Remote Desktop and Terminal Server Software
In need of monitoring for Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD)? We’ve got good news for you.
As part of our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for EUC, Remote Desktop Commander Suite, Remote Desktop Canary, and Fix My Session all help you monitor and manage multiple aspects of your AVD deployments.
We wrote this quick guide to show you how to implement AVD monitoring for your deployment via an easy, step-by-step approach . . .
[Read more…]As more and more companies elect to use Azure Virtual Desktop to host their line of business applications and/or provide full desktop environments for their remote workforce, having a quick and cost-effective way to troubleshoot poor Digital Employee eXperience, or DEX for short, is critical. In this article, we discuss our approach to DEX monitoring for AVD, and also discuss how our solution provides many more features than Azure Virtual Desktop insights at a much lower total cost.
We’re sure you’ve received the support desk ticket – an employee in your organization is complaining that their AVD desktop or RemoteApp is slow, laggy, or otherwise unreliable. However, a user can seldom articulate the true problem to any level of meaningful detail. What they are trying to convey is an issue in one of the following areas that is impacting their productivity (e.g. their DEX), and it’s now up to you to figure out which one or two are causing the greatest problems. Specifically, is the issue related to:
As you’re starting to realize, unless you have a specialized tool that can quickly and clearly zero in on the actual cause of poor digital employee experience (DEX), your end users will remain frustrated and your support ticket count will stay elevated.
Our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution is a highly affordable way to quickly pinpoint the root causes of poor DEX in AVD. Starting at only $14.99 USD per monitored AVD multi-session host per month, or $155.99 USD per monitored AVD multi-session host per year, it ships with a specialized DEX Dashboard that is custom designed for RDS, AVD, and Parallels RAS deployments. Most significantly, it lets you review both historical DEX metrics it collects AND lets you observe a live AVD user session to see what is happening in real time when a user interacts with applications. And we’re not joking about the observability features – you can both watch critical DEX metrics by themselves, OR, coupled with our Premium Management Features product, you can shadow their user session AND watch their DEX metrics in a sub-window. How cool is that?
If you suspect the problem instead relates to the client’s PC, or the client’s home network, you can send them a lightweight applet to run on their PC which, after just a quick double click, installs our specialized libraries that work with the Windows App AVD client to send diagnostic data upstream to the AVD host, where our DEX dashboard can display it to you. With the RDPSoft Client Side Diagnostics applet installed on their PC, now you can review client metrics like WiFi signal strength, CPU, memory, disk/network IO, jitter, differential traceroutes between AVD gateways and other points on the Internet, disconnect reasons, and much more.
Yet, sometimes a user doesn’t raise a support ticket right away and chooses to complain several days after the fact about poor user experience. In this scenario, it is important to be able to summon historical DEX data from the time period in question, and that DEX data must be granular and individualized enough to be useful for troubleshooting. Fortunately, our DEX dashboard for AVD sessions meets that goal, as you can review data like latency, user input delay, packet loss, and AVD host load around the time of the issue. With our host-side agent deployed, you can also dive deeper pinpoint which users (or services) were also on the AVD host at the time of the problem, and the level of resources those other users and processes were using.
As you may be aware, Microsoft does provide some monitoring dashboards natively for AVD like Azure Virtual Desktop Insights. These are generally basic in scope, highlighting statistic outliers (e.g. users with high latency or similar types of data). The challenge with this approach to monitoring is that requires storing the collected performance counters and event log data into Azure Log Analytics. Azure Log Analytics is priced based on the amount of data ingested, retention durations, and other factors. The more granular and more frequently you want to collect the data for the reporting, the more money you pay.
For instance, Microsoft’s own article on the subject indicates that even with monitoring of very basic performance counters, such as user input delay, latency, session counts, and related event logs, a single session host can easily generate 3 to 5 GBs of data a month. That’s easily $12 per month in retention costs alone per session host. And it doesn’t give you much of the more granular information you need for troubleshooting, such as per-process impact on memory and CPU usage, per-user impact on memory and CPU usage, etc.
Similarly, these dashboards primarily work on historically collected data, as compared to monitoring a “live” session to see what the user is experiencing that instant.
When troubleshooting a digital employee experience issue in AVD in an attempt to determine the root cause, it is vital to collect more granular sets of data historically, and you must have an option for live monitoring as well, which often reveals problems that historically sampled data may miss.
In contrast to Azure Virtual Desktop Insights, our Remote Desktop Commander Suite confers many advantages for the AVD admin. Specifically:
It’s easy to get started. You can take one of the following paths to begin:
We love talking to our customers, so you can also call-in during business hours to chat with a sales representative. Call 1-855-738-8457 x1 inside the US, or 1-702-749-4325 x1 internationally, and we’ll answer all of your questions.
