In the first part I explained how you can connect your Azure RemoteApp instances to Azure Operational Insights. You can find this blogpost here. In the second blogpost I showed you which OpInsight solutions are very useful looking to the management which needs to be done on the Azure RemoteApp instances when using a custom image. You can find this second blogpost here. In this third post I want to focus on monitoring the usage of your Azure RemoteApp collection. With OpInsight it’s possible to collect values from performance counters of the agents. Through this functionality we can also the actual usage of the Azure RemoteApp collection. Based on your Data Plan you can save this information for a period of time and see if the usage is increased or decreased.

The first step is to activate the gathering of performance information about Terminal Servers sessions from the Microsoft Monitoring Agents. You activate this following these steps:

1. Login to the OpInsight console
2. Go to Settings -> Logs
3. Add the following counters to the Performance Counters section
   
4. After 1 hour the performance information should be visible on Operational Insight. You can query the information by going to Log Search
   
5. Type in the following query: Type=Perf ObjectName=”Terminal Services” CounterName=”Active Sessions”
   
6. Click on 1 Metrics and on the ‘+’ sign and the graph will be visible:
   
7. You can also use the following queries:
   
8. When you save the queries by clicking on the Save icon you easily re-use the queries when needed.
   

So with the ‘Near Real-time Performance Data Collection’ in OpInsight we can collect the usage of RemoteApp collections and instances. When collected we can also create queries to show the information on the ‘My Dashboard’ in OpInsight. The dashboard I’ve created will show the Active, Inactive and Total sessions through Tiles: