XOAP AVD Manager is a browser-based control plane for Azure Virtual Desktop. Connect an Azure subscription and manage your entire AVD estate — host pools, session hosts, images, scaling, cost, and access — in minutes. No in-tenant appliance to deploy, no agents required to get started, and a free tier so you can prove value before you pay.
- Works across subscriptions and Entra tenants from a single, filterable view.
- Live data, direct from Azure — host, session, and cost data read straight from the Azure ARM, Cost Management, and Log Analytics APIs.
- Concurrent-user licensing — pay for the users you actually run at once, not everyone who has an account.
1. Single-pane fleet overview #
- Live fleet dashboard — running hosts, active sessions, fleet utilization, and estimated monthly cost at a glance.
- 24-hour activity charts — sessions vs. capacity, CPU, and network, drawn from AVD Insights / Log Analytics.
- Savings view — estimated cost savings vs. an always-on fleet, with a live scale-events feed.
- One-click AVD Insights enablement — turn on diagnostics per connection or per host pool whenever a pool isn’t yet reporting.
2. Host pool management #
- Full lifecycle for pooled and personal host pools — create, configure, and delete with type-to-confirm safety.
- Guided New Host Pool flow — type, region, load balancing, image, scaling plan, connector, auto-heal, and FSLogix in one slideout, with Azure naming-convention suggestions.
- At-a-glance health — per-pool health, scaling mode, utilization bar, assigned image, and connector coverage.
- Pool-level operations — add hosts scoped to the pool, rolling reboot (drains and reboots one host at a time, skipping hosts with active sessions), and install Windows updates across all hosts.
3. Session host management #
- Fleet-wide and per-pool host tables — Azure power state, session count, CPU/RAM, connector status and version, disk tier, and per-host image version.
- Image-drift detection — a badge flags any host not running the pool’s assigned golden image.
- Complete host actions — start, deallocate, restart, reimage, drain, resume, install Windows updates, install connector, and delete.
- Deep host detail — utilization donuts, health checks, VM details, live sessions, and session diagnostics (latency, protocol health, and the last error events).
4. Sessions & helpdesk #
- Live session list — fleet-wide and per-pool, showing user, host pool, session host, state, active app, and start time, with search and filter.
- Helpdesk actions per session — send a message, disconnect, or sign the user out (with an unsaved-work warning).
5. Autoscaling & power management #
- Reusable, named scaling plans — ramp-up / peak / ramp-down / off-peak schedules, weekday selection, capacity thresholds, minimum and warm-baseline host counts, and session / CPU / RAM triggers, assignable to many pools.
- Visual scaling-plan builder with a live preview.
- Weekend / off-day shutdown — automatically deallocates hosts on non-working days.
- Holiday overrides — set specific dates with their own minimum host count.
- Manual override — pin the running host count now; it auto-expires at the next schedule transition.
- Scale-event log — every host-count change with before/after counts and the trigger that caused it.
6. Cost intelligence & optimization #
- Real per-pool cost — day / week / month actuals from Azure Cost Management, scoped to the AVD resource groups, plus cost-per-session and spend-by-service.
- Estimated savings vs. always-on, so you can show the value of scaling.
- Per-pool monthly budgets with threshold alerting.
- Automatic disk tiering — Premium SSD while a host is running, Standard HDD when it’s deallocated, to cut idle storage spend.
7. Alerts & budgets #
- Proactive monitoring created as native Azure alert resources — no separate monitoring tool to wire up. Eight ready-to-use templates:
- CPU high, low memory, and host-down metric alerts.
- Unhealthy hosts, connection errors, high latency, and no available hosts log-based alerts (KQL over AVD Insights).
- Monthly cost budget with 80% / 100% thresholds and optional forecast.
- Delivery via Azure action groups and email.
8. Image lifecycle management #
- Flexible golden-image sources — Azure Marketplace (latest Windows 11 multi-session), Compute Gallery, or managed images.
- Keep-updated tracking — automatically follow the latest image version, gated to a maintenance window, with one-click rollback to the previous image.
- Rolling rollout — drains and replaces hosts in batches with a color-coded progress view (queued / in-progress / done / failed) and per-host status.
- Safe rollover — replacement hosts get previous names (during rollout the replacement host is renamed), and personal-desktop user assignments migrate to the new host automatically.
- Image-deleted alert when an assigned image version no longer exists, plus per-host drift badges.
9. Maintenance & patching #
- Per-pool maintenance windows (days / start / end / time zone) that gate automated refreshes and reboots.
- Scheduled rolling reboots.
- Windows Update patching — per host or across all hosts; deallocated hosts are started, patched, then deallocated again.