The modern workplace is now typically a mixture of in-office work combined with remote telework. Many organizations have deployed various End User Computing solutions like Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix, and Parallels RAS to facilitate maximum flexibility for their hybrid workforce.
With that flexibility often comes the need to audit the actions of remote workers from many different vantage points. The desire to audit user activity often stems from a desire to evaluate user productivity, to ensure a good digital experience for workers (e.g. making sure that remote systems are responsive with low lag), to assuaging DLP (data loss prevention) concerns, and many other reasons.
At RDPSoft, we are dedicated to building powerful, flexible, and affordable solutions for remote desktop user activity monitoring – please read on to learn about our unique approach and to request a demo or start a monthly subscription with us.
Organizations throughout the world often implement Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop to facilitate telework for their employees and contractors. Once AVD has been deployed, companies may decide to more closely monitor user activity for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to:
There are several ways to monitor this user activity, including:
Using RDPSoft solutions, it is easy to provide comprehensive user activity monitoring for AVD systems. Here are the steps required to do so.
Determine how many AVD multi-user session hosts you have running in your host pools at times of peak usage. Then, start a monthly subscription for the Remote Desktop Commander Suite for only $12.99 USD per monitored host, entering this number in the server count field when prompted. If you have more than 10 hosts, or would like to start an annual subscription, contact our sales team for a quote.
Immediately after establishing a subscription, you will receive a link with a license file and download instructions for the Remote Desktop Commander Suite. Follow the link to the release notes, and follow the guided videos to set up our software on a VM running inside the VNet hosting the AVD hosts in your host pool(s). Small orgs with 10 or fewer AVD hosts can use our built in SQL Express instance, larger orgs with more than 10 hosts can leverage an Azure SQL instance or an internal SQL Server Standard instance they are already using in their AVD environment.
While the Remote Desktop Commander Suite contains over a dozen user activity reports, the two most popular are:
These two reports provide both a detailed and executive summary of AVD user activity by user, indicating the total time they were connected to a session on an AVD host, and how much time they spent active versus idle.
These reports can be scheduled to run daily or weekly, with a Prior Day or Prior Week lookback filter. You can also provide mail server information so that the reports are automatically sent to stakeholders, and you can also filter these reports by Active Directory group, so that various managers can receive the reports associated with their direct reports.
If you need enhanced user activity monitoring for certain users, or if there is a concern that specific users are using mechanisms like USB mouse jigglers to defeat idle/active time tracking, you can also enable periodic screenshot and window caption recording. This activity can later be reviewed via the Remote Desktop Commander Client interface, and via scheduled reports and HTML file outputs of screen activity.
If certain managers or other stakeholders need to live observe user work in their AVD sessions, you can start a monthly subscription to our sister product, Premium Management Features, for $12.99 USD per named admin, help desk, or manager user per month. Premium Management Features has an integrated tool called SuperShadow that allows admins, help desk users, and managers to live monitor multiple AVD user sessions at once as required, and can be configured so that monitoring takes place without user notification. Moreover, Premium Management Features has a delegation wizard that allows you to permit non-admin managers and help desk users to shadow users as required.
Please note that you can monitor much more than just user activity with our solutions. Comprehensive AVD performance monitoring – to include Digital Employee eXperience (DEX) and synthetic login monitoring – is also supported. Please read this blog article to learn more about how to set up these other AVD monitoring features.
Please feel free to reach out to our sales team to schedule a live demonstration of these features, in which we will also answer any additional questions you may have.
Whether you’re a member of your company’s security team or incident response team, you no doubt understand the importance of getting Microsoft’s Sysmon utility installed on your Windows systems. It seems like every few months there is another guide or article published by CISA reemphasizing the importance of deploying Sysmon to help prevent ransomware, or at a minimum, making Sysmon logs available during an incident response post compromise.
Fortunately, we here at RDPSoft have created a nifty utility called Sysmundo for system administrators and security team members that makes deploying Sysmon, reconfiguring Sysmon, and uninstalling Sysmon across your Windows systems very easy to do. It does not require any scripting, and all actions are driven by a GUI. Best of all, these specific features do not require you to purchase a license from us – you can leverage our tool to do install, reconfigure, or uninstall Sysmon whenever you need it to. Here’s how it works.
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One of the biggest criticisms leveled against Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services as an end user computing (EUC) platform is its complete lack of integrated management and monitoring tools. … Learn more about our centralized RDS monitoring and management >
