Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Recently, Amazon announced WorkSpaces Applications in-console monitoring. This is a big shift forward for AWS, who is quietly building market share with their Amazon WorkSpaces Applications (previously called Amazon AppStream 2.0) virtual applications offering. This announcement validates that observability matters for Amazon WorkSpaces Applications customers – they need to see what’s going on in their virtual application and desktop fleets, hosts and sessions.

Azure monitoring looks straightforward when managing a single environment. Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Azure Monitor Agent and Azure Policy provide a comprehensive set of tools for collecting and analysing telemetry. For a Managed Service Provider (MSP), however, the challenge changes significantly when the service needs to support dozens or hundreds of customers.

For years, moving workloads to the cloud has been driven by scalability, flexibility and the desire to reduce the capital expenditure associated with running a data center. In 2026, however, there is another factor entering the conversation: the rising cost of buying and refreshing physical servers. The question is now whether rapidly increasing hardware prices are enough to push organizations that might previously have refreshed their on-premises infrastructure towards cloud alternatives.

For over two decades, VMware has been the dominant platform for enterprise virtualization. Organizations worldwide have relied on VMware to consolidate servers, improve hardware utilization, and simplify infrastructure management.Broadcom officially completed its acquisition of VMware in 2023 and subsequently there were many changes for VMware users.

Open source software (OSS) offers organizations access to flexible, customizable, and often free software. It can reduce licensing costs and provide access to a large community of developers and users. However, open source does not automatically mean free, simple, secure, or risk-free. Organizations using OSS can face challenges around technical support, security, licensing, maintenance, functionality, and internal expertise.

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) puts the user’s desktop at the end of a long delivery chain: the Azure control plane, host pools, session hosts, profile storage, the network, and the endpoint on the user’s desk. Any one of them can make a session feel slow, and none of them looks broken from inside the others. That is why performance work on AVD starts with continuous monitoring across the whole chain rather than at either end of it. Azure Virtual Desktop Monitoring is what closes that gap.