Overview

It’s true that there is no shortage of monitoring choices out there. However, I am extremely excited about one of the newer options provided by VMware as an additional add-on, which is the Digital Employee Experience for VMware Horizon. The great thing about this option is that it utilizes the telemetry data already available from the Horizon Client and Horizon agent, without requiring any new additional installers. In contrast, some other solutions may require the installation of additional binaries, which can be challenging to ask our consumers/users to install, especially when they are unmanaged.

With our next-generation Horizon Control Plane, we have migrated our monitoring to the Workspace ONE Intelligence platform from our CMS (Cloud Monitoring Service). This opens up a whole new world of opportunities for observability and workflow automation using Workspace One Freestyle Orchestrator, notifications and other workflows can be generated from the captured telemetry events. Some of the integrations include Slack Web API, Workspace ONE UEM, Service Now and your own connectors for enterprise systems (REST API’s).

We all strive to create a great experience for our end consumers/users. Our goal is to build secure, performant, and resilient environments. (I’ve often heard from my customers that VDI is the most stable environment.) This monitoring option is an additional step to reinforce the experience we create because certain factors are beyond our control, such as the device they use, the last mile connectivity, and their location.  We track VM performance, network performance, and logon times. We utilize this telemetry to generate an overall organization experience score throughout the day. In this post I will go over briefly what dashboards there are and how to set up a notification on an event from Workspace One Freestyle Orchestrator.

Requirements

• Connect your Horizon deployment to Horizon Cloud using the our edge appliance and have Horizon Cloud manage the deployment.
• One of these licences
  • Horizon Universal subscription
  • Horizon Apps Universal subscription
  • Horizon Apps Standard subscription
• An additional purchase of the Workspace ONE Experience Analytics for Horizon add-on SKU. This will provide the DEEM  Digital Employee Experience for VMware Horizon dashboards.
• Horizon Next-gen tenants are automatically set up with intelligence when provisioned.

Below I will go over some of the dashboard views. In this first screenshot you can see this is your default display of utilization in your universal console. We can do much more inside of Workspace One.

DEEM – Digital Employee Experience Management

Now available as an additional add on is all of the employee experience metrics and scoring as depicted in the screenshot below.  

In here you can see more details on your packet loss score. Additionally you can add  columns if you want just like shown above to further investigate issues.

Creating Notifications for Horizon with Freestyle Orchestrator

In your workspace one console click Freestyle button and add workflow button to start your first  workflow.  

In these two screenshots below you can see the Intelligence data source and the Horizon data source. Intelligence data source has all of the data and telemetry around Digital Employee Experience Management and Horizon has the Horizon components that make up delivery of applications and desktops.

We will go through as an example setting up a workflow to notify an email address of an agent(s) in an errored state. Remember this could be email, slack, service now or your own method. Make sure you select Horizon>Agent Error. Once you have selected that you can chose to execute this workflow manually, schedule it or  automatically which is what I am going to do.

I am going to set my Error Status equals true that way if it is an errored state I will get an email.

Now we are going to add an additional step to send us the email. I am going to add a step in the workflow and select the send email and click add action.

Now before you enter in your email and test it you can view the potential impact of this workflow before you enable it to so how much it impacts you. If you are satisfied with the results just give a name enable it and click save.

Here is an example of some extra connectors you can add. If you are looking to setup additional workflow connectors in Workspace One go to Integrations tab > Workflow connectors > click the add button.