Before you begin
- User Sessions: any plan. You need the analytics.sessions.read permission to see the list, which all the built-in roles include.
- Send message and Disconnect: the session.assist permission. Administrators, operators, and help desk users have it by default.
- Log off and Force Logout: an administrator.
- Session Replay: the Enterprise plan, an administrator, and the session_replay.view permission.
Where to find it
- User Sessions: go to Microsoft 365 → Entra → Users and open the Sessions tab. Old links to /sessions take you straight there.
- Session Replay: go to Microsoft 365 → Entra → Session Replay. The link only appears in the sidebar when you meet all three Session Replay requirements above.
Read the session list
Each row is one AVD session. The columns are State (Active or Disconnected), User Principal Name, Host pool, Session host, Start time, Disconnected time, Logon Time, Last Latency, and Protocol. Click any column heading to sort. The user, host pool, and session host names link to their own pages.
Above the list, the Total Sessions, Active, and Disconnected cards show the counts and double as filters: click Active or Disconnected to show only those sessions, and Total Sessions to show all of them again. Use the search box to find a user, host pool, or session host, and the host pool menu to narrow the list to one pool. A per-pool summary shows how many sessions in each pool are active, disconnected, or being logged off.
Logon Time and Last Latency come from AVD Insights. If AVD Insights is not collecting connection data for your tenant, those columns show a dash and a banner explains why. Turn on AVD Insights and the Connection and Network Data diagnostic settings on your host pools, sending them to a Log Analytics workspace. Values appear within a few minutes once data flows.
Live updates
The list updates on its own. The chip next to the page title shows Live while Atlas is streaming session changes to your browser in real time, and Polling when the stream is not connected and Atlas is refreshing on a schedule instead. Click Refresh at any time to load the latest sessions immediately. Use Export to download the current list as CSV, Excel, or a branded PDF report.
Help a user in their session
Open the ⋯ menu at the end of a session's row. These two actions need the session.assist permission:
- Send message: the title is filled in as Message from support, and you can change it to anything up to 128 characters. Type a message of up to 1,024 characters and click Send message. It pops up in the user's session straight away.
- Disconnect: drops the user's connection after you confirm. Their apps keep running on the session host, and they can reconnect and carry on where they left off.
Disconnect is the gentle option. Try it before a log off when a session is stuck, because the user loses nothing. To see or control a user's screen, use the Atlas Reach remote console or Quick Support.
Log a user off
Logging off ends the session on the session host, so anything the user has not saved is lost. Only administrators can do it, in one of two ways:
- From the row: open the ⋯ menu and choose Log off.
- From the toolbar: tick the checkbox for exactly one session and click Force Logout. Force Logout works on one session at a time; with more than one selected, the button is disabled.
- Either way, Atlas asks you to confirm, naming the user and the session host. Click Force Logout to go ahead.
The row stays in the list with a Logging off… badge until Azure confirms the log off. If it fails, the row returns to normal and Atlas shows the reason.
Every action is audited
Messages, disconnects, and log offs are all recorded in the audit log with who did it, which session, and when. A message's title is recorded too.
What Session Replay is
Session Replay plays back a session as a timeline of events and performance metrics: when the user signed in, how long their profile took to load, what the session host's CPU, memory, disk, and network were doing, when they disconnected, and anything that went wrong along the way. It lets you diagnose a complaint like "it was slow this morning" after the fact.
Session Replay is an event timeline, not a video recording. It never captures the user's screen or keystrokes. Video recording of remote sessions is a separate Atlas Reach feature.
Find a session in Session Replay
The Session Replay page lists past and current sessions with their start and end times, duration, user, host pool, session host, client, status, score, and issue count. Search by user, VM, or session ID, and filter by status (Active, Disconnected, Completed, or Error), host pool, region, and time range: the last 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days. Turn on Issues only to show just the sessions where something went wrong.
The Total Sessions, Active, Completed, and Issues tiles summarize the sessions that match your filters, each with its share of the total. Click a row to preview it in the Session Playback panel, then click the play button or choose Open replay from the ⋯ menu to open the full replay.
Atlas records session activity in the background, so a session that has just started can take up to about 20 minutes to appear.
Play back a session
The replay opens with the session's user, session host, host pool, start and end times, and score at the top. Below that:
- Timeline: a scrubber marking every event across the session. Zoom to 1, 5, or 15 minutes, or Full to see the whole session. Click a point on the timeline to jump there, or click a marker to open that event.
- Events: the event stream, which you can search and filter by category: Login, FSLogix, Performance, Network, Security, AVD Broker, and Atlas Actions.
- Event details: select an event to see its details, related events within two minutes of it, recommended actions, and the raw metadata.
- Performance Metrics: charts of CPU, available memory, disk queue length, and network round trip time over the session.
If you can see the Operations Timeline, use View in environment timeline to see what else was happening in your environment while the session ran.