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Remote Desktop Commander v6 Sneak Peek

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Greetings, friends and customers! For our U.S. based customers, we hope you enjoyed a great Thanksgiving holiday last week.

We wrote this blog post to give you a quick update on development progress in Remote Desktop Commander v6, which will be released in Q1 of 2022. Read on to learn how you can participate as a beta tester for this new version. Also, if you are a user of our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite tool, read on to learn about a special promotion available to you if you start a monthly subscription with us before December 31, 2021.

In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:

Remote Desktop Commander Version v6 Sneak Peek and Beta Signup Link

End of Year Promotion for New Customers Who Start a Monthly Subscription

Remote Desktop Commander Version 6 Sneak Peak

First of all, a big thank you to all of our customers who participated in our product feature survey we sent out a few months ago, and congratulations to James W., our winner of the randomly drawn $150 Amazon Gift Card. Based on your feedback, the biggest need identified was a comprehensive, top level dashboard displaying the health of your RDS deployment. So that’s what we’ve been hard at work on, and that’s what will be the cornerstone feature of our upcoming Version 6 release.

While currently a work in progress, the Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard will show you things like login times monitored by Remote Desktop Canary, Remote Desktop Gateway health, Remote Desktop Connection Broker health, and the health of your various RDS collections and AVD host pools.

Version 6 of Remote Desktop Commander will offer better integration with Remote Desktop Canary databases so you can see recent login durations and errors directly atop the new dashboard. The health status of your Remote Desktop Gateway servers and Connection Brokers will also be displayed, in terms of whether or not those infrastructure services are running, their CPU and memory loads, connection statistics, database response times, etc. Finally, you can see the general health of specific collections and host pools in your RDS and AVD deployments, in terms of things like CPU/Memory load, session counts, average sessions per host, latency, and user input delay.

Clicking on specific subitems in the dashboard will in turn launch other dashboards and reports so you can quickly drill into areas of interest for a closer inspection.

Furthermore, Remote Desktop Commander v6 will offer additional new reports related to Remote Desktop Gateways and Connection Brokers, such as connection statistics, reason for connection failures, connection broker database responsiveness, and other metrics.

We’d love for you to participate in a beta of Remote Desktop Commander v6 once it is ready. To do so, please sign up here and we’ll notify you when the beta becomes available.

20% Off For New Customers Who Start a Monthly Subscription

We have many customers worldwide who currently use one of our commercial tools (Remote Desktop Commander Suite, Remote Desktop Canary, Premium Management Features) for monitoring their Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) environments. We have an even larger user base who utilizes our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite solution to do basic user session management in RDS and AVD. We greatly appreciate both of these groups, as they are the reason for our success.

If you’re in the latter category, but have contemplated a move to one or more of our commercial RDS and AVD monitoring tools, please go here to request a quote and mention that you want your special 20% off coupon code to start a monthly subscription with us. We’ll write back with your coupon code and we’ll also do a quick needs assessment before your purchase to make sure you order exactly what you need. Here are the details of the promotion:

  • You must be a new customer who is not currently licensing the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, Remote Desktop Canary, or Premium Management Features applications from us.
  • The offer applies to monthly subscriptions only (not annual subscriptions)
  • The discount applies to the first 3 months of the subscription, at which point the price will revert to the regular price.
  • You must sign up for a monthly subscription on or before December 31st, 2021.

Whether you have a limited time need or ongoing need for comprehensive RDS/AVD monitoring and management, this promotion is a great way to get started.

Remote Desktop Commander v5.1 Now Available!

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Greetings friends and current Remote Desktop Commander customers!  We’ve just released Version 5.1 of our Remote Desktop Commander Lite, Premium Management Features, and Remote Desktop Commander Suite solutions.  While largely a maintenance release, Version 5.1 introduces a new Drain Mode Helper for RDS collections and AVD hostpools – and this feature is available in both the free Remote Desktop Commander Lite and commercial Premium Management Features and Remote Desktop Commander Suite releases.  In addition to this new feature, Version 5.1 offers some performance enhancements and improvements to the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Premium Management Features solutions:

  • The Remote Desktop Reporter Service has been further optimized for larger environments.  Specifically, SQL query improvements have been made to reduce locking and waits when inserting lots of agent data.
  • The new CPU Usage By Application Dashboard has been optimized for larger environments, so that it loads relevant data faster.
  • Areas of the software that research items online, such as process names, connecting IP addresses, disconnect reasons, etc., now load a full instance of a web browser when researching those items on Google.  This makes those research features more compatible across a wider variety of operating systems and web browsers.
  • It’s now easier to build custom computer groupings for related RDS or AVD hosts in the Remote Desktop Commander Session Navigator.  We’ve improved the code that retrieves computer accounts from the domain controller, making it easy to add both server and workstations to the Remote Desktop Session Navigator for management tasks.

