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TSAdmin Replacement For Server 2012, 2016, and 2019

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TSAdmin on Server 2012Over the past 7 years, I have had the privilege of talking to server based computing admins worldwide, discovering the key pain points they must overcome when taking care of their day-to-day management tasks, especially if they manage Remote Desktop Services deployments.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loss of TSAdmin featured prominently in these discussions. But, more on that in a moment.

The result of these discussions? Remote Desktop Commander. This next step in the evolution of our Remote Desktop Services solution set was developed in direct response to the specific pain points I heard articulated time and time again by RDS admins.

No More TSAdmin in Windows Server 2012

Without a doubt, one of the biggest issues Windows server admins have been dealing with as they migrate from Server 2008 RDS deployments to RDS on Server 2012, 2016, and 2019 is the lack of a simple and powerful RDP management tool. Specifically, a tool that handles some of the most common terminal server user session and process management tasks they need to perform on terminal servers and session hosts in their RDS collections. This issue first came to light with the release of Windows Server 2012, as the former TSAdmin (Remote Desktop Services Manager) utility was orphaned by Microsoft. Terminal Server session management tasks were, in the opinion of many, very poorly integrated into the Remote Desktop Services Manager (RDSM) in the Server Manager program. Moreover, if your RDS collections are more than a few dozen session hosts in size, the Remote Desktop Services Manager can hang and simply will not scale properly.

Remote Desktop Commander replaces TSAdmin on Server 2012
Managing Server 2012 User Sessions with Remote Desktop Commander

With many admins still not comfortable using PowerShell scripting to do Remote Desktop Services and Windows Virtual Desktop management tasks, the situation has become untenable.

As a result, some admins turned to our free Remote Desktop Admin Toolkit, which was a collection of basic tools that could do limited user session and process management tasks. However, none of these tools were integrated with each other, and their feature set was rather limited.

A Free TSAdmin Replacement for Remote Desktop Services Deployments

As a result, we built an integrated, easy-to-use, and powerful terminal server management utility: Remote Desktop Commander Lite.

Viewing Process Memory Consumption By User on Server 2012
Viewing Process Memory Consumption by User on Server 2012

The Remote Desktop Services Manager features for Windows Server 2012/2016/2019 that ship with RDPSoft’s Remote Desktop Commander are too numerous to list. Therefore, rather than us “bullet point” you to death, take a look at our video introduction to Remote Desktop Commander on YouTube demonstrating the intuitiveness and power of this utility.

One of the most interesting things you will see in this video is how Remote Desktop Commander can intelligently group related fields, in order to show you things like total memory consumed by user, by server, or RDP bandwidth, for instance. There are also features we provide that were never present in TSAdmin, such as the ability to review RDP latency and connection quality for multiple user sessions at once.

Running Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure?  No problem.  All of our solutions, including Remote Desktop Commander, also work well inside Windows Virtual Desktop environments.  In fact, you can publish our tools as a WVD RemoteApp and use it to manage your WVD host pools from anywhere!

Which Edition of Remote Desktop Commander Do You Need?

Because we know that all of our customers may not need a comprehensive monitoring and reporting solution for their RDS, WVD, and Citrix farms at this time, we now offer several different classes of license:

Viewing Server 2012 session process memory consumption, grouped by heaviest memory consumers.
Viewing Server 2012 session process memory consumption, grouped by heaviest memory consumers.

Remote Desktop Commander Lite – completely free for all RDS, WVD and Citrix farm admins – and it provides you with the ‘TSAdmin like’ session management features you need for day-to-day administration of your Remote Desktop Services, WVD, and Citrix server farms.

Premium Management Features for Remote Desktop Commander Lite – adds a powerful feature superset to Remote Desktop Commander, and overcomes some of the shortcomings in Microsoft’s shadowing technology, giving you a very powerful RMM tool designed specifically for support Remote Desktop user sessions and Remote App sessions. Additionally, it allows you to delegate specific RDS and WVD management tasks to help desk staff across your RDS collections and WVD hostpools without making them admins, which is not available in Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services Manager.  It also solves shadowing issues in Citrix, such as the requirement to obtain consent before shadowing, and Citrix Director’s dependence on Remote Assistance.  Best of all, it only costs $99.99 per help desk technician or admin per year, which is much less expensive than typical RMM tools.

Remote Desktop Commander Suite – which only costs $9.99 per monitored RDS, WVD, or Citrix host per month – gives you TSAdmin replacement management capabilities outlined above, but also includes:

  • Our Remote Desktop Reporter utility for historical session user activity, RDS, WVD, and Citrix performance monitoring and reporting, license reporting, connection quality/RDP latency reporting, RDP security (login and login failure) tracking, and session recording
  • SPL Tracker, which helps MSPs and others automate the chore of Microsoft SPLA and Citrix CSP license reporting

Free Remote Desktop Commander Software

What makes the most sense for you? Remote Desktop Commander Lite, our Premium Management Features overlay, the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, or Remote Desktop Canary?  Visit our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle page to learn more about each product as well as licensing options.

Citrix Shadowing Without Notification

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While most of our customer base runs Microsoft Remote Desktop Services and Windows Virtual Desktop, we have a substantial subset of customers who use our tools to manage their Citrix environments. Most of our Citrix customers use our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution to gain valuable insights about Citrix host performance and user activity monitoring, without spending lots of extra money on higher Citrix licensing tiers, and/or the Citrix Analytics service. When you consider that our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution often runs less than $0.70 per user per month to implement, it is a “no brainer” in terms of cost savings.

Over the past year, we’ve gotten lots of great feedback from our RDS and WVD customers who have adopted our Premium Management Features overlay to provide delegation of administration to help desk staff, as well as offer improved shadowing, remote assistance, and live monitoring capabilities to admins, support staff, and managers. During this time, we heard from some of our Citrix customers that needed these same sorts of capabilities.

Citrix Shadowing Limitations

The first question we pondered was “why are Citrix customers asking us for this?” Citrix touts its solution as an extremely robust end user computing platform that greatly exceeds what comes out of the box with RDS or WVD. And certainly shadowing and delegation of administration is something that is provided by Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as well as their cloud-based offerings.

Well, we talked at length with our Citrix customers and learned of several shortcomings in the way they implemented shadowing in their more recent product versions. As a result, we made a few tweaks to our Premium Management Features overlay to make it completely compatible with Citrix environments, as well as RDS and WVD. Here is a list those shortcomings and how our Premium Management Features product overcomes it.

Citrix Shadowing Depends On Remote Assistance Being Installed On the Help Desk Technician’s Computer, Among Other Things…

To start shadowing a Citrix session, you log into Citrix Director, find the user’s session, and press “Shadow.” Citrix Director generates a Microsoft Remote Assistance file (invite.msrcincident), which you must load into the Microsoft Remote Assistance client (MSRA.exe) to start shadowing.

You better have the Microsoft Remote Assistance feature installed AND line of sight to your Citrix servers if you want to shadow sessions.

While MSRA.exe is already installed on most client operating systems like Windows 10, it is not installed by default on server operating systems like Server 2012, Server 2016, and Server 2019. If it is not installed already, a help desk technician will simply download a file they can do nothing with until the Microsoft Remote Assistance feature has been installed. On top of that, you better hope that your help desk technician’s PC that is running MSRA.exe has line of sight to the Citrix host with the target session to be shadowed. Otherwise, shadowing will not work, because the Remote Assistance ports are selected dynamically from a range, and there is no facility (unlike with modern STUN/TURN/ICE protocols) to wiggle a way through your firewall to connect to the Citrix server.

