With the excitement around Windows 365, I wanted to take a look at something that I believe is underrated. Windows 365 Analytics provides some really strong monitoring/data on the user experience and performance. This is the latest of my articles about Windows 365 as a Windows 365 MVP. Today, we’re going to talk about remote connection performance metrics, resource performance, and more!
Windows 365 Connection Metrics
As a reminder, as this is part of endpoint analytics, it requires a valid Intune license.
For starters, you can access the connection metrics here.
You can separate this into 3 buckets:
- Remoting Connection
- Model Performance
- Device Performance
Let’s discuss those a bit more. Your remoting connection report focuses on round trip time (ms) and sign in time (seconds) to determine how your experience is.
For Round Trip Time, they grade it as:
- Good (0-100ms)
- Average (100-200ms)
- Poor (over 200ms)
For Sign-in Time, they grade it as:
- Good (0-30s)
- Average (30-60s)
- Poor (60s+)
They give you a nice little graphic to show you how your daily metrics are over the last 30 days:
It gets cooler when you look at Sign-in times deeper. We get data on the breakdown of how long it takes. For context they look at a few items:
- Remoting sign-in (How long it takes from when user clicks on Cloud PC client to when Cloud PC sends user login/credentials to machine)
- Core sign-in (How long it takes to get a responsive desktop after sign-in, excludes new user sign-in and first sign-in after Feature Update)
- Core boot (how long it takes to reach sign-in prompt after device is turned on, excludes OS update time)
The last thing to bring up are the recommendations and insights. It will identify devices that have poor sign-in time, which makes you need to consider some changes. You can see here, it identified a bunch of devices that have less than ideal sign-in times:
This leads you to realize that maybe we should consider moving those 3 devices with 100+ MS to another region (as they’re not based in the same geographic area).
Another really cool thing they have is model performance metrics. It looks at the Round Trip Time (RTT) and Cloud PC sign-in during each phase by your Cloud PC Model:
Windows 365 Resource Performance
Resource Performance helps with optimizing vCPU and RAM resources on your Cloud PCs.
As you grow into Windows 365 (hit 10+ machines), it will create baselines that you can base yourself against. You can see below, we have a resource performance score of 84:
You can see how your score breakdown calculates the score (over 50% is considered a spike as a FYI):
- CPU spike time score (this plots the ratio of CPU spike times to total usage time and averaged over a 14 day period)
- RAM spike time score (this plots the ratio of RAM spike times to total usage time and averaged over a 14 day period)
My breakdown is:
They also show a nice trend graph like this:
Similarly to the previous section, they show model performance:
Along with the individual device peformance:
We also get insights as well, which are really nice. This provides a nice use case for the new resizing capabilities with Windows 365:
Individual Windows 365 Cloud PC Analytics
Now, we move onto looking at an individual device’s analytics, which is where this comes together nicely.
Overall, the Endpoint analytics shows the full story, which we have discussed in the previous sections:
One new area is “Work From Anywhere” (WFA) which is really neat and shows you the capabilities that empower WFA.
It’s pretty basic, it focuses on:
- Running Newer/Updated Versions of Windows
- Ensuring devices are on Azure AD/Hybrid
- Devices being Cloud-Managed
- Devices being Cloud-Provisioned
Let’s check out some of the other analytics. An individual’s startup performance looks like this:
Application reliability is another interesting area as you can see below:
My favorite is probably the individual resource performance. It really gives a great view into the overall device health and whether we should resize:
The final one is our remoting connection tab that gives more historical insight into performance:
Final Thoughts
This article was something I thought was good to cover and showcase the powerful analytics we have in Windows 365. We’re seeing many new capabilities like applying region change to existing machines:
We also have Cloud PC resizing:
Everything we done is driven by good analytics so we aren’t firefighting in the dark. We will continue to see more advancements that make this platform a major disruptor in the Virtual Desktop/PCaaS space.
