How to Report on VMware Horizon Sessions and Usage without the Enterprise Edition (free)

If you have VMware Horizon Enterprise Edition with VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon, you can already monitor and report sessions and usage and a lot more. If you however have Horizon View Standard Edition or Horizon Advanced Edition you can't since this does not contain vRealize Operations for Horizon. Well, good news you can use this VMware Fling to help -free.

VMware Horizon Toolbox 2.1 is a Web portal that acts as an extension to View Administrator in VMware Horizon 6. The Toolbox was recently updated to version 2.1 with the following new features:

Horizon 7 support
Client Access Filter
Filter client devices by MAC address, IP address or Client Type (MAC, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux)

And as a reminder, here are the other features:

Device Access Policy

Device Access Policy can restrict client devices by MAC address, IP address, and device type. You can set allowed list or forbidden list for your pools.

Auditing

Sessions: Shows historical concurrent session trend for last 2 days, last week and last month. Shows current virtual desktop connections by desktop pools, and shows virtual application connections by RDS (Remote Desktop Service) Farms.
Usage: Shows accumulated use time of users for last 2 days, last week and last month. Shows all connections (user name, pool/farm name, machine name, connection time, disconnection time) for the past 2 days, last week, and last month.
Snapshots: Shows parent virtual machines of linked clone desktop pools and descendant snapshots in a tree view. The snapshots not in use by linked clone pools are marked in grey, so that the View administrator can remove the snapshots not in use.
Clients: Shows statistics for operation systems and versions of View clients in different types of view styles. Show View clients IP addresses.

Remote Assistance

Remote Assistance provides the capability for the administrator or IT helpdesk to remotely view and/or control an end-user’s desktop in the Horizon View environment. (This is also called session shadowing.)

Console Access

Console Access lists all VMs for desktop pools, and you can filter VMs by VM name or DNS name. Clicking the VM name, the vSphere console for that VM will pop out.

Power Policy

Power Policy lists all desktop pools and their power policies. Power Policy can power on all VMs in a desktop pool with some schedule, like 8:00 AM on all work days. You can setup power policy for each desktop pool.

Source: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/horizon-toolbox