The Cloud Monitoring Service (CMS) is one of the central services provided in the first-generation Horizon Cloud. The service gives you the ability to monitor capacity, usage, and health within and across your fleet of cloud-connected pods, regardless of the deployment environments in which those individual pods and the agent-running VMs reside.
Before You Read this Page
Before you read this page, please take consideration of the following points.
As of August 2022, Horizon Cloud Service - next-gen is generally available and has its own Using Next-Gen documentation set available here.
An indication of which environment you have, next-gen or first-gen, is the pattern that appears in the browser's URL field after you log in to your environment and see the Horizon Universal Console label. For a next-gen environment, the console's URL address contains a portion like /hcsadmin/. The first-gen console's URL has a different section (/horizonadmin/).
Brief Introduction
The Cloud Monitoring Service obtains capacity, health, and usage-related data from the pods in your tenant's fleet and from the agent-running VMs.
The real-time data is made available within the Horizon Universal Console. Historical data and trend data is available to you within the Workspace ONE Intelligence console (as described in VMware KB article 91183).
The service feeds data into the various Dashboard page's tabs to help you see overall health and drill-down into the health and capacity metrics at various levels.
The service also provides data in the user cards, in which you perform help desk operations to support your individual end users.
The Service's Monitoring Features - Requirements
Before you can use the monitoring service's features, you must have in your first-gen tenant environment a minimum of the following:
- One cloud-connected pod.
- A completed Active Directory domain registration for at least one Active Directory domain to which that pod has line of sight.
- The Super Administrators role assigned to at least one group in that Active Directory domain.
- The Cloud Monitoring Service (CMS) switches enabled in your first-gen tenant environment. The console's General Settings page provides the switches. The same switches control the use of the monitoring service for all of the cloud-connected pods in the same tenant environment. In the console, navigate to .
If your Horizon pod is cloud-connected using Horizon Cloud Connector in a native Amazon EC2 deployment, the monitoring service is enabled for that pod only if you manually activated the Connection Server Monitoring Service (CSMS) in the appliance. For more information, see Manually Activate Services for Horizon Cloud Connector on Native Amazon EC2.
The types of pods that you can onboard to the control plane are described in Horizon Cloud - Introduction to the Service.
Horizon Deployments - Requirements
Use of the monitoring service with these deployment types has these requirements.
- The deployment must be running Horizon 7 7.13 or later.
- The pod's JMS message security mode is set to Enhanced. The service's monitoring features do not work if the mode is not set to Enhanced.
Use the administrator console for the pod to check the security mode setting. If needed, change the security mode to Enhanced, as described in the "Change the JMS Message Security Mode to Enhanced" topic in Horizon 7 Upgrades from the VMware Horizon 7 Documentation.
- The Horizon deployment — pod and desktops — must be done according to one of the supported Horizon pod deployment architectures in the Horizon reference architecture. Refer to Horizon reference architectures in VMware Tech Zone's VMware Workspace ONE and VMware Horizon Reference Architecture site.
When you have cloud-connected Horizon pods that are sending desktop data to vRealize Operations for Horizon, enabling the CMS toggles in General Settings causes data to be sent to the Cloud Monitoring Service instead. To remain using vRealize Operations for Horizon to collect desktop session data, deactivate the CMS toggles in . Alternatively, you can use the Management Pack for Horizon for vRealize Operations Manager with CMS enabled.
First-Gen Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure Deployments - Requirements
For these deployments, availability of monitoring data in the user card and in the relevant locations in the Workspace ONE Intelligence console and in the Horizon Universal Console depends on whether you have the CMS toggles switched on in the Horizon Universal Console General Settings, and which options you selected when installing the agent software on the deployment's desktops using the Horizon Agents Installer (HAI).
- To collect historical session data for Workspace ONE Intelligence, you should enable the toggles and install the Horizon Monitoring Service Agent in HAI.
- To show live session data, you should also install the Help Desk Plugin in HAI.
About Historical Session Data
Historical session data refers to data such as:
- Session information for logged-off sessions over the previous seven days.
- Performance trend data (CPU, memory, latency, disk trend) for active, idle, and disconnected sessions over the previous 15 minutes.
When your first-gen tenant's settings are configured such that live session data is not collected, data for VM-related information and login time breakdowns is collected, however, the following data is not collected and therefore unavailable to display:
- Client information.
- User experience information.
- Real-time performance trends.
- Process/Application information.
You set the session data option in the first-gen Horizon Universal Console by navigating to and changing the Session Data setting.
Learn More
Use the following topics and their subtopics to learn about the unified visibility, health monitoring, and help desk features that the service provides.