Finally, as we begin development on the next version of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, we want to hear from you regarding the new features you want to see in our products.  Read on for a link to our product features survey below – all participants in the survey will be entered into a drawing for a $150 Amazon Gift Card, in which a winner will be selected at random after the survey deadline closes.

In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:

Using The New Drain Mode Helper

New Performance Enhancements and Tweaks in Version 5.1

Participate In Our Product Features Survey For A Chance To Win a $150 Amazon Gift Card

Version 5.1 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

Check On and Change the Status of Drain Mode On Multiple RDS and AVD Hosts With Our New Drain Mode Helper

Managing Drain Mode on Hosts in RDS Collections and AVD Host Pools Just Got A Lot Easier

Administrators of medium and larger sized Remote Desktop Services and Azure Virtual Desktop environments know how tricky it can be to manage drain mode across all of their session hosts. It’s easy to put a host into drain mode for maintenance yet forget to take it out of drain mode later, causing problems related to load balancing. When too few servers have to pick up the slack of too many sessions, bad things happen.

As a result, we created the new Drain Mode Helper, which is now available for ALL of our user base – both users of the free Remote Desktop Commander Lite utility and our commercial Premium Management Features and Remote Desktop Commander Suite customers can leverage this feature.

Using the Drain Mode Helper is easy. Simply select the RDS collection, AVD host pool, or manual grouping of RDS session hosts from the left hand tree view in the Remote Desktop Commander Client’s Session Navigator. Then choose the “Check and Manage Drain Mode on Computers” menu item.

The Drain Mode Helper will then launch and quickly retrieve the drain mode status on all of the hosts in that RDS Collection or AVD Host Pool. You can easily select all of the hosts that are in drain mode to take them out of drain mode, or vice versa.

This tool is sophisticated enough to realize when it is dealing with an RDS collection versus an AVD host pool. When dealing with an RDS collection, it adjusts drain mode on the individual servers. When working with an AVD host pool, it adjusts the drain mode status of the host(s) directly via the Azure Virtual Desktop brokering infrastructure.

New Performance Enhancements And Tweaks In the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Premium Management Features

At RDPSoft, we’re always working to further improve and optimize our software based on customer feedback. Version 5.1 has several of these optimizations, as discussed in depth below.

First, we optimized some internal SQL statements in the Remote Desktop Reporter Service, which reduces locks and waits when Remote Desktop Commander is transferring large amounts of agent data collected from session hosts into the relevant tables. This results in reduced resource usage on the SQL Server and speeds up the time it takes to transfer this data into the SQL database.

Secondly, in our newer CPU Usage By Application dashboard, we added optimizations so that this dashboard will only show up to 2500 records maximum of programs using the most CPU, regardless of the size of the environment. This will speed up the loading and display of data in this dashboard for our larger customers.

CPU Use By Application Report
CPU Usage By Application Dashboard – Now Optimized!

Thirdly, we improved the “research” buttons throughout the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Premium Management Features tools, that would automatically try to lookup things like process names, IP addresses, and RDP disconnect reasons via Google. In previous versions, we’d use an internal web browser component to display the results, but this did not always work reliably on some operating systems with certain security settings, so now research tasks shell out to a separate default web browser instance for improved compatibility.

Researching Items Online Now Launches a Separate Web Browser

Finally, we updated the Computer Group builder in the Remote Desktop Commander Client. In certain environments, like Citrix, you may need to build logical groupings of session hosts or virtual desktops that don’t correlate to an RDS collection or AVD host pool. Version 5.1 makes it easier to build computer groups – simply enter in your domain name, click the Refresh button, and Remote Desktop Commander will quickly do a deep search in Active Directory to return all servers, and optionally, all workstations. You can then select the ones you want to incorporate into a custom computer grouping.

