New – CloudWatch Metrics for Amazon WorkSpaces

AWS customers are deploying Amazon WorkSpaces at scale in medium and large organizations. For example, health care company Johnson & Johnson is using WorkSpaces to realize the long-promised security and efficacy benefits of virtual desktops, in a world populated by a diverse workforce that would like to use their own computing devices if possible (also known as BYOD – Bring Your Own Device). You can view their recent presentation, Deploying Amazon WorkSpaces at Scale, to learn more about what they did and how they now support BYOD for 16,000 contractors and employees, along with zero clients for another 8,000 users.

New Metrics
In order to help our customers to monitor their WorkSpaces deployments, we recently added additional Amazon CloudWatch metrics for WorkSpaces. These metrics are designed to provide administrators with additional insight in to the overall health and connection status of individual WorkSpaces and of all of the WorkSpaces that belong to a particular directory.

Like all CloudWatch metrics, these metrics can be viewed in the AWS Management Console, accessed via the CloudWatch APIs, and monitored by CloudWatch Alarms and third-party tools.

The new metrics are enabled by default and are available to you at no extra charge. Here’s what you get:

• Available – WorkSpaces that respond to a status check are counted in this metric.
• Unhealthy – WorkSpaces that do not respond to the same status check are counted in this metric.
• ConnectionAttempt – The number of connection attempts made to a WorkSpace.
• ConnectionSuccess – The number of successful connection attempts.
• ConnectionFailure – The number of unsuccessful connection attempts.
• SessionLaunchTime – The amount of time taken to initiate a session, as measured by the WorkSpaces client.
• InSessionLatency – The round trip time between the WorkSpaces client and WorkSpaces, as measured and reported by the client.
• SessionDisconnect – The number of user initiated and automatically closed sessions.

Here’s how you create an alarm that will fire if a user cannot connect to their WorkSpace:

Available Now
The new metrics are available now and you can start monitoring them today!

To learn more, read about Monitoring Amazon WorkSpaces.

— Jeff;