerCLI to pull the total remote sessions out of View and then writes it to a txt file, along with some other stuff. I don't have the URL right now as it's on my work PC. I'm thinking that with some tweaking there must be a way to initiate this from Cacti and then graph the output.

[gunnarb]

I think this post is spot on as far as the forum goes.  I just can't think of something off the top of my head that will get you this info.  Seems very basic but I'm with the guy above, I think you'll have to write a script and pull this information out using PowerCLI.  Should be doable, just not straight forward.

[jftuga]

I see references to a PCoIP management console SNMP MIB via google searches.  Does anyone know where to actually find the MIB itself?  I have used Cacti and have written templates for it.  This mib would be very useful to get started.

Also, I don't think the zero-clients themselves have a SNMP interface.

Thanks,

-John

[gunnarb]

The MIBs are only good on a per VM basis, so if you wanted to see how many VMs where running, you'd basically have to monitor all VMs.  This would not be a recommend approach.

Unfortunately when it comes to the MIBs I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to discuss, so I'll just recommend going to techsupport.teradici.com and see if you can find what you are looking for.

Gunnar

[Linjo]

Have a look at the Windows Performance Counters on the Connection Broker, if anywhere it should be there. (But I am not 100%).

With an VMI-call that should be easy to get into your Cacti-monitoring.

Let me know if you can't find it and I try to get a script togheter for you.

// Linjo

[pieterjanheyse]

I received this link from someone at VMware, http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=768 but did not accomplish the whole cacti thing...

When we get the data, we should be able to get it from a linux box, so there is an extra hurdle to get over there. If you crack the problem, please do give some feedback.

[pieterjanheyse]

Linjo, you are the man!

I check my connection servers and there is a WMI counter for VDM sessions as well as PCOIP gateway sessions. Do you know how I get these counters to a linux box over the network and into cacti?

Maybe a sample script?

Thanks!

[six4rm]

Thanks Linjo, that's pretty interesting. With that in mind I found this - http://erwan.l.free.fr/snmptools/

Not really sure where to start in pulling out the All Sessions counter though.

EDIT:

This looks even easier - http://forums.cacti.net/about27929.html

Running the following command however returns 0 when I currently have 170 sessions showing when monitored via Performance Monitor & View Admin console.

C:\>GetPerfmon.exe 10.100.2.91 "VMware VDM,All Sessions,none,Current Sessions"

Current Sessions:0

I've tried running it on the Connection Server rather than remotely but still get 0 returned.

Damnit, so close!!

EDIT2:

Using typeperf.exe exhibits the same behaviour.

C:\>typeperf "\\10.100.2.91\VMware VDM\All Sessions"

"(PDH-CSV 4.0)","\\10.100.2.91\VMware VDM\All Sessions"

"02/02/2012 10:45:27.827","0.000000"

"02/02/2012 10:45:28.829","0.000000"

"02/02/2012 10:45:29.831","0.000000"

"02/02/2012 10:45:30.852","0.000000"

[six4rm]

I managed to get this working.

I used this template for Cacti, but unfortunately as it uses typeperf it'll only work if your Cacti box is running Windows. - http://docs.cacti.net/usertemplate:data:windows:typeperf

As I mentioned above when I ran typeperf remotely it was returning a value of 0, however I have since discovered that if I run the same typeperf command on the View Connection Server it returns the correct value. That led me to see whether I could run typeperf on the View Connection Server remotely using PSExec, and it worked!

c:\>typeperf "\\VIEWCS\VMware VDM\All Sessions" -sc 1

"(PDH-CSV 4.0)","\\VIEWCS\VMware VDM\All Sessions"

"02/03/2012 10:26:37.824","0.000000"

The command completed successfully.

c:\>PSExec \\VIEWCS typeperf "\VMware VDM\All Sessions" -sc 1

PsExec v1.98 - Execute processes remotely

Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Mark Russinovich

Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

"(PDH-CSV 4.0)","\\VIEWCS\VMware VDM\All Sessions"

"02/03/2012 10:27:30.252","164.000000"

Exiting, please wait...

The command completed successfully.

typeperf exited on VIEWCS with error code 0.

With that in mind I had to edit the script included with the template to use PSExec to launch typeperf on the Connection Server itself. I also realised that the Scheduled Task for the Cacti poller on my Windows box was set to run using the SYSTEM account, so I had to change this to a Domain Admin account for the above to work correctly.

It's all now working, see the attachment.

If anyone would like further information about what I changed in the script give me a shout.

[Peter6343]

We have been experimenting with a modified Host sFlow agent streaming PCoIP performance metrics to a central collector,

http://blog.sflow.com/2012/02/desktop-virtualization.html

The approach scales well and is easy to integrate with tools like Graphite and Ganglia. I am not sure how well this would work for Cacti, since Cacti wants to poll for data.

Peter

[ConstantinLotz]

I've created a Cacti template in combination with a powershell script which fetches the view session data graphing is possible 🙂

Instructions & Download is available @ Cacti Template: VMware View Sessions monitoren ‌in German (but google translate should do it).

Hope this helps you out.
Kind regards,

Constantin

[roneng]

You can use vROPS with Horizon view adapter, to monitor this metric,

it can be done based on pool / connection server / pod.

It depends on your licensing model.

Good luck

[anvr]

VMware Fling 'Horizon Toolbox' very useful and easy to install.