Version 4.0 of our Remote Desktop Canary solution now offers an integrated Workflow Builder Wizard. This new wizard lets you set up synthetic login tests for your RDS collections and individual session hosts in AVD, Citrix, VMWare, and Parallels RAS in mere minutes. In addition, Canary v4 now offers the new Remote Desktop Canary Program Tester applet, which examines the internal text of launched applications, interpreting whether an app launch was successful. The Remote Desktop Canary Program Tester can even do this for apps with “hard to OCR” text. Plus, there are numerous other new features you will find useful.
In depth, this means that:
- It is now much easier to setup new types of Remote Desktop Canary synthetic login tests, or to reconfigure existing synthetic login tests. The Workflow Builder handles many of the little details, such as user account creation in the domain, login script assignment, and more.
- App testing is much more robust. Remote Desktop Canary can scan the text of an application’s title bar and/or internal window controls that indicate a successful launch, without being solely dependent on OCR.
- You can switch between two different types of lightweight RDP clients during testing for greater compatibility.