admin – Page 7

Remote Desktop Performance: Key Metrics to Watch

January 4, 2016 By admin Leave a Comment

So, you’ve implemented a brand new Remote Desktop Services (RDS) or Citrix XenDesktop farm. Now, you want to start monitoring different metrics to get a better handle on Remote Desktop performance in general or maybe determine which users and/or clients are the most costly in terms of resources used.

Here are the key remote desktop performance categories you need to keep an eye on, and why they’re so important:

CPU Usage

While RDS Dynamic Fair Share Scheduling (and the built in Citrix XenApp equivalents) help evenly distribute CPU load amongst “plain vanilla,” “task worker” user sessions, this technology is not a panacea. For some MSPs and on-premise Remote Desktop Services shops, some users will require a much larger share of CPU (implemented via the Windows System Resource Manager) in order to run their beefier software. In other situations, Dynamic Fair Share Scheduling may let you inadvertently stuff too many users on an existing virtual machine, because DFSS will dutily throttle available CPU down to the point where common tasks may take *forever* to complete. Therefore, it is still very important to look at remote desktop CPU consumption patterns by user, even down to the process level running in the user sessions.

Memory Usage

Unlike DFSS above, there is no way to throttle available remote desktop memory per user session, which makes it even more critical to monitor remote desktop memory consumption both by user session aggregate and on a per process basis. By analyzing memory use by user and by process, you can better optimize the farm, and/or silo certain users and/or applications on specific servers that are better provisioned for their memory needs.

Bandwidth Usage

We’ve written at length about Remote Desktop Bandwidth consumption here and here, but many admins continue to be surprised at how much bandwidth RDP or ICA can use, depending on how it has been configured. Remote Desktop Protocol Version 8 and higher can double, triple, or even quadruple bandwidth use in certain use cases when UDP is enabled alongside TCP for transport. Moreover, if you permit transfer of files and screenshots via cut and paste, bandwidth can be consumed in a hurry. Since this has a significant impact on the user experience for others if RDP usage saturates the external Internet link, it’s important to see which users consume the most bandwidth, and what they are doing when they consume it.

Connection Quality

If you’ve moved your RDS farm to Windows Server 2012 or later, you can now get a much greater handle on individual user session latency and “potentially available bandwidth” via new RemoteFX performance counters. This quickly lets you determine if user connection problems are on their end, or if many of your users are experiencing high latency due to a load or networking problem on your end. Unfortunately, these performance counters are not very easy to correlate with individual users, but fortunately, our Remote Desktop Commander Suite can do this automatically for you.

Leverage an Affordable Remote Desktop Performance Monitoring Solution

We’ve touched on four big remote desktop performance monitoring areas above. While Citrix provides some monitoring capabilities in its expensive, upper licensing tiers (via EdgeSight / Director), smaller shops running regular Microsoft Remote Desktop Services are not provided with built in monitoring tools, short of what an admin can script together with PowerShell. While you can look at upper tier monitoring solutions, the per concurrent user price of these tools are rather steep, especially as they are sold through the channel.

For only $9 per server per month, let our Remote Desktop Commander Suite offering monitor each of those areas for you.

Please review our sample reports, demonstration videos, and feature listing now. Then, consider starting your subscription with us. With a 30-day money back guarantee and free initial support, you have absolutely nothing to lose.

RDP Logs – Where Are They? How Do I Monitor RDP Activity?

December 15, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

Having now had years of conversations with customers and evaluators, we’ve learned that there is a mistaken assumption among admins that you can glean decent report samples regarding RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) activity from the Windows event logs themselves.

Unfortunately, that’s just not the case.

Pro Tip: Your Log Management / IT Search Software Isn’t Going To Help You Generate RDP Reports

Many set out with the general goal of accessing RDP logs and making sense of the data – maybe specifically monitoring RDP activity. Therefore, they first look to the event log. And, using an event log management or IT search software seems like it would work, right? Nope.

The Amount Of RDP Logging Data Stored in the Windows Event Log Is Minimal

Sure, you can look for Logon Failures and Successful Logons in the Windows Security Log (Event IDs 4625 and 4624 respectively) with a Logon Type of 10, like so:

An account was successfully logged on.

Subject:
Security ID: SYSTEM
Account Name: COMPUTER$
Account Domain: DOMAIN
Logon ID: 0x3e7

Logon Type: 10

New Logon:
Security ID: DOMAIN\User
Account Name: User
Account Domain: DOMAIN
Logon ID: 0x2c906b2c
Logon GUID: {fda9b3a8-1d42-3d9b-712a-ad2cb6a35f92}

You can also turn on Process Tracking auditing to see which users run what applications. However, this will not distinguish between what programs are run in RDP sessions versus traditional console sessions – unless your log management software can correlate Logon IDs.

There are also diagnostic Windows Event Log channels, such as TerminalServices-LocalSessionManager, that can tell you when sessions disconnect and reconnect. However, just like successful logon and failed logon data, this basic information is relatively useless when it comes to reconstructing a comprehensive history of what users do in their sessions.

Terminal Server Diagnostic Channels in the Event Viewer have some additional information, but not much... — Terminal Server Diagnostic Channels in the Event Viewer have some additional information, but not much…

Let RDPSoft Do The Heavy Lifting For You – For Only $9 Per Server Per Month

Our Remote Desktop Commander Suite software continually gathers the live session state data from all of your Citrix and Remote Desktop Servers on a recurring basis (e.g. whether or not a user is idle, how long they’ve been idle, how much RDP bandwidth they’ve consumed, the quality of their connection (RDP latency), etc), and stores that data into a central SQL database.