Our Premium Management Features solution, on the other hand, has zero dependencies on the Microsoft Remote Assistance client. In the Remote Desktop Commander Client with Premium Management Features enabled, the help desk technician simply selects the user session – or sessions plural, because our software can shadow multiple user sessions at once – and then starts the shadowing process. Nothing else is required – the help desk tech is taken directly into the user session. Watch this video to see how easy it is:

Because of this, our Remote Desktop Commander Client can be published as a seamless application, and help desk technicians can now support end users from ANYWHERE, even if they do not have line of sight access to the Citrix hosts running the user sessions, since our client will be running as an app on your servers in the Citrix environment.

Citrix Shadowing Requires User Consent

Currently, there is no way in Citrix to natively shadow a Citrix user’s session without obtaining consent through Microsoft Remote Assistance first. Citrix’s own KB article spells this out. This is a major problem, as there are numerous use cases where consent before shadowing is not desirable. As an example:

  • Some highly regulated industries require that user activity be observable at any time by supervisors and managers to ensure compliance.
  • Other industries require that managers have the ability to review worker activity at any time to ensure customer satisfaction.
  • Educational institutions may need to have the ability to observe and monitor student activity to ensure compliance with policies or to aid in teaching.

Our Premium Management Features solution, with its new Citrix Management Delegation Wizard, allows administrators to set shadowing policies on Citrix hosts so that consent is not required when shadowing a session, and then specifically control which users/managers have the right to perform a shadowing action. Furthermore, our software’s user interface allows help desk technicians and managers to monitor and observe multiple user sessions at the same time with our special “Mini View Dock.”

Use the Management Delegation Wizard to adjust permissions and shadowing policies on all of your RDS, WVD, or Citrix hosts.

Citrix Shadowing and Management Delegation

Admittedly, Citrix has much better management delegation capabilities when compared with RDS or WVD. Still, there are some challenges. Unless you are a customer at one of the highest licensing tiers, you will probably have to choose a preset delegation level. For shadowing, this would typically be the Help Desk Administrator role. Unfortunately, this role also gives extremely powerful rights to those users, such as being able to terminate processes, place servers in a delivery group into maintenance, and also perform power operations.

The built in Help Desk Administrator role offers a lot of power, perhaps too much power…

Our Premium Management Features solutions simplifies this considerably, allowing you to delegate out specific granular management and shadowing tasks to your users, without making them admins on those hosts or giving them rights that could lead to them accidentally taking a server offline. Common management tasks such as shadowing, logging users off, disconnecting users, and messaging users can be assigned to specific users or groups in Active Directory. Then, they only have the rights to perform those specific tasks as required.

Citrix Management Delegation Wizard

What Are You Waiting For? At Only $99.99 Per Named Admin, Help Desk, or Manager User Per Year, Our Premium Management Features Solution is a Bargain!

Click here to learn more about the Premium Management Features overlay for Remote Desktop Commander.

Click here to start an annual subscription on a named admin/help desk/manager user basis.

Click here to request a quote or start a dialogue with our sales team.

Remote Desktop Commander v4.9 Now Available!

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Greetings friends and current Remote Desktop Commander customers!  We’ve just released Version 4.9 of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and our Premium Management Features overlay.  This new version offers:

  • brand new reports that track things like RDP loss and retransmission rates, hourly load on servers, user reconnection attempts through a Remote Desktop Gateway, and much more;
  • an overhaul of our existing reporting, with a focus on better chart presentation and automatic chart data aggregation in larger environments;
  • the ability to delegate out management tasks and shadowing to Citrix help desk staff members, allowing them a much more streamlined shadowing experience that does not require the use of Citrix Director or Microsoft Remote Assistance;
  • numerous other product enhancements.

We’re also excited to announce that we’re expanding an existing promotion which you won’t want to miss, so please read on!

