Streaming sessions view in Amazon Nimble Studio

Introduction

Amazon Nimble Studio empowers creative studios to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely in the cloud. Studios can rapidly onboard and collaborate with artists globally and create content faster using access to virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across Amazon Web Services (AWS) global infrastructure.

Using the streaming sessions view included in the latest update to the Amazon Nimble Studio console, studio administrators are better able to launch, monitor, and terminate streaming sessions. In this post, we use an example Amazon Nimble Studio setup to demonstrate the new streaming sessions view and its functionalities.

Amazon Nimble Studio streaming sessions

Streaming sessions provide customers with a secure way to deliver remote desktops to many different devices over varying network conditions. Amazon Nimble Studio uses NICE DCV, a high-performance remote display protocol, to stream workstations to customers. Sessions run in environments that are preconfigured by launch profiles, which provides administrators the ability to manage resource access and share only the necessary studio resources with artists to accomplish their tasks. These include the operating systems, software installations, file system access, render farm access, and security controls. After administrators create launch profiles and share these with artists, artists can launch streaming sessions using these preconfigured environments.

Administrators need to have a view into various aspects of running, or previously terminated, sessions across their studio. Properties such as active users, launch profiles used, session status, instance types used, and runtime can serve as useful metrics to track and predict future projects.

Streaming sessions view

In a recent update, Amazon Nimble Studio introduced a new view in the AWS Management Console—a secure, easy-to-access web-based portal. The addition provides studio administrators with views and functionality to manage streaming sessions. It shows parameters for active sessions and sessions terminated in the last 24 hours.

Sessions view parameters

User
The login name of the artist who launched the streaming session

Launch profile
The name of the launch profile used to launch the streaming session

Region
The region in which the studio is deployed and the streaming session launched

Status
The status of the current session

• Starting: the instance is starting up.
• Running: the instance is up and running and is ready to be used by the artist.
• Ending: the instance is currently shutting down and being terminated.
• Terminated: the instance is terminated.

Launch time
The date and time when the instance initially launched, which can be toggled to display as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) or local time using the dropdown menu in the top right corner of the table

Duration
The time duration from when the instance initially launched

Instance type
The instance size/type that is used in the streaming session: xlarge, 2xlarge, 4xlarge, 8xlarge, 12xlarge, and 16xlarge

AMI
The Amazon Machine Image (AMI) used to launch the instance (AMIs provide the information required to launch an instance.)

Streaming sessions actions
Currently the sessions view provides an action to terminate any currently running streaming sessions. This is helpful in order to shut down sessions accidentally left running by users.

Streaming sessions count
In addition to the streaming sessions view, the launch profiles view now displays the number of active sessions for each launch profile, which provides a quick and simple overview.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we summarize how the new streaming sessions view helps administrators of Amazon Nimble Studio view and manage sessions. We explain Amazon Nimble Studio sessions and the different environment configurations through launch profiles. We also explore the different properties of streaming sessions and how the new view helps customers administer them. We looked at the current capabilities provided in the Actions menu. Finally, we looked at the Active Sessions count attribute in the launch profile viewer.

If you have questions, feedback, or would like to get involved in discussions with other community members, visit the Nimble Studio Forum