How healthy are your Windows 365 or Azure Virtual Desktop PC’s ?

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Introduction

Microsoft has just pushed out yet another new feature for Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop environments which is called health checks. Myself and my good friend Paul Winstanley took a look at the new feature and wanted to share our thoughts with you.

We looked at the new functionality of the Windows app on Windows devices but this new feature is available via the Windows app on the following platforms:

• Windows: version 2.0.703.0 or later
• macOS: version 11.1.8 or later
• iOS: version 11.1.7 or later
• Android: version 11.0.0.46 or later

What are health checks ?

Good question. Think of it as a way for the Windows app to carry out a series of checks to verify that everything is in place to ensure that you have a consistently good connection to your Cloud PC and if something is not right, to report that there’s a problem to you via the app and via logs.

These checks happen if it detects a network change, or can be triggered manually by the end user or automatically when the Windows App itself starts or when the user makes a connection to a resource such as a Cloud PC or Cloud App.

Let’s take a look

In the current version of the Windows app (2.0.704.0 at the time of writing), the health checks ability has been added. Please note that it is gradually rolling out to all regions, so if you have updated your Windows app and still don’t see the health symbol, don’t panic, it’s on its way.

To verify which version of Windows app you are running see here.

Before the feature rolls out your Windows app will look something like this.

After the health check feature is enabled for your region, the Windows app will appear something like this, notice the new heart shaped icon on the left menu highlighted with a green arrow.

Clicking it, brings up some information on the right side of the Windows app detailing the health of your connection.

In there you can see the computer name, and what it determines to be the state of the system, the date and time of the check and the result of the check, in this case Everything looks good.

You can also manually check the health by clicking Check again which will kick off the health checks, or click on Open log to see a log file containing what it has checked and the results of that check.

Below is what the log file content looks like when everything is OK.

The health_checks.log file location on Windows devices is:

C\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Temp\DiagOutputDir\Windows365\logs\health_checks.log

You can also click on See all health checks to expand a list of what is checked.

that’s all fine when everything is working, but what about when you have an actual problem ?

Detecting network issues

If something is detected to be not working, such as a failure to reach a required endpoint, then the Windows app will alert you with a banner, and the Health Check icon will have a red dot to signify something is wrong. These changes to the Windows App appearance happen if a network change is detected.

Clicking on the health check icon itself, or clicking the Check device health warning button will allow you to check and reveal what the problem is.

At this point you have many options.

• Check again
• Open log
• See all health checks
• Open network settings

Clicking on See all health checks in this example reveals that the network connection is disconnected.

And as mentioned above, that was detected when a network change was detected, as is revealed in the log file by clicking on Open log.

Clicking on Check again in this failed state reveals (in the log) that this was a user initiated check.

After you’ve sourced the root of the problem (in this case the router was turned off to simulate a network failure), and resolved it, the log reveals that there was another network change, and this time all is good.

So there you have it, automated and manual health checks are now possible using the new feature in the Windows app.

More info

You can get more info about the new feature from Microsoft below:

• Run health checks to detect issues with Windows App connections – Windows App | Microsoft Learn
• https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/enhancing-azure-virtual-desktop-and-windows-365-experience-with-health-checks/4446612

Summary

The new health checks feature is a very welcome addition to the Windows app, as more and more companies have complex environments that contains proxies, ssl inspection, network sniffers that can interuppt or block the necessary traffic routes.

The health check feature highlights when there is a problem with one or more of these endpoints, and alerts the end user with a popup. The admin in their turn can utilize the health check log to get more info about exactly what is failing.

Thanks Microsoft for the feature and in particular thanks to the very helpful PM, Pavithra Thiruvengadam.