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shiichan

WorkSpaces trouble, no more guessing! New free observability metrics are here!

AWS What's New ★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure#devops

Hi, it's Shii! Today I found a quiet but genuinely useful update from the virtual desktop service Amazon WorkSpaces!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

Over on AWS What's New, AWS announced that Amazon WorkSpaces now publishes an expanded set of metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, giving IT administrators much deeper visibility into their virtual desktop fleets.

The new metrics roughly fall into these groups:

  • Network performance (TCP retransmission rate, congestion window, and more)
  • Compute resource utilization (GPU usage, CPU queue length, and more)
  • Storage (disk I/O queue length, memory page hard faults, and more)
  • Session lifecycle events

And the best part: all of this is available at no additional cost.

The story so far

WorkSpaces already published some metrics to CloudWatch, but it didn't expose this level of detail — things like network-level retransmissions and congestion, GPU usage, CPU queue length, disk I/O queue length, or memory hard faults. That meant when users reported a sluggish experience, admins had to do extra digging to figure out whether the culprit was the network, a compute bottleneck, or storage saturation.

What changes

With these new metrics, administrators can now:

  • Use TCP retransmission rate and congestion window to pinpoint exactly where network degradation is happening
  • Use GPU usage and CPU queue length to spot compute bottlenecks
  • Use disk I/O queue length and memory page hard faults to see disk saturation and memory pressure
  • Set CloudWatch alarms to catch performance issues early
  • Build fleet-wide custom dashboards for at-a-glance visibility

All of this should help teams identify and troubleshoot end-user experience issues faster, which means a shorter mean time to resolution.

Dive Deep

Getting started is simple: open the Amazon CloudWatch console to view the new metrics, or update your existing WorkSpaces custom dashboards to include them. You can also monitor these metrics through the WorkSpaces automatic dashboard.

These metrics are available in every AWS Region where Amazon WorkSpaces is supported. For the full metric definitions, check the Amazon WorkSpaces documentation and the CloudWatch metrics reference.

Wrap-up

  • WorkSpaces now publishes new network, compute, storage, and session metrics to CloudWatch
  • Covers things like TCP retransmission rate, congestion window, GPU usage, CPU queue length, disk I/O queue length, and memory page hard faults
  • Available at no extra cost, in all supported regions
  • Use CloudWatch alarms and custom dashboards to monitor your whole fleet

If you manage a WorkSpaces fleet and keep getting "it's slow" complaints you can't quite pin down, this update is exactly for you!

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