In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:

New Reports Available in the Remote Desktop Commander Suite

Existing Report Improvements

Management Delegation Wizard and SuperShadow Now Available For Citrix Admins and Help Desk Staff

Other Product Enhancements in Version 4.9

Expanded Promotion – Buy Andy’s Book on RDS Security, and Get 1 Month of Remote Desktop Commander Suite AND Remote Desktop Canary Monitoring For Free

Version 4.9 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

New Reports in the Remote Desktop Commander Suite

RDP Protocol Loss and Retransmission Rates

Quickly spot the client users with the highest rates of UDP packet loss

Now that *almost all* of the Remote Desktop Services deployments running Server 2008 R2 have been retired, it remains important to keep an eye on aspects of how the modern Remote Desktop Protocol is functioning in your Server 2012, 2016, and 2019 environments. A key part of that is detecting packet loss and retransmission rates over the UDP channel used by RDS. Version 4.9 of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite now offers two new reports (a detailed variant and a summary variant) that quickly show you which users are suffering the highest rates of packet loss and retransmission. Coupled with other network quality reports like latency, you can quickly spot clients with less reliable connections.

Performance – Hourly Load By Server

Even without our agent installed, you can get daily reports showing how CPU, memory usage, and session counts increased and decreased during certain hours of the day.

Long time users of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite are well familiar with our Historical and Performance Across the Load dashboard. Now this same data is available in report form, either on-demand when working inside this dashboard, or as a report that can be scheduled on a recurring basis. For organizations running RDS, Citrix, and WVD deployments in a public cloud like Azure or AWS, having this information is critical, as it makes sure you’re not wasting your compute dollar as server load waxes and wanes throughout different days of the week.

Remote Desktop Gateway Reconnection Attempts

Similar to its sister report, Session Reconnect Attempts, the new Gateway Reconnect Attempts highlights users that have reconnected through a Remote Desktop Gateway more than 2 times in any hour. This may be indicative of connection issues on their part or, if many users are reconnecting frequently in the same hour, it may be highlighting a load issue on the Gateway or a general misconfiguration in the broader RDS deployment.

Existing Report Improvements

During the Version 4.9 development cycle, we spent a great deal of effort cleaning up the 100 reports in the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, specifically reports that utilize charts.

In previous versions of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, certain charts could be become unreadable if the volume of data (e.g. the number of user accounts) was too large. While this was easily remedied by pairing the reports with filters that restricted data by computer name, Active Directory group, or user account, we have now added automatic “Top X” and “Bottom X” aggregation to some of the reports. If you have a larger environment with many different users, the charts will automatically show you the outliers (e.g. the Top 15 users with the highest average RDP latency for instance). For example:

“Top X” style aggregation now allows you to spot outliers and makes reports cleaner in larger environments. Here you can see the users with the highest and lowest productivity.

All of this aggregation is automatic so, after you upgrade to Version 4.9, you’ll start seeing it automatically in most of the reports that you typically run on a scheduled basis.

Delegation of Management AND SuperShadow Functionality Now Supported For Citrix Deployments

Our Management Delegation Wizard and SuperShadow features for RDS and Windows Virtual Desktop have been such a hit, and we now support those features in Citrix environments as well. At only $99.99 per named admin, help desk, or manager user per year, it’s quite the bargain!

We’ve heard more recently from many Citrix admins that attempting to delegate out specific management tasks like logging off users, disconnecting users, and shadowing users to help desk and other non-admin staff is painful at best. In some cases, being able to assign that level of granularity via Custom Roles in Citrix Studio is unavailable unless you are an Enterprise customer.

Then, there are issues with shadowing in Citrix Director itself. Currently, shadowing in Director leverages Remote Assistance, which must be installed and configured correctly on the administrator’s system to work correctly. It also informs the target Citrix user of the shadowing attempt. In some industries, the ability to monitor one or more worker sessions for spot auditing and compliance without user notification is required.

Fortunately, our Premium Management Features overlay now solves this big gap for all Citrix deployments, regardless of licensing level. Specific groups of help desk users can quickly be delegated specific management tasks, without being made admins on the host servers. Also, shadowing can be configured with or without consent required. More importantly – it just works. SuperShadow launches and can monitor and manage multiple user sessions at once from different Citrix hosts, whether they are desktop or app sessions, and whether or not the client is using multiple monitors. It all works natively, and is not dependent on Remote Assistance at all.

In three quick steps, you can unify and delegate Citrix management permissions to your help desk staff and other non-admin managers
Select (check) the Citrix sessions from the Virtual Apps and Desktops host servers, and then shadowing is just another mouse click away. No dependencies on Remote Assistance required.

Other Product Enhancements

Here are two other product enhancements in Version 4.9:

  • Loading speed has been improved in the Performance and Load Across the Farm Dashboard, especially for larger environments.
  • A “Test Email” button has been added in the Remote Desktop Commander Configuration tool, to quickly verify whether or not scheduled reports can relay properly.
  • We now support the usage of a Service Principal Name (SPN) to authenticate against and manage WVD deployments.

Expanded Promotion – Buy Andy’s RDS Security Book and Get A Month of Monitoring For Free!

Andy’s new RDPwned book on Securing Remote Desktop Services was a hit at launch, with lots of readers sharing their positive feedback with him. When the book launched, we started a promotion whereby any person who purchased the book could pick up a single server’s worth of RDS monitoring via the Remote Desktop Commander Suite for a full month. Now, we’re pleased to extend this promotion further.

If you purchase RDPwned between now and July 31st, 2020, we’ll give you a one month, single server monitoring license of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, AND a single workflow license of Remote Desktop Canary, so you can get alerted if any problems whatsoever start to develop in one of your RDS collections. That’s a $70 USD value for only $9.99!!

All you need to do to claim your 1 server, 1 month Remote Desktop Commander Suite license and your 1 workflow, 1 month Remote Desktop Canary License is to email inquiries [at] rdpsoft [dot] com with a screenshot of your Amazon Kindle purchase receipt. We’ll take care of the rest!

Remote Desktop Commander 4.9 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 4.9 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 $9.99 per server per month, click here.

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

RDPwned: A Guide To Securing Microsoft Remote Desktop Services

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Greetings, friends and loyal customers! After over a year of research, my new book on how to secure your RDS environments has finally been published.

RDPwned - A Guide to Securing Microsoft Remote Desktop Services
Click here to purchase the Amazon Kindle edition for only $9.99 USD

Given how many of you are standing up new Remote Desktop Services deployments or expanding existing ones right now to facilitate teleworking during the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s imperative that you get serious about RDS security. Hackers and APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) teams know that businesses around the world are “opening up their doors wide” to facilitate remote working at the moment, and they may come knocking at yours soon. Don’t unwittingly let them in.

My book first walks you through how attackers find your RDS deployments, using normal search engines and device fingerprinting search engines like Shodan. Then I show you the tools hackers use to break into your environment, by performing dictionary attacks, man-in-the-middle compromises, or client-side credential stealing. Next, I illustrate some of the most common techniques and scripts they will use to escalate their privileges from a lowly standard user all the way up to local admin and domain admin, and how they are able to deploy and run these scripts and malware on your servers. Finally, I discuss the major types of defenses you can deploy to reduce the likelihood of being attacked, and how to mitigate the damage if you are.

As a way of saying thanks to all users of RDPSoft software who wish to purchase this book, we’ve crafted a special promotion. All individuals and companies that purchase a copy of my new book – just $9.99 on Amazon Kindle – through the end of May 2020 are also entitled to 1 server license of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite software for a month. What can you do with a license of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite for a month? Here are a few ideas:

All you need to do to claim your 1 server, 1 month Remote Desktop Commander Suite license is to email inquiries [at] rdpsoft [dot] com with a screenshot of your Amazon Kindle purchase receipt.

From the RDPSoft Blog

SPLA Reporting Made Easy

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