Xangati has Huge Announcement at Tech Field Day: User Based Performance Profiling

I told people tonight that I wasn’t going to write a blog post till later but I clearly can’t sleep so here it goes.

The Xangati Presentation was spot on today at Tech Field Day. Right from the start to the end of their presentation they come to play with appropriate content and information that was timely for the Virtualization and End User Computing(EUC) industry. I will get right into the meat of the their content. They did some great marketing but you’re here at this blog because you want to better your VDI environment. Before getting started I also feel it’s necessary to make it known that I am a current Xangati customer.

So the biggest news of the day that was announced via Xangati, User Based Performance Profiling. The current best practice is to implement a VDI environment is use a non-persistent desktop architecture. The basis of the non-persistent desktops is to split the user persona and applications from the desktop. Non-persistent desktops allow Disaster Recovery (DR) and availability by not having to worry about OS problems. If there is an issue, just grab a different desktop. Who cares about the desktop? Next time you log in with a non-persistent desktop you get a clean image, no matter what the heck you did before in your session.

Doesn’t that sound great? If you are able to pull a non-persistent desktop architecture off, there hasn’t been a proper way to monitor and trend what the user is doing after the fact. Monday you are on VDI and your desktop is “desktop-23”. You log off and next Tuesday morning you grab “desktop-06”. Same thing goes on and on and on. There hasn’t been a way to tie the users activities to performance until recently. While the User Based Performance Profiling is still a future, it’s close. The code is done and it’s being ran in beta.

Current things I love about the product:

The ability to monitor PCoIP\HDX metrics from the Client to the VM

Monitors Ready Time, Storage Latency, IO rates, Network Latency, Memory spikes, CPU, spikes

Insight into the applications being ran on the desktop via WMI

All metrics are trended and you get alerts based on difference varying form “normal” activity”

Able to create views or groups of applications that you want to specifically track

vDS integrated via Net Flow. No need for agent VM’s on your hosts(vSphere 5 only) Video

Drill down features to get to the root problem

Things that could be better:

Active Directory integration for user accounts is lacking

Adding new desktops to monitor is a manual process to get added to the dashboards

Luckily the two things that could be better are things were Xanagti has been listening to their customers. Both pieces should be covered in the next release.

The product has a great framework in place for also monitoring Unified Communications along with VDI. I can see Xangati being bought soon by one of the big vendors. Agent-less monitoring that is vendor diagnostic, Powerful.

Great Overview of the Xangati presentation: Musings of Rodos

Thoughts from the Wahl Network: A Combination Of Bacon, Star Wars, and Performance Monitoring

More Information about Xangati can be found here.