Workspot Trends enables your organization to make data-driven decisions that optimize the performance of your Workspot deployment worldwide. Workspot Trends shows your users’ Workspot experience over time with user experience surveys, network performance, and system performance.
User-reported satisfaction is a flexible way of identifying which parts of your Workspot deployment are working best and which may need attention.
Release Status
Release 2.0.0 is in production.
Trends is a standard feature, available to all Workspot customers.
New features and bug fixes are expected to occur frequently.
Release 2.0.0
Trends navigation has been substantially changed. The schedule for updating the documentation below is TBD.
When the same user or pool is shown in different charts, they will be represented by the same color when possible.
The "Desktop Pools > Login Experience" and "Users > Login Experience" pages now shows the time spent in connecting, resuming VMs, and posture check.
The landing page now shows the average user survey rating, chart of rating over time, total active users, total user session, total usage hours, average usage hours per user, active users over time, users with oversized and undersized desktops,
Trends now has a "Desktop Pools > Usage Heat Map” page that shows desktop sessions in two different ways under: as a chart and as a heat map. The chart shows "Desktops in Use" (running desktops which may or may not have a signed-in user), "Paused Desktops", and so-called "Excess Desktops" (pool size - desktops in use - paused desktops). The heat map shows desktops in use.
The new "Users > Client Activity" page shows activity for every Client device, listing the user's name, email, Client type and version, device OS and model, IP, location, cost center, date of most recent access, and whether the Client is still registered with Control.
Release 1.9.0
The Home page now summarizes the contents of the other pages. In order, it lists Surveys, User Desktop Sizing, Cloud Desktop Usage, Cloud Apps Usage, and Cloud Desktop Pools Performance.
The “End User Experience > User Experience” and “End User Experience > Pools Experience” pages now show charts of packet loss and packet retransmission, given in percent.
Release 1.8.0
The Sizing page now lists desktops that are undersized or oversized in terms of CPU usage, memory usage, or both.
The Sizing page can now show CPU and memory usage distributions for any selected desktop.
Bug fixes.
Release 1.7.0
A new “Sizing” tab shows reports on desktops suspected on being undersized or oversized for their workload. This is determined by memory and CPU load. See Desktop Sizing, below.
Support for multiple Trends instances, initially https://trends.us.workspot.com and https://trends.eu.workspot.com, for data sovereignty.
Bug fixes and usability improvements.
Known Issue
Trends doesn't work if third-party cookies are blocked in the browser, as they are by default in Google Chrome's Incognito Mode. Workaround: Use a browser (or browser mode) that allows third-party cookies.
Introduction
Trends helps you understand:
Are my users happy?
How is user experience satisfaction trending across groups/pools/users?
How many users are more satisfied vs. less satisfied?
Compare performance between one or more users/pools.
Understand user participation across pools.
View detailed feedback provided by users.
Examine potential sources of dissatisfaction or low performance.
Video Demo
Note: This demonstration is from Workspot Trends 1.0. The current version has many additional features, documented below.
Example Workspot Trends Displays
Trends Landing Page (Usage)
Overall user survey rating over time
Per-pool user survey rating over time
Survey result histogram by rating
User participation in survey over time
Signing into Workspot Trends
Ensure that Trends permissions are granted to your Workspot account. Follow the procedure in Administering Workspot Watch in Control (Watch and Trends use the same permissions page).
Sign-in option 1: Sign into Trends from Control via the “Reports > Workspot Trends > Open” button.
Sign-in option 2: Sign into Trends from https://trends.us workspot.com/companyIdentifier or https://trends.eu workspot.com/companyIdentifier, where
companyIdentifier is specific to your company, as listed in Workspot Control under “Setup > Configuration > Access > Subdomain.”
US or EU are the location of your Workstation deployment. (Most current deployments are in the US region.)
Once signed in, you will see the Trends dashboard, which defaults to the Usage page (shown above).
Top-Level Navigation
The top-level navigation strip has four tabs. In addition, there is a “Filters” sidebar with contents that change somewhat according to which tab you’re on.
Home
Usage
User Experience
The “Sizing” Tab
GCP STN (Coming Soon)
These are described below.
The Home Tab
The “Home” tab collects reports from the other tabs on a single page.
The Usage Tab
“Usage” gives several simple reports. It is divided into two major sub-tabs: “Cloud Desktops” and “User Activity.”
Cloud Desktops Sub-Tab
The “Cloud Desktops” is laid out similarly to the “End User Experience” tab, but with per-user and per-pool usage statistics.
