Omnissa Horizon Performance Tracker is a tool used by the Administrators to gather user experience when using an Horizon VDI.
This tool is also serves as a good starting point for troubleshooting VDI performance helping to determine if the problem is due to the infrastructure or the client connection.
VDI performance depends on a variety of factors and variables making it challenging to fix without monitor systems in place within the production infrastructure. Tools like Aria Operations Manager, ControlUp, eG Innovations, just to name a few, can be invaluable in such scenarios.
Which Horizon protocol is actually in use, how many resources are consumed, how much time is necessary for the client to establish a session with a desktop are just a few of the complex investigations that need to be performed.
Requirements
The Horizon Performance Tracker supports these configurations:
- All OSs that support Horizon Agent are supported with the exception for Linux Agents.
- With the exception of Horizon Client for Linux and Windows 10 UWP as published applications, all Horizon Client versions are supported.
- Supported only Blast and PCoIP display protocols.
- .NET Framework version 4.0 or later.
How to install the Horizon Performance Tracker
During the installation of the Horizon Agent, enable the Horizon Performance Tracker option.
Once the Horizon Agent installation is complete, an icon will appear on the user's desktop.
When you open the application, there are two tabs available:
- At a Glance - this tab shows metrics associated with the current remote connection, such as protocol in use, network bandwidth, info about the Transport and so on.
- Session Properties - session details are displayed in this tab
At Glance
This tab provides all useful info for having an overview of the remote session status.
Horizon Performance Tracker displays metrics of the following features:
- Given Protocol
- Network bandwidth usage
- Transport type
- Encoder in use
- CPU usage
In the At Glance tab you can also switch the view from a grid to a graph view.
Session Properties
The Session Properties tab shows information related to the current session such as broker URL, device and peripheral details, keyboard type, location, and so on.
This tab helps the Administrators to determine if the end user's endpoint has an issue.
Limitations
Although it is a very useful tool, the Horizon Performance Tracker has some limitations that do not allow for an in-depth analysis.
- If the user reports poor performance, the tool doesn't provide a complete resource usage overview (CPU, RAM, disk I/O) which limits the assess whether resources are insufficient.
- For example GPU details are not available then GPU usage and the profile type in use cannot be determined (picture from ControlUp).
The Horizon Performance Tracker is still a valuable (and free) starting point to investigate potential issues with endpoints.
Additional info about Horizon Agent can be found on the Omnissa website.