Define Custom Computer Groupings
Defining Custom Computer Groupings Is Now Even Easier in the Remote Desktop Commander Client

What New Features Would You Like Us To Add?

We’ve got many great ideas about new features that we want to add to Remote Desktop Commander, but we’d like you to help us prioritize them- so that we add the features that will benefit the majority of our clients first.

As a way of saying thank you, if you complete the survey at the link below, you will automatically be entered into a drawing for a $150 Amazon gift card. Please, only complete one survey per person. The survey closes on September 30th, 2021, and we will inform the winner shortly thereafter.

To start the survey, please click here.

Remote Desktop Commander 5.1 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

If you are an existing Remote Desktop Commander SUITE subscription licensee and/or active maintenance agreement holder, click here to request upgrade instructions.

If you are an existing Remote Desktop Commander Lite or Premium Management Features customer, proceed to the Remote Desktop Commander Lite download page to download Version 5.1 of the client.  Then install it over your previous version.

If you’d like to learn more about the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, including its feature set and how to start a subscription for only $11.49 per server per month, click here.

If you’d like to learn more about Premium Management Features, including its feature set and how to start a subscription for only $114.99 per named admin or technician per year, click here.

Request a web demo with an RDPSoft solutions expert to see all our solutions’ features in depth.

Remote Desktop Monitoring as a Service

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Greetings everyone. I’m excited to tell you about a brand new feature we’ve added to Version 3 of our Remote Desktop Canary product, which is its ability to perform Remote Desktop Monitoring as a Service (RDMaaS).

We have spent months rearchitecting Remote Desktop Canary to run as a Windows service application, so you can now set it up on a virtual machine (running inside or outside your networks) to monitor RDP, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Remote Desktop Services connectivity and login times on a continual or scheduled basis. If the VM Remote Desktop Canary runs on is restarted – to apply updates or for any other reason – it will now restart its testing processes automatically, in accordance with the schedule you have designed.

Please watch the two videos below – make sure to expand to full screen, and change your YouTube settings to view them in high resolution. Then, read on below to learn even more about these features.

Learn how to configure Remote Desktop Canary’s service with a user account that it can utilize to spin up Remote Desktop Monitoring tests.
Remote Desktop Canary v3 is now a true Remote Desktop Monitoring as a Service solution!

Remote Desktop Canary, With Its New RDP Monitoring as a Service Capability, Is Now a True Set and Forget Monitoring Solution for RDS and AVD

Because Remote Desktop Canary now operates as a service, you can program exactly the types of tests (basic RDP connectivity checks, total login duration checks, etc.) that you want to run against individual Remote Desktop Session Hosts, Azure Virtual Desktop Hosts, or even full RDS collections. Then, you can rest easy knowing that the Remote Desktop Canary service will perform the tests you want around the clock, according to the schedule you have defined.

Even if the Windows Server VM you have installed Remote Desktop Canary on is rebooted due to Windows updates, patching, or other maintenance tasks, Remote Desktop Canary will pick right back up where it left off, based on its testing schedule.

New Scheduling Features Let You Stop Synthetic RDP and Azure Virtual Desktop Login Tests During Maintenance Periods

Many organizations do nightly or weekly reboots of their Remote Desktop Servers to improve reliability and make sure necessary Windows updates are applied. You can easily plan around those timeframes with the Remote Desktop Canary 3.0’s new scheduling engine.

Similarly, if you run Azure Virtual Desktop, you are probably shutting some of your AVD hosts down at non-peak times to save money. You can now have Remote Desktop Canary stop monitoring certain hosts in the evening, and then resume monitoring in the morning.

Even more importantly, you can now schedule a separate “sanity check” test to make sure all of your AVD hosts or RDS session hosts are fully responding and providing desktops each morning – which is critically important if you leverage FSLogix, or other user profile management solutions, that could fail to load if Azure Files or other required Azure services are offline. We’ve even heard of the Azure Virtual Machines themselves not loading properly after a cold start in the morning, but Remote Desktop Canary will sound the alarm if any of them are unresponsive, alerting you to the issue ahead of time, allowing you to fix an issue before the morning login storm of users.

Learn More About Remote Desktop Canary’s Features, Pricing, and How to Start a Monthly or Annual Subscription

Remote Desktop Canary can be purchased separately or as part of our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS and AVD.

Have more questions or want to schedule a demo of its capabilities over Zoom? Please reach out to our sales team today.

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