RDPSoft

Remote Desktop and Terminal Server Software

We Make RDS, XenApp & VDI Monitoring/Reporting Easy and Affordable
  • Products / Services
    • Not Sure Where To Start?
    • The Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle For RDS and AVD
    • RDS / AVD Monitoring & Reporting
      • Remote Desktop Commander Suite
    • RDS / AVD Management and RMM Tools
      • Remote Desktop Commander Lite (Free RDS/AVD Management Tool)
      • Remote Assistance RMM Tool + Delegation of Management for RDS/AVD Support Desk
    • RDS Synthetic Login Monitoring / Connection Time / Uptime Monitoring Tools
      • Remote Desktop Canary
    • Consulting and Professional Services
      • RDS Performance Audit
      • Custom Report Design Services
      • Training and Other Professional Services
  • Download
    • Lite: Free RDS/Citrix Session and Farm Manager
    • Lite With Premium Management Features
    • Suite: Installer and Release Notes
    • Remote Desktop Canary – Request a Demo/Trial
    • Request Upgrade To New Version
  • Buy
    • The Complete RDS/AVD Monitoring and Management Bundle Purchase Options
      • Start Monthly Subscription Now
      • Start Annual Subscription Now
    • Remote Desktop Commander Suite Purchase Options
      • Start Monthly Subscription Now
      • Start Annual Subscription Now
      • Buy Perpetual License(s)
    • Premium Management Features Purchase Options
      • Start Monthly Subscription Now
      • Start Annual Subscription Now
    • Remote Desktop Canary Purchase Options
      • Start Monthly Subscription Now
      • Start Annual Subscription Now
    • Buy Incident Based Support Packages
    • Pricing
  • Blog
  • Support
    • Contact Support / Submit Ticket
    • RDPSoft Knowledge Base
  • Contact
  • Partners

Remote Desktop Commander v6.0+ Highlights

April 13, 2022 By admin 1 Comment

The Version 6.0 release of our Remote Desktop Commander solution offered something for everyone – whether using our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite Client or licensed for our full Remote Desktop Commander Suite.

For instance, here are just some of the notable capabilities:

  • The Remote Desktop Commander Suite is packed with expanded capabilities – including an extremely powerful Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard that shows you the health of your Remote Desktop Gateways, Remote Desktop Connection Brokers, and Session Hosts all in an interactive window.  This dashboard also integrates with our Remote Desktop Canary product to show current RDS login times in your RDS deployment and alert you to any RDP login issues.
  • The Remote Desktop Commander Client has been optimized for additional speed and efficiency when it loads collections full of session hosts.

It’s a lot of content, so here are some links to easily navigate to your specific area of interest:

The Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard

Integrating Remote Desktop Canary With Remote Desktop Commander

Reports for Connection Brokers, Gateways, and Remote Desktop Canary 

Quick Filter by User or Computer Name When Manually Running Reports

Introducing Turbo Mode for the Remote Desktop Reporter Agent 

Selective Capture of Certain Metrics

User Session Retrieval Speed Improvements for Larger Collections

Need to Monitor Your Connection Brokers?  Want to Add Remote Desktop Canary Licensing?

A Note About TechMentor Redmond, August 2022

Version 6.0 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

Our Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard is the “Single Pane of Glass” RDS Monitoring Dashboard You’ve Been Dreaming About

Top Level Deployment Dashboard
At long last, one dashboard which shows you the health of your entire RDS deployment, with “drill down” functions to analyze and fix problems.

The Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard gives you a comprehensive picture of the health of your Remote Desktop Services deployment, no matter how big or small your environment is. You can see the health of gateways, brokers, and session host collections, and if successfully integrated, also see the login time results of recent Remote Desktop Canary synthetic tests. Clicking on any area of this dashboard raises a menu of sub-dashboards, reports, and other actions, letting you drill down into the data for powerful troubleshooting. In fact, you can drill down all the way into the resource usage of processes or RDP protocol stats in various user sessions.

Watch the video above to learn how to add your connection brokers for monitoring in Version 6+ and how to use the new Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard. Once your gateway and broker role servers are added, data will start populating into this dashboard. You can click on any of the displayed items (e.g. labels, trending sparkline graphs, etc) to raise a “chooser” dialog to drill further into the information collected from brokers, gateways, session hosts, and login times. You can can even launch an RDP admin session directly into a broker or gateway server if it’s misbehaving!

Since Remote Desktop Commander v6+ supports Connection Broker monitoring and Remote Desktop Canary integration, you may want to add more licenses or add the Remote Desktop Canary product to your existing subscriptions.

Don’t forget: It’s worth your time to learn more about why Connection Broker monitoring is so important.

Link Remote Desktop Canary with Remote Desktop Commander for Better Monitoring and Visibility.

Version 6+ of Remote Desktop Commander offers direct integration with Remote Desktop Canary. Specifically, Remote Desktop Canary can be configured to send its alerts to the special RemoteDesktopCanaryStatsv2 table that is included in the latest Remote Desktop Commander database, or you can configure Remote Desktop Commander to connect to an external Remote Desktop Canary SQL database to consume Canary’s login test data. Once this is done, Remote Desktop Canary alerts and login times will display across the top of the Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard, and Remote Desktop Canary reports can also be generated on a manual or scheduled basis.