10. Automation #
- Scripted Actions library — reuse your existing XOAP scripted actions or create new ones in a guided flow.
- Event hooks — trigger a scripted action on any of 30+ AVD events (host start / stop / restart / drain / registered / unhealthy, scaling, schedule, session, and lifecycle events), with a recent-fires log.
11. Workspaces, application groups & applications #
- Application Groups — every Desktop and RemoteApp group across all connections, with its host pool, publishing workspaces, and RemoteApp count; create new groups, publish to workspaces, and manage user assignments.
- Workspaces — grid and detail views; publish or unpublish application groups, assign users per published group, and a Connect panel with the subscribe URL, web client link, and an Open in Windows App deep link. Safe delete and force-delete with a reviewable resource list.
- Applications — App Attach / MSIX packages and published RemoteApps, with a Publish RemoteApp flow and assignment management. Published apps surface in both pool and host detail.
- FSLogix storage — create and manage the storage accounts and file shares behind user profiles.
12. Directory & user assignment #
- Full Entra directory — users and groups read live via Microsoft Graph, with on-prem-synced identities flagged as AD DS (synced), plus search and source filtering.
- Real Azure RBAC assignment — assign any principal to an application group, a host pool, or a specific session host (Desktop Virtualization User on app groups, Virtual Machine User Login on VMs).
- Assignment slideout — multi-select principals and, for application groups, read back current assignments by name with one-click revoke.
13. Access control & governance #
- Role / plane model — Operations, Administration, and Infrastructure planes gate every action, with a “Viewing as” preview to check what each role sees.
- Action log — every resource action (pool and host changes, image rollouts, reboots, patching, deployments) is recorded with timestamp, resource, and result, shown on each pool’s Activity tab.
14. AI assistant #
- A platform-wide assistant powered by Claude, available throughout XOAP:
- Explain — ask about any resource and get answers grounded in a sanitized, redacted snapshot of your fleet, cost, and scaling state.
- Create & manage — add a session host, create an application group, assign a user, and more — through a confirm-then-execute, names-only model: you confirm in plain language, and the platform resolves names to Azure resource IDs. The assistant never touches raw IDs, scopes, or credentials. The action set is growing.
- Usage transparency — the launcher shows prompts remaining today against your plan’s limit.
15. Multi-subscription & multi-tenant #
- Merged fleet across subscriptions — one view of every pool, host, session, cost, and health signal.
- Cross-tenant from one pane — manage AVD across multiple Entra tenants, each with its own isolated connection credential, filterable per connection.
- Every resource tagged by its source connection for clean attribution.
16. Getting started #
- Connect-first empty state — add an Azure connection inline without leaving AVD Manager.
- Three start paths: QuickStart (a one-click disposable sandbox — resource group, network, pool, app group, workspace, scaling plan, and hosts — with an image picker, convention-based names, background provisioning with retry, and one-click teardown); Enterprise (a guided wizard covering governance tags, identity, network, image, scaling, insights, and connector); Manual (go straight to the manager and create each resource yourself).
- VM size picker with live pricing — each size shows real pay-as-you-go pricing (per hour and per month, from the Azure Retail Prices API) alongside vCPU, RAM, and network, with a Recommended for AVD quick-pick row.
- Tracked deployments — every host-add is a job with a live phase and an expandable, color-coded step log (creating VM → registering → Available, or the failure reason with remediation).
- Workspace-friendly slideouts — maximize any panel to full width or minimize it to a side handle without losing your input.
17. Lisensing #
- Concurrent-user model — pay for peak concurrent users, not named or monthly-active users.
- Licensing tab — current plan, managed-systems usage, live concurrent users, 30-day peak, and licensed seats with an over-license warning.
Editions #
| Free | Paid (Workspace) | |
| Price | $0 | Flat workspace fee + concurrent-user licensing |
| Host pools / hosts | Manage 1 pool / 5 hosts (the rest are view-only) | Unlimited |
| Deploy | QuickStart + Manual | + Enterprise guided wizard |
| View everything | Pools, hosts, sessions, cost, workspaces, app groups, RemoteApps, storage | ✓ |
| Scaling plans | Read-only example | Full builder + assignment |
| Automation & hooks | — | ✓ |
| Access control & RBAC | — | ✓ |
| App Attach / MSIX | RemoteApps only | ✓ |
| FSLogix management | — | ✓ |
On the roadmap #
We’re transparent about scope. The following are not in the product today and are on our roadmap:
- Windows 365 management
- Intune integration
- Multi-region disaster recovery / failover
- Always-on server-side automation (event hooks currently dispatch while the manager is open)
- MSP packaging (per-customer grouping, delegated customer logins, and per-customer branding and billing on top of the cross-tenant management we already provide)