By doing so, we are able to generate dozens of reports and dashboards that show you exactly what users were doing in their sessions, their individual performance impact on the servers, and so much more.

Your time as a network admin is worth a lot on an hourly basis. Therefore, we think spending only $9 per server per month for quality RDP logging and reporting is quite a bargain. So, please review our sample reports, demonstration videos, and feature listing now. Then, consider starting your subscription with us. With a 30-day money back guarantee and free initial support, you have absolutely nothing to lose.

Updated: October 2020.

Flexible Licensing for RDS Tools

December 14, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

Years ago, we launched a flexible month-to-month subscription licensing program for our Remote Desktop Commander Suite, and the result was phenomenal. The traditional channel-driven, expensive perpetual licensing models used by our competition were simply making less and less sense.

While occasionally we offer promotions, you can always count on this: We offer month-to-month licensing that starts at less than $10 per RDS/XenApp server per month, and at about a $1 per virtual desktop/physical workstation.

For more details, check out our pricing for Remote Desktop Commander.

RDS Tools for Specific Tasks . . . And Within Reach

Small and medium-sized businesses who run server-based computing farms designed around Microsoft Remote Desktop Services or Citrix XenApp continue to enthusiastically embrace our licensing model, thrilled to finally have reliable tools that cover areas like:

. . . and the little features that help with things like enabling Remote Desktop remotely and the demystification of RDP logs.

All with so little additional cost.

Not sure where to start? Determine what your needs are for RDS tools or Learn more about Remote Desktop Commander Suite and its many features.

Updated: January 2021.

How To: Monitoring RDP Bandwidth In Real Time and Session By Session

July 13, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

We’ve written at length about how the Remote Desktop Reporter component of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite excels at tracking RDP bandwidth consumption over time and how it is capable of generating many different reports to track this consumption by user or by computer. We’ve also mentioned how crucial it is to apply the recently released Microsoft Hotfixes so that bandwidth data is queryable on a Windows 2012 server.

But, is there an easier way to at least keep an eye on RDP bandwidth without the reporting?

The Growing Importance of RDP Bandwidth Monitoring

It is imperative that admins do something – even if it doesn’t involve reporting – before bigger problems crop up. Now that more and more shops are migrating to Windows Server 2012, it is all the more important to start monitoring RDP bandwidth. Why? Due to vast improvements in the RDP 8.0 protocol, such as adaptive graphics and combined UDP/TCP transport of data, remote desktop data throughput has been greatly enhanced.

And, what does that mean? Much larger amounts of data transferred on average. Therefore, it’s perhaps more important than ever before to stay on top of it.

Reviewing RDP Bandwidth Data In Real Time

In many cases, admins may want to simply review this data in real time, to see on a day-to-day basis which users are transferring the most data. If this is the case, our Remote Desktop Commander Suite offering (at least at first glance) might appear to be overkill.

Not a problem. Our Remote Desktop Commander Lite is perfect for this purpose.

When in session view, Remote Desktop Commander Lite automatically displays total RDP bandwidth transferred in each user’s session. If you click on the RDP bandwidth column, users are grouped sorted from greatest consumption to least consumption.

When arranged in this fashion, it’s easy to spot the outliers. From there, you can message the user to find out what they’re doing and disconnect or reset their session. You can also jump into process view to see what programs they’re running that could be the culprit.

Happy hunting of your bandwidth hogs – please be merciful to your users!

Do you have questions about how Remote Desktop Commander Lite can assist with your RDP bandwidth monitoring needs? Contact RDPSoft or start a conversation below.

Monitoring Remote Desktop Memory Usage in Real Time With Remote Desktop Commander

June 29, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

Of all the critical system resources that must be monitored on a Terminal Server or other Server Based Computing environment, memory usage is one of the most important.

If you’ve worked with Citrix or Microsoft RDS for any length of time, you’ve seen how servers can grow unresponsive when an errant process has a memory leak, which is more common then many might think. The RDP Clipboard applet (rdpclip.exe), which runs in each user’s session, is one of the most notorious culprits in this regard.

Which is why we at RDPSoft always found it odd that the Remote Desktop Services Manager (aka TSAdmin) never had an integrated way of showing memory usage by process, by user, by computer, or by session.

Enter Remote Desktop Commander

We decided to fix that in Remote Desktop Commander Lite, our integrated Terminal Server session and process management utility.

Process Memory Consumption

Rather than attempting to get this information from performance counters with WMI, which can be dreadfully slow, we used low-level native calls in a multi-threaded architecture to return memory statistics with blazing fast speed across systems in your farm.

Peak Process Memory Consumption

More than just current memory usage by process, you can also track peak memory usage by process. This is incredibly important, because sometimes a process temporarily allocates a huge chunk of memory, works with it, and then deallocates it.

However, during that peak allocation, if memory is already running near maximum capacity, this can cause a performance impact on your server. And even if the process goes back to “normal memory use,” you can still get a clue as to how greedy it was with memory at a prior moment.

Memory Consumption Per User, Computer, Session, and More . . .

And finally, reviewing memory consumption per user, per computer, or per session is trivially easy.

View of process memory consumption by user group — Viewing process memory consumption by grouped user

Simply switch into Process View in Remote Desktop Commander Lite, and then click on the appropriate column (e.g. User, Computer, or Winstation).

Voila. Remote Desktop Commander will automatically tally the total memory for each grouping and display it to you.

How Can You Leverage These Capabilities Today?

Trial software for Remote Desktop Commander Lite is available for free, and you can download it right now.

Questions? Reach out to RDPSoft or comment below.

« Previous Page
1
…
5
6
7
8
9
…
12
Next Page »