Monitoring NICE DCV Performance and Statistics

Starting with NICE DCV 2023.1 server, you can use Windows Performance Counters to monitor various aspects of the protocol performance and collect the statistics about the NICE DCV sessions and connections.

Tools to Collect Performance Counters:

Performance Monitor (PerfMon): A Windows-native tool that lets you visualize performance data in real-time or from log files.
LogMan: A command-line tool that can start and stop logging based on specified criteria.
TypePerf: A command-line tool that writes performance data to the command window or to a log file.
PowerShell: Windows scripting language, which can be used to gather and manipulate performance data.
Third-party tools: There are several third-party monitoring solutions available that can gather these counters and provide in-depth insights.

DCV Performance counters are grouped in five counter sets.

Counter Sets

NICE DCV server

This counter set contains global statistics about the DCV Server service on the host. It also contains an aggregated variant of many counters that are also available in the other counter sets, providing a way to access the information aggregated over the full lifetime of the server, and with a static path (you don’t have to retrieve session or connection identifiers in order to read the counters in this counter set).

Note

the aggregated instance from one of the other counter sets (e.g. "\DCV Server Connections(_Total)\Sent Bytes)" returns the sum over all active connections, while the global counter is accumulated since the server started, and includes connections that have been closed.

Counter name	Description	Unit	Notes
Active Sessions	Number of active sessions on the host	Count
Total Sessions	Incrementing number of sessions created on the host, including the session that have been closed	Count
Active Connections	Number of active connections to the server	Count
Total Connections	Incrementing number of connections to the server, including active, reconnected and disconnected clients	Count
Idle Disconnections	Incrementing number of connections that were disconnected because of inactivity	Count
Receive Rate bits/sec	Rate in bits per second at which data is received by the server	Bits/sec
Received Bytes	Total number of bytes received since the service was started	Bytes
Send Rate bits/sec	Rate in bits per second at which data is sent by the server	Bits/sec
Sent Bytes	Total number of bytes sent since the service was started	Bytes
HTTP Download Rate bits/sec	Bandwidth in bits per second for outgoing HTTP traffic	Bits/sec	Client-to-server traffic for file storage is counted in Receive Rate
HTTP Downloaded Bytes	Total number of bytes sent over HTTP since the service was started	Bytes	Client-to-server traffic for file storage is counted in Received Bytes
Round-Trip Time ms	Average round-trip latency between server and clients, in milliseconds	Milliseconds	Measured and updated once every 5 seconds
Minimum Round-Trip Time ms	Minimum round-trip latency detected since the server started, in milliseconds	Milliseconds	Updated once every 5 seconds

DCV Server Processes

This counter set contains information about the individual NICE DCV processes.

agent_type can be one of: session_agent, system_agent, user_agent

Counters are updated once per second.

Counter name	Description	Unit	Notes
% Processor Time	Percentage of processor time used by the process	Percent	Percentage is relative to one CPU core (i.e. 100% means the process is hogging one thread). Same as \Process(NAME)\% Processor Time
Physical Memory Bytes	Current amount of physical memory used by the process, in bytes	Bytes	Same as \Process(NAME)\Working Set
Virtual Memory Bytes	Current size of the virtual address space of the process, in bytes	Bytes
Process Identifier	Numeric process identifier (PID)	-

NICE DCV server sessions

Counters in this set provide information about a single session. There's one instance of this counter set for each created session, whether a user is connected or not.

If the administrator closes a session, the corresponding instance is removed; if the administrator re-creates a session with the same name, all the counters restart from zero.