Watch this video to discover how easy it is to integrate Remote Desktop Canary and Remote Desktop Commander.
Remote Desktop Canary Integration
Even if Remote Desktop Canary is sending login test results to an external SQL server outside your network (e.g. such as into Azure SQL), Remote Desktop Commander can be linked to that DB in order to display the test results.

Reports Track Critical Metrics Related To Connection Brokers, Gateways, and Login Times

Remote Desktop Commander v6+ offers multiple reports in the “Infrastructure” category. Most of these can be raised directly from the Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard, but you can also schedule them on a daily basis.

Remote Desktop Commander Infrastructure Reports
Track gateway CAP/RAP failures, connection broker connection request failures, and RDS login times with our new Remote Desktop infrastructure reports.
Connection Broker Failure Tracking
Find out exactly why your Connection Broker is failing to route connections
Remote Desktop Gateway CAP and RAP failures
Similarly, determine which users are getting CAP or RAP failures when trying to connect through a Remote Desktop Gateway
RDP login time reports
Integrate Remote Desktop Canary with Remote Desktop Commander to see login times richly visualized in detailed reports.

Be sure to learn more about why Remote Desktop Gateway CAP and RAP failure monitoring is so important.

Reporting by User or by Computer Just Got Even Easier With Quick Filtering

In previous versions of Remote Desktop Commander, if you wanted to filter a report by user(s) or computer(s), you would need to first define that filter. Only then could you apply it to limit the report’s data.

In Remote Desktop Commander v6+, when you select the “Run Report” button, the top selection allows you to select a time range but now also allows you to quickly pick users or computers you wish to filter by. This is a great new feature for larger environments as you can quickly investigate an issue happening on specific servers or to specific users.

Quick Filtering Makes Reporting By User or Computer Easier
Looking for data related to a few specific users or computers? Attach a quick filter to a report and immediately get only the data you need.

Do You Love Redlining Your RDS Session Hosts? Turbocharge Our New Agent Service.

We have added optimizations to the Version 6+ Remote Desktop Reporter Agent Service to help it run more efficiently on terminal servers under high CPU load. We call these optimizations “Turbo Mode,” and when enabled, it makes our agent service yield less of the CPU when collecting new data. This may result in slightly higher CPU consumption on the session host, but on a highly tasked session host, this setting may be required in order for our software to timely collect and transfer agent data back to the master Remote Desktop Reporter Service.

If you wish to enable “Turbo Mode,” first install or upgrade our agent service on your hosts to Version 6. You can do that by running the new agent installer package located under \Program Files (x86)\RDPSoft\Remote Desktop Commander\AgentInstaller on your hosts, exactly as you have done before during prior upgrades. The new agent installer will upgrade any older version of the agent service to the new version in place.

Once that is done, if you wish, you can reconfigure the new agents on your hosts to use Turbo Mode by running the Polling Rate & Agent Tuning Wizard in the Remote Desktop Commander Configuration Tool, like so:

Turbocharge Our Agent's Data Collection

You Can Now Disable the Capture of Certain RDS Related Metrics

Organizations with very limited SQL database space or massive RDS deployments can now instruct the Remote Desktop Reporter Service to NOT capture certain types of metrics from hosts during polling. In general, we recommend that you do not disable specific metric captures unless absolutely required, as this will result in some reports and dashboards showing incomplete or missing data. That said, disabling some or all of these metrics can result in faster polling of servers and a reduction of data in your database. There are also specific use cases where this may be beneficial, such as in organizations who only use Remote Desktop Commander for user activity monitoring time tracking, but nothing else.

Disable the capture of metrics to reduce database space
You can now disable the capture of specific metrics to reduce database space

Get a Speed Boost When Managing Extremely Large Session Collections

In version 6.0+ of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite AND Remote Desktop Commander Lite (with or without Premium Management Features), we have optimized some of the algorithms that collect user session and process information. As a result, retrieving or refreshing sessions from RDS collections with 50 or more hosts now can see a 30-50% speed increase.

For example, in our benchmark tests, listing data from 500 user sessions connected to 100 RDS hosts now takes only 11 seconds, down from 20 seconds plus previously. In addition, we have added safeguards to prevent accidental thread reentrance, which in rare cases could cause additional slowdowns.

Enumerate user sessions and processes faster
Have massive RDS collections (e.g. 100+ session hosts)? Version 6.0 speeds up the retrieval of user sessions and processes.

Need to Monitor Your Connection Brokers?  Want To Add Remote Desktop Canary Licensing?

If you need to increase your server license count to begin monitoring connection brokers, or if you’d like to add Remote Desktop Canary licenses (or convert to our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS), please reach out to us via our sales form. We will contact you promptly to ascertain your needs and then present you with the most cost effective way to augment your licensing.

