This dashboard gives an overall performance of the compute components of Desktop as a Service. It shows performance problems related to vSphere clusters such as high contention and low utilization. This dashboard is designed for the Horizon and vSphere teams, with the goal of fostering close collaboration between the two teams.

This dashboard is a superset of the vSphere Cluster performance dashboards in terms of functionalities, but only lists clusters that are used by Horizon.

Design Consideration

This dashboard combines the data from the vSphere Cluster Contention dashboard and the vSphere Cluster Utilization dashboard into a single dashboard, and adds Horizon objects such as VDI Pool and RDS Farm. It lets you traverse the vSphere and Horizon as one integrated component of your Desktop as a Service platform.

Both CPU and Memory are shown separately. You can have one problem at a time, but not the other. CPU problems tend to be more common than memory problems due to the lower overcommit ratio in the memory.

How to Use the Dashboard

Review the heat map at the top of the dashboard.

  • It shows all the vSphere cluster and only shows clusters that are part of Horizon.

  • Expect all of them to be in the green range. At the very least, none of them should be in the red.

  • Select a cluster to see the KPI. All the scoreboards are automatically populated.

Review the table vSphere Clusters for Horizon.

  • It lists all the clusters sorted by the least performing in the last 1 week. You can change this time period.

  • Expect all of them to be in the green range. At the very least, none of them should be in the red.

Select one of the entries in the table.

  • Its KPI is shown in the scoreboards. The health chart shows the trend of the cluster performance over time. The four scoreboards show the different aspect of the host performance.

  • Its relevant property is shown in the property widget.

  • All the VDI Pools, RDS Farms, and ESXi Hosts are shown in the heat maps underneath. You can select one of them and its value is shown on the metric chart.

Select one or more entries in the scoreboard.

  • The line chart below the scoreboard plots the selected metrics.

  • Use the metric chart widget to compare metrics to see if there is any correlation.

  • You can also stack them. For example, you can combine Read IOPS and Write IOPS to get the Total IOPS. But, you should not combine Read Latency and Write Latency to get total latency as you must consider the read to write ratio.

Points to Note

If your Horizon architecture defines that utilization should not exceed certain threshold, you can add the threshold into the line chart. The threshold line helps less technical teams as they can see how the real value compares with the threshold.