Counter name	Description	Unit
Session Duration sec	Total number of seconds the session has been open	Seconds
Total Pixels	Number of pixels in the display area, which is the sum of the number of pixels across all the displays in the session	Pixels
Display Count	Number of displays in the session	Count

The following counters are the same as the ones in NICE DCV Server counter set, with minor differences in the description:

Counter name	Description
Active Connections	Number of active connections to the session instance
Total Connections	Incrementing number of connections to the session instance, including active, reconnected and disconnected clients
Idle Disconnections	Incrementing number of connections to the session instance that were disconnected because of inactivity
Ungraceful Disconnections	Incrementing number of connections to the session instance that were disconnected because of an error
Receive Rate bits/sec	Rate in bits per second at which data is received within the session
Received Bytes	Total number of bytes received since session start
Send Rate bits/sec	Rate in bits per second at which data is sent within the session
Sent Bytes	Total number of bytes sent since session start
HTTP Download Rate bits/sec	Bandwidth in bits per second for outgoing HTTP data within the session
HTTP Downloaded Bytes	Total number of bytes sent over HTTP within the session
Round-Trip Time ms	Average round-trip latency between server and clients within the session, in milliseconds
Minimum Round-Trip Time ms	Minimum round-trip latency detected since the session was established, in milliseconds

NICE DCV Server Connections

Counters in this set provide information about a single client connection. Counter set instances are created when a client connects to the server and deleted when the client disconnects. The connection_id is a number, and it is only unique within one server session.

Counter name	Description	Unit
Connection Duration sec	Total number of seconds the connection has been open	Seconds

The following counters are the same as the ones in “DCV Server” counter set, with minor differences in the description:

Counter name	Description
Receive Rate bits/sec	Rate in bits per second at which data is received within the connection
Received Bytes	Total number of bytes received since the connection was established
Send Rate bits/sec	Rate in bits per second at which data is sent within the connection
Sent Bytes	Total number of bytes sent since the connection was established
HTTP Download Rate bits/sec	Bandwidth in bits per second for outgoing HTTP data within the connection
HTTP Downloaded Bytes	Total number of bytes sent over HTTP since the connection was established
Round-Trip Time ms	Average round-trip latency for the connection, in milliseconds
Minimum Round-Trip Time ms	Minimum round-trip latency detected since the connection was established, in milliseconds

NICE DCV server channels

Counters in this set provide information about individual channels in a client connection. There can be additional channels for extensions.

Channel names are:

dcv::main
dcv::display
dcv::input
dcv::audio
dcv::filestorage
dcv::clipboard

Incoming filestorage traffic is attributed to the dcv::filestorage channel.

Outgoing filestorage traffic is included in the HTTP Download counters in DCV Server Connections.

Note

Counters in this set are a subset of the ones in DCV Server Connections.

Counter name	Description
Receive Rate bits/sec	Rate in bits per second at which data is received via the channel
Received Bytes	Total number of bytes received via the channel
Send Rate bits/sec	Rate in bits per second at which data is sent via the channel
Sent Bytes	Total number of bytes sent via the channel

NICE DCV Server Imaging

Counters in this set provide information about the subsystems responsible for screen grabbing, encoding and delivery.

Counters in this set are divided in two groups:

For those in the first group, NICE DCV collects one value for each session and publishes it in the $session_name instance.
For those in the second group, NICE DCV collects one value for each encoder in each session. There are three active encoders:
- one full-frame encoder
- one tile-based encoder
- one lossless encoder
These counters are published in the $session_name:$encoder_name instances.

Counter name	Description	Unit	Instance
Grabbed Frames/sec	Captured frame rate in frames per second	Count/second	session
Grabbed Frames	Total number of captured frames since the session started	Count	session
Sent Frames/sec	Rate of screen frames sent per second to the connected client	Count/second	session
Dropped Frames/sec	Rate of screen frames that were not sent to the connected client per second	Count/second	session
Display Latency ms	Average time in milliseconds between frame capture and presentation	Milliseconds	session
Available Bandwidth bits/sec	Estimated bandwidth available in the connection, in bits per second	Bits/second	session
Encoded Frames/sec	Rate of screen frames encoded per second	Count/second	session:encoder
Encoding Time ms	Average time, in milliseconds, used for encoding one sceeen frame	Milliseconds	session:encoder
Encoding Time per Megapixel ms	Average time, in milliseconds, used to encode one million pixels	Milliseconds	session:encoder
Frame Quality %	Average frame compression quality, expressed as a percentage	Percent	session:encoder
Frame Compression Ratio %	Average frame compression ratio, defined as the ratio between the frame size, in bytes, and the size of the compressed frame	Percent	session:encoder

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Multimonitor/full screen failure with NVIDIA GPUs on Windows

Parameter reference