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 

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) 

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