Our Own CEO Andy Milford Presented Two Sessions at Techmentor Redmond 2022

Techmentor 2022 was back live and in person at Microsoft’s Headquarters in Redmond, WA from August 8th-12th, 2022. Andy presented two different sessions there on topics that will be of interest to you:

  • TH14 – Azure Virtual Desktop: Is It Worth the Hype and Cost (75 minutes)
  • TF02 – Dont Get RDPwned: Everything Remote Desktop Security (Full Day Workshop)

The first session, which focused on all the hype around Azure Virtual Desktop, broke out in a brutally honest fashion whether or not AVD makes sense when compared to RDS for your organization. Be sure to check out RDPSoft’s AVD Resource Center for some related insights.

The second session was an eight hour deep dive on how to properly secure your RDS environment so you don’t get “RDPwned” and “ransomwared” by hackers. This full day session was anchored around the material in Andy’s previously published RDPwned book. Be sure to pick up your copy.

Remote Desktop Commander 6.0 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 the client.  Then install it over your previous version.

Or, learn more about:

  • The Remote Desktop Commander Suite, including its feature set and how to start a subscription.
  • Our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS, including all the products included and how to start a subscription.
  • Our Premium Management Features, including its feature set and how to start a subscription per named admin or technician per year.

Finally, you can also request a web demo with an RDPSoft solutions expert to see all our solutions’ features in depth.

Updated: January 2023.

Filed Under: Citrix Edgesight Replacement, Performance, Remote Desktop Monitoring, Remote Desktop Performance, Remote Desktop Protocol, Remote Desktop Reporting, Software Releases, Synthetic RDP, Terminal Server Logging, Terminal Server Monitoring Tagged With: connection broker monitoring, gateway monitoring, rdp login times, rds deployment monitoring, rds login times

Trackbacks

  1. Remote Desktop Connection Broker Monitoring | RDPSoft says:
    May 25, 2022 at 12:56 pm

    […] Remote Desktop Commander 6.0, we introduced a new Top Level Deployment Dashboard which displays the health of all of your Remote […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Email
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Not Sure Where To Start?

In just a few moments, you can find the right fit of solutions and even services for your needs.

> Get Going Now.

Help Documents

Remote Desktop Commander
Help and Users Guide
Release Notes (ver 6.x)

Sign Up for Remote Desktop Tips and RDPSoft Updates

Blog Topic Categories

  • Azure RemoteApp
  • Azure Virtual Desktop
  • citrix edgesight
  • Citrix Edgesight Replacement
  • Citrix Shadowing
  • Cloud RDP Monitoring
  • Performance
  • RDP Disconnects
  • RDP Latency
  • RDP Login Time
  • RDP Login Tracking
  • RDP Logon Failure Tracking
  • RDP Logs
  • RDP Loss Rate
  • RDP Security
  • RDP Transmission Rate
  • RDS Infrastructure
  • RDS License Metering
  • RDS Licensing
  • Remote Desktop Bandwidth
  • Remote Desktop CPU
  • Remote Desktop Management
  • Remote Desktop Memory
  • Remote Desktop Memory Usage
  • Remote Desktop Monitoring
  • Remote Desktop Performance
  • Remote Desktop Protocol
  • Remote Desktop Reporting
  • Remote Desktop Security
  • Remote Desktop Services
  • Remote Desktop Services Free Tools
  • Remote Desktop Services Hotfix
  • Sensitive Data
  • Server 2012 TSAdmin Replacement
  • Shadow User
  • Software Releases
  • SPLA Reporting
  • Synthetic RDP
  • Telecommuting/Teleworking
  • Terminal Server Logging
  • Terminal Server Monitoring
  • Uncategorized
  • User Activity Monitoring
  • User Productivity
  • Windows 2008 Terminal Server
  • Windows Virtual Desktop
  • WVD Login Time
  • XenApp Monitoring
  • XenApp Reporting

Recent Posts

  • Remote Desktop Commander v6.5 Now Available!
  • AVD Monitoring: An Easy Step-By-Step Approach
  • Three Reasons Why You Need to Monitor CAP and RAP Failures On Your Remote Desktop Gateways
  • Remote Desktop Commander v6.0+ Highlights
  • Connection Broker Monitoring

From the RDPSoft Blog

  • Remote Desktop Commander v6.5 Now Available!
  • AVD Monitoring: An Easy Step-By-Step Approach
  • Three Reasons Why You Need to Monitor CAP and RAP Failures On Your Remote Desktop Gateways
  • Remote Desktop Commander v6.0+ Highlights
  • Connection Broker Monitoring
  • Email
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

We Do “Single Pane of Glass” Monitoring and Management for RDS

Top Level Deployment Dashboard

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 >

Reach Out

For fastest response, reach out via our sales and support contact forms.

Sales
US: 1-855-738-8457 x1
Outside the US: 1-702-749-4325 x1

Support
for Evaluators and Priority Support Customers
US: 1-855-738-8457 x2
Outside the US: 1-702-749-4325 x2

Copyright © 2013 - 2020 RDPSoft. All rights reserved. · RDPSoft is the sole authorized publisher and distributor of the following software titles: Remote Desktop Commander, Premium Management Features, Remote Desktop Canary · Sitemap