VCAP-DTA Objective 6.3 – Analyze PCoIP Metrics for Performance Optimization

Skills and abilities being tested :-

• Interpret PCoIP WMI counters – When you install the View Agent on a virtual desktop, additional WMI (Windows Management Interface) counters are added to the Windows virtual desktop. Amongst other things, it allows you to add in statistics for PCoIP performance which can come in very handy when troubleshooting performance issues. To do this, go to the virtual desktop and go Start | Run | perfmon.exe and once Performance Monitor starts, click on the green plus button and add in your required counters. You can choose from the following areas:-
  • PCoIP Session Audio Statistics
  • PCoIP Session General Statistics
  • PCoIP Session Imaging Statistics
  • PCoIP Session Network Statistics
  • PCoIP Session USB Statistics

   The key point here is not to add all the counters and get blinded by lines shooting around all over the place, and remember that the PCoIP server needs to be active in order to generate statistics. That means if you       connect to a virtual desktop via RDP, you will see counters all flatlined and wonder what all the fuss is about! The View Integration Guide has some really good guidance on how to interpret the metrics here and worth a read to help make sense of the perfmon statistics. This is worth a read to get the equations on how to calculate bandwidth used for audio and video etc. If you are having performance issues, it may be that you have set an aggressive group policy that throttles bandwidth too low and the connection is maxing out it’s assigned bandwidth. Remember you do have the View PDFs to hand in the exam, so you can open the Integration guide and go straight to this section to save you from having to remember how to compute bandwidth values.

• Interpret PCoIP log files – PCoIP log files are stored under %PROGRAMDATA%\VMware\VDM\logs and Simon Long has an excellent blog post on how to interpret PCoIP log files, so take a look at that before the exam. It mainly discusses the PCoIP Log Viewer, which to the best of my knowledge you won’t have access to in the exam but all of the relevant metrics to look out for are there in the text. The Log Viewer just puts it in a more friendly format. That being said, if you have a look at Andre Leibovici’s guide, for the sake of the exam it’s worth remembering key words or phrases and then searching the log files for those key words. Remember, time in the exam is a luxury you don’t have! Look out for the following:-
  • Registry setting parameter pcoip.max_link_rate 
  • Loss= (signifies packet loss on the network)
  • Plateau (maximum bandwidth used by PCoIP)

    Andre has another article on key word searches in log files here, well worth a read.