Connection Broker Monitoring

In Remote Desktop Commander 6.0, we introduced a new Top Level Deployment Dashboard which displays the health of all of your Remote Desktop Services deployment infrastructure in one main view. If you integrate the Remote Desktop Commander Suite with our Remote Desktop Canary solution, the results of your continuous synthetic RDP login tests will automatically update in this dashboard, so you can spot errors or lengthening login times that impact user experience.

In addition, this dashboard displays the trending health and load of all of your RDS gateway servers, your connection brokers, and session host collections.

Why Connection Broker Monitoring Is Important

Out of all of these roles, the Connection Broker is arguably the most important, as it truly is the “brains” of an RDS deployment. It is responsible for routing and load balancing users on to the correct servers in RDS collections, and also reconnecting disconnected sessions to the appropriate hosts. As such, the Remote Desktop Commander Suite monitors Connection Broker metrics like connection success rate, the recent number of connections processed, the response time of the SQL database server(s) the connection broker(s) are linked to, and the stored procedure success rate on that SQL database(s) that the connection brokers consult when routing users.

How To Monitor Connection Brokers

Our software collects and monitors these metrics because it has been our direct experience that connection brokers can seem “OK” in terms of CPU and memory use, but may NOT actually be OK when you start looking at things like database response times and stored procedure failure rates. Frankly, the internal mechanics of how connection brokers interact with their SQL databases are, erm, “complicated” and somewhat akin to watching sausage being made – it’s not pretty! When login storms arrive in the morning, after lunch, or after a temporary RD gateway or load balancer failure, the SQL DB typically gets overloaded, causing the connection broker to stop routing connections, etc. Consequently, proper connection broker monitoring must incorporate all of these metrics.

Furthermore, comprehensive RDS deployment monitoring, like what we provide in our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS, monitors connection broker metrics ALONGSIDE critical gateway AND session host metrics, plus drives continuous testing into the farm with synthetic RDP login monitoring. The Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard is your entry point to all of this rich information, with drill down capabilities into active session management, shadowing sessions, user and process level performance troubleshooting, and over 100 reports on connection quality, user activity monitoring, licensing, and much more just a few mouse clicks away.

Connection Broker Error Reporting

While connection broker routing failures happen less frequently than Remote Desktop Gateway CAP and RAP failures, it’s still important to keep an eye on them. For instance, if you migrate your deployment to use new infrastructure servers, or if you recreate your RDS collections, you may have users trying to connect with older RDP files that hold invalid collection information. Running the “Connection Broker Connection Request Failures” report in the Remote Desktop Commander Suite will show you all of the user accounts that are using invalid RDP files, as well as other problems, such as connection broker(s) with insufficient system resources to route users appropriately.

Ready To Get Started?

Are you ready to add comprehensive monitoring and management to your RDS environment? Would you like to have that “single pane of glass” that can show you all the critical metrics related to your Remote Desktop Services deployment, with active session management/shadowing, deep dive performance troubleshooting, user activity monitoring, license tracking, connection quality, and more just a few mouse clicks away?

If so, start a very affordable subscription to our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS with volume discounts available. Or, if you’re not ready to purchase just yet, contact us for a web demo and let us answer all of your pre-purchase questions.

Updated: January 2023.