What is AVD Sessions Manager & Features

AVD Sessions Manager allows you to manage sessions for all host pools. You can add multiple tenants in AVD Sessions Manager and manage all sessions of the selected AVD Tenant. Below is the supported feature for AVD Sessions Manager:

• Multi-Tenant Support: You can add as many as AVD Tenants you want under the management of AVD Sessions Manager.
• List all User Sessions in an AVD environment for all Host Pools:
• Action: Log off Session
• Action: Remove Session
• Action: Remove All Stale Sessions
• Action: Remove All Disconnected Sessions
• Action: Shadow a Session quickly
• Find if a user is logged onto one than one Session Host
• Quick Action: Be able to find all logging traces of a user
• Easily search a user in Sessions List
• Shows if a user is a stale session or normal session
• Shows Logon Count for each user.
• Filter Sessions by Host Pools

Understanding AVD Sessions Manager user Interface

AVD Sessions Manager interface is very user friendly. The Interface helps you understand the overall status of all sessions of opened AVD Tenant.

Action Bar

Action bar contains actions that you can take against an AVD Session.

Grid Showing all sessions

As you can see currently, the ATOS AVD Tenant is opened in the tool which shows the list of sessions available in the AVD Tenant. The data that is shown in the grid is explained below:

• Check: Allows you to check and uncheck a session.
• Log Off: Allows you to log off a session.
• Remove: Allows you to remove a session
• User Principal Name: Shows the user principal name of the user.
• ADUserName: Shows AD Username of the connected session.
• CreateTime: Shows session creation time.
• SessionID: Shows Session ID
• HostPoolName: Shows host pool name of the user.
• SessionHostName: Shows session host name to which the user is connected to.
• SessionState: Shows session state for the user.
• ResourceGroup: Shows resource group of the host pool.
• Host Status: Shows session host status. Host Status will be VM Turned Off or VM Turned On.
• Account Type: Shows if the account type is a Normal Connection or a Stale Session.

Note: Any account will be a normal connection if the Session Host is Turned On. The account type will be shown as a Stale Session if the Session State is “Active” and VM is turned OFF.

• Logon Count: Logon Count shows on how many sessions hosts the user has logged onto. If you find two or more number for a user, then the user is connected to more than one session host. As an example of a user using multiple session hosts is shown below:

Available Actions on Interface:

• Remove Selected: Only selected sessions in the Grid will be actioned and sessions will be removed.
• Logoff Selected: Only selected sessions will be logged off.
• Logoff Disconnected: All disconnected sessions will be logged off.
• Remove Disconnected: All disconnected sessions will be removed forcefully from the grid.
• Shadow Selected Session: Allows you to shadow a selected session.
• Quick User Action: Allows you to take a quick action for a single session.

Check If a User is logged onto Multiple Session Hosts

If you want to check if a user is logged on to multiple session hosts, you have two options to check: you can check in the grid and look at the “Logon Count” column that will be show if a user is using two or session hosts.  As an example of a user using multiple session hosts is shown below:

Checking using Quick Action

Quick Action also allows you to check if a user is logged onto multiple session hosts. Click on “Quick Action” button found on the action bar which, in turn, will show below screen:

You need to enter target user’s UPN in the “Enter UPN” field and then click on the “Check” button. When you click on the “Check” button the process will

• Check the user in the AVD Tenant and its status.
• Check if user is logged onto multiple hosts

If the process finds that the user is logged onto multiple session hosts all user entries with the session host will be listed in the grid “Found In Other Host Pools or Hosts” section.

Here you can select the session in the grid and then take actions such as Force Logoff and Remove Session.

Check if there are stale sessions in the AVD Tenant

AVD Sessions Manager allows you to check if there are stale sessions in the AVD Tenant. A session is considered stale if the user state is “Active” and the Session Host VM is Turned Off. The “Account Type” column will show if a user is a stale connection or normal connection as shown below:

A Stale Session is not useful as the session is already disconnected from the Session Host, but AVD data still shows that user is active. In this case you need to ensure that the stale session has been removed from the grid. To remove the stale sessions, select all stale sessions and then click on the “Remote Selected” button found on the Action Bar.

Using AVD Sessions Manager – Shadowing Current Session

Shadowing session can be used if you would like to shadow a session and help user with issues. However, please note shadowing is available only for “Active” sessions. To use the shadow feature, follow below steps:

1. Click on a user in the grid that is “Active”. Look at the SessionsState column and check session state for the user.
2. And then click on the “Shadow Selected Session” button found on the action bar. Once you click on the Shadow Selected Session button the process will show a window as shown below:

There are two choices: You can take control of the remote session WITH USER PERMISSION or WITHOUT USER PERMISSION. By default, “Without User Permission” is selected. Click on Take Control button to take control of the remote session. The process will connect to remote session and then show the user desktop screen.