Frequently Asked Questions

Savings vary depending on your usage patterns, but most customers see 40-70% reduction in AVD compute costs. If your users only work standard office hours (40 hours/week), that's 128 hours/week where VMs can be shut down—roughly 75% of the time.

No. Before shutting down hosts, The Smart Scaler sends a warning message to active users (if configured). You can set a grace period giving users time to save their work. Users who don't disconnect within the grace period will have their sessions preserved (disconnected but not logged off).

With Start VM on Connect enabled, Azure automatically starts a session host when a user tries to connect. This means users can still access their desktops outside working hours—they'll just wait a minute or two for a host to start.

Yes, but we recommend disabling Azure Scaling Plans for host pools managed by The Smart Scaler to avoid conflicts. Our scheduler provides more flexibility with holiday awareness, priority-based windows, and cross-tenant management.

The scheduler evaluates your schedules every 5 minutes. Actions like starting and stopping VMs are executed immediately when a schedule change is detected.

Yes! This is one of The Smart Scaler's key features. Using Azure Lighthouse, you can manage host pools across multiple tenants from a single dashboard—perfect for MSPs and multi-tenant enterprises.

The free tier includes 1 host pool. Paid plans allow you to manage additional host pools. Each host pool counts as one seat regardless of how many session hosts it contains.

Go to Billing and purchase additional host pool licences. Once purchased, you can import more host pools from your connected environments.

Absolutely. The free tier lets you manage one host pool indefinitely—no credit card required. This is a great way to evaluate the platform with a test or development environment.

Here are common things to verify: 1. Schedule is enabled – Check the toggle on the Schedules page 2. Correct timezone – Ensure the schedule timezone matches your expectations 3. Window priority – Lower numbers = higher priority. Check that your windows don't conflict 4. Permissions – Verify Lighthouse deployment is complete and permissions are active 5. Dry-run mode – Check with support if the scheduler is in dry-run mode (testing) Check the Audit log for any error messages.

Go to Environments, click Add Environment, and re-deploy the Lighthouse template. Your existing schedules will resume working once access is restored.

Yes. You can use host selectors in your schedule windows to target specific hosts by name pattern, tags, or resource group. This lets you exclude persistent desktops or specific users from scaling actions.

The Smart Scaler runs on Azure Functions with high availability. However, since we're managing cost optimisation (not critical workloads), there's no formal SLA. In practice, we maintain 99.9%+ uptime.

Email us at support@thesmartscaler.com. We typically respond within one business day.