Summary statistics: Total active users, Total user sessions, Total usage hours, Daily average use per user.
Time series: Active users per day and Overall usage per day (in session-hours).
The filters work as with the “End User Experience” tab.
Cloud Apps Sub-Tab
“Cloud Apps” gives the same insight as “Cloud Desktops,” but about Applications and App Servers rather than desktops and desktop pools.
User Activity Sub-Tab
The “User Activity” tab has two tables: one giving usage information per user and the other listing “inactive users” who haven’t signed in in at least 90 days. Such users may need assistance in using Workspot or, if they no longer need a Workspot desktop, removing their Workspot accounts from Control may be called for.
The User Experience Tab
Trends’ “User Experience” tab is subdivided into four major tabs and a filter sidebar.
Tabs
The major tabs are:
Survey Summary, the default tab.
Pools Experience, which shows data on a per-pool basis:
Survey feedback summary.
CPU utilization per pool.
Number of desktops with CPU utilization over 80%.
Memory utilization per pool.
Number of desktops with memory utilization over 80%
Average TCP RTT and UDP bandwidth.
Average disk throughput in I/O operations and megabytes per second.
Packet loss rates and packet transmission rates in percent.
User Experience, which shows data on a per-user basis.
User list, which shows feedback statistics and the number of sessions.
User rating over time.
CPU, TCP, disk utilization, packet loss rate, and packet retransmission rate as with the Pools Experience tab, but expressed per-user instead of per-pool.
Getting Started, which gives introductory information.
Filter Sidebar
The filter sidebar is on the left side of the screen and is initially closed. Its scope changes somewhat depending on which tab is active, with the Survey Summary tab having the complete set of filters. These are:
Date range. Defaults to the past week.
Company name (restricted to your company, of course).
Pool name. Defaults to all pools.
User name. Defaults to all users.
Desktop name. Defaults to all desktops.
Rating. Defaults to all ratings.
Using a filter can declutter the graphs and tables and increase responsiveness.
When setting a filter, you can select more than one entry per category. The example below shows that three users have been selected:
Filter Notes
Investigating small groups of users works best when no more than five users are selected.
When you navigate to a tab that doesn’t use a given filter, your selection is remembered when you return to a tab where it is available.
Filters are not applied until you press the (easily overlooked) “Apply Filters” button at the bottom of the page.
The Sizing Tab
The “Sizing” tab. “Undersized desktops by CPU” is selected.
The “Sizing” tab reveals desktops that may be undersized or oversized for their usage, which can indicate problems with the programs running on the VM or that the user needs to be migrated a different VM size.
An undersized desktop has consistently high CPU or memory usage.
The user may benefit from being migrated to a more capable VM.
Alternatively, a runaway process or memory leak may be consuming resources pointlessly.
An oversized desktop has consistently low CPU and memory usage.
Migrating the user to a lower-cost VM may be possible without a noticeable reduction in performance.
Alternatively, if power management is enabled for the desktop, it may not be entering a power-saving state as expected.
Samples are taken periodically across the sampling window to evaluate four thresholds:
High CPU Threshold: detects undersized VMs. If at least 80% of the CPU usage samples (in percentage of CPU load) are above the user-selected threshold, the desktop is undersized.
Low CPU Threshold: detects oversized VMs. If at least 80% of the CPU usage samples (in percentage of CPU load) are below the user-selected threshold, the desktop is oversized.
High Memory Threshold: detects undersized VMs. If at least 80% of the memory usage samples (in percentage of memory in use) are above the user-selected threshold, the desktop is undersized.
Low Memory Threshold: detects oversized VMs. If at least 80% of the memory usage samples (in percentage of memory in use) are below the user-selected threshold, the desktop is oversized.
The CPU and Memory Thresholds are set in the filter sidebar.
Undersized Desktops, Oversized Desktops Tabs
These tabs choose between showing Undersized or Oversized desktops. The total of all desktops exceeding the threshold is given. The list of these desktops is shown according to the next set of subtabs.
By CPU, By Memory, By CPU and Memory Subtabs
The list of undersized or oversized desktops is filtered by CPU, memory, or both according to the selected subtab and displayed below, along with user, pool, desktop, session, usage, and rating statistics.
Selecting an individual desktop in the table shows its memory and CPU usage by quintile and graphs its usage over time:
Usage of a selected desktop by quintile. Both CPU and memory usage are high.
Usage of a selected desktop over time. Both CPU and memory usage are high.