What is Omnissa Monitor?
Omnissa Monitor is an on-premises monitoring and observability solution purpose-built for Omnissa Horizon 8 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. It provides IT administrators and operations teams with comprehensive, real-time insights into every layer of the Horizon 8 stack, from infrastructure elements to end-user experience, through a single, unified console. This allows for proactive monitoring of the environment and simplifies ongoing Day 2 operations.
What Omnissa Monitor covers
| Area | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Virtual desktop workloads | Horizon 8 VDI, including Connection Servers, Unified Access Gateways, desktop pools, and end-user sessions |
| Underlying infrastructure | vSphere, including vCenter, ESXi hosts, clusters, datastores, and virtual machines supporting the Horizon environment |
| Capacity | vSphere compute, memory, and storage capacity for the monitored environment |
Monitoring data is collected from Horizon 8 pods you connect and from the vCenter instances hosting them. Workloads outside a connected Horizon 8 pod, and infrastructure outside a connected vCenter, are not monitored.
Key capabilities
- Single pane of glass: Monitor Horizon Connection Servers, Unified Access Gateways (UAGs), and end-user sessions from one console.
- End-user experience metrics: Track logon duration, protocol latency, packet loss, and CPU and memory utilization.
- Infrastructure health: Monitor Connection Server and UAG health, certificate expiry, and session utilization.
- vSphere observability: Monitor the underlying vSphere clusters, ESXi hosts, and virtual machines supporting your Horizon environment.
- Historical analysis: Analyze trends and troubleshoot past issues using retained historical data.
- Databricks integration: Stream Horizon 8 infrastructure and session metrics to a Databricks lakehouse for analytics and long-term storage.
Deployment workflow at a glance
| Step | What you do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Confirm your environment meets the system, data source, and port requirements | Prerequisites (below) |
| 2 | Deploy the Omnissa Monitor OVA appliance to vCenter | Deploying the Omnissa Monitor Appliance |
| 3 | Set the admin password, access the web console, and create your organization | Initial Configuration |
| 4 | Validate your license | License Validation |
| 5 | Connect your Horizon 8 pods and Unified Access Gateways | Initial Configuration |
| 6 | Explore the Horizon 8 dashboards | Horizon 8 Dashboards |
| 7 | Connect vCenter and explore the vSphere dashboards | vSphereInfrastructureObservability |
For ongoing operations, see Horizon Pod Errors and Topology Sync and Troubleshooting.
Prerequisites
System requirements
Omnissa Monitor is delivered as an OVA appliance and deployed on-premises within your vCenter/vSphere environment.
Ensure your environment meets the following minimum requirements before deploying.
| Resource | Minimum requirement |
|---|---|
| CPU | 16 vCPUs |
| Memory | 40 GB RAM |
| Storage | 600 GB |
| vCenter version | 8.x or higher |
| Network | Static IP, default gateway, netmask, and DNS configured |
| Deployment format | OVA / OVF template |
| High availability | Not supported (single-appliance deployment) |
Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) deployments are not supported. Omnissa Monitor 2609 requires on-premises vCenter/vSphere deployment.
Supported data sources
For details on compatibility, see the Omnissa Product Interoperability Matrix.
Note: vCenter Server is also supported as a data source for vSphere infrastructure observability. See Connecting a vSphere data source. Supported vCenter versions are listed under System requirements above.
Port and protocol requirements
The following ports must be open for Omnissa Monitor to communicate with data sources and services.
Outbound (from Omnissa Monitor)
| Source | Target | Port | Protocol | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Omnissa Monitor | Horizon Connection Server | 443 | HTTPS | Monitor Connection Server appliances |
| Omnissa Monitor | Horizon Connection Server | 4002 | TCP | Java Message Service (JMS) — real-time event streaming |
| Omnissa Monitor | Unified Access Gateway VMs | 9443 | HTTPS | Monitor individual UAG appliances |
| Omnissa Monitor | DNS server | 53 / 853 | TCP / UDP | DNS name resolution |
| Omnissa Monitor | NTP server | 123 | UDP | Time synchronization |
Inbound (to Omnissa Monitor)
| Source | Target | Port | Protocol | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Horizon Agent | Omnissa Monitor (inbound data queue) | 31883 | TCP / UDP | Horizon Agents on end-user VMs send monitoring metrics to the MQTT server on Omnissa Monitor |
Recommendations
The following practices help keep monitoring data flowing and protect the appliance against data loss.
Verify network connectivity between components
Omnissa Monitor depends on uninterrupted communication with the components it monitors. A firewall rule, network segmentation policy, or security appliance that blocks any of the ports listed above will silently stop data collection from the affected source. The console continues to run, but the data goes stale.
Before deploying, and after any network change:
- Confirm that every port in Port and protocol requirements is open in both directions between the appliance and its data sources.
- Confirm that firewall rules, intrusion prevention, and TLS inspection between the appliance and Horizon components do not intercept or drop this traffic.
- Confirm that DNS resolves the fully qualified domain names of every Connection Server, UAG appliance, and vCenter you intend to monitor.
- Confirm that NTP is reachable and the appliance clock is synchronized. Time drift affects the accuracy of time-series data.
If a previously connected source stops reporting, see Troubleshooting.
Protect the appliance against data loss
Omnissa Monitor stores collected monitoring data on the appliance itself. Because the release supports a single-appliance deployment with no high availability, loss of the appliance means loss of the retained monitoring history.
Protect it using the vSphere capabilities already available in your environment:
- Take regular snapshots of the appliance VM, so that it can be restored to a recent state.
- Consider vSphere Fault Tolerance for the appliance VM, which maintains a live shadow instance on another host and fails over without data loss if the primary host fails.
- Include the appliance VM in your existing backup policy, alongside the other management infrastructure in your vCenter environment.
Establish snapshot frequency and retention according to how much monitoring history you are prepared to lose, and to your organization's existing backup standards.
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