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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.

Bye Bye TSAdmin – Server 2008 Extended Support Ends on January 14, 2020!

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You know what’s frightening this Halloween season?
Trying to manage Remote Desktop Services on Server 2012, 2016, 2019 with only Server Manager!!!

The horror… The pain… The suffering… The masochism… *ahem*

Extended Support ends for RDS on Windows Server 2008 in 90 days, on January 14th, 2020.

Gone forever is TSAdmin, TSConfig and those other Server 2008 tools you’ve come to rely on for Terminal Server Management.

Solve all of those RDS Management Woes with Remote Desktop Commander Lite + Premium Management Features.

For only $99.99 $89.99 per named admin/support desk tech per year, get:

  • Comprehensive, scalable RDS and WVD management – no matter the size of your RDS or WVD farm;
  • Shadowing/remote assistance that works properly, even on multi-monitor desktop and RemoteApp sessions;
  • Delegate specific RDS management tasks to support techs –without making them admins on your terminal servers or brokers!

Click here to start an annual subscription of Remote Desktop Commander Lite + Premium Management Features, and use the BYEBYE2008 code at checkout to receive $10.00 off each named user license purchased.  But act soon, before this special offer expires, just like your extended support for Windows Server 2008.

User Session Shadowing in Remote Desktop Commander v4.7+

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Until the release of our Remote Desktop Commander v4.7, one of the continuous laments that we used to hear from our customer base for years centered on the user session shadowing in Remote Desktop Services.  This is a shame, because the internal architecture for shadowing from Windows Server 2012 R2 onwards is pretty amazing!  Using MSTSC to shadow proved however less than smooth.  The litany of complaints has always included problems like:

  • lack of proper shadowing support (zoom out) for multiple monitor sessions;
  • dreaded permissions errors;
  • the unfortunate requirement for help desk users to be administrators (!) on the terminal servers they want to shadow;
  • the inability for Windows 7 systems to initiate shadowing on Server 2012/2016/2019 systems and Windows 8 and 10 workstations.

There was also the small issue that there were no tools for shadowing/remote assistance inside Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure.

By the way: Check out this twisted history of shadowing RDP users.

In the resulting confusion, admins and IT staff have been paying an arm and a leg for remote assistance tools to bridge this gap for years. These tools require heavy install footprints, hundreds or even thousands of dollars per technician per year, and tedious invitation URLs, etc. are required to start helping users.

Which Reminds Us: Delegation of Administration Options for Remote Desktop Services Has Been Nonexistent For W a y  T o o  L o n g

The other need that we heard frequently from our customers: To have the ability to precisely delegate Remote Desktop Services management permissions to their help desk and front line support staff.  For a while, the only real option had been to give help desk staff admin rights on session hosts and connection brokers.  Not an ideal situation from a security, or a “whoops I just rebooted a terminal server with 30 user sessions running line of business apps” perspective.

We tried to resolve some of these issues with our RDSConfig utility, that allowed permissions reassignment for users and groups on session hosts.  However, in larger RDS collections, you need a way to apply those permissions to a huge swath of session hosts all at once – especially as new session hosts are brought online.  Also, to do their jobs, help desk staff need rights to query the Connection Broker to dynamically list RDS collections and the servers that are members of each, plus they should have the ability to read RDS-related performance counters on those session hosts, so they can troubleshoot things like network latency from the client to the server.

So, We Figured Out How To Make User Session Shadowing Much Better AND Created a Wizard To Let You Delegate RDS Management Tasks To Your Help Desk Staff

We call these tools in the Remote Desktop Commander Client Premium Management Features.  Want to shadow Server 2012+ systems from Windows 7?  No problem.  Want to monitor multiple user sessions at once in live view in one window?  We do that.  Do you have RDS users with multiple monitors that you haven’t been able to shadow before?  Again, we’ve got you covered.

Where To Go Next To Find Out More . . . 

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

Updated: November 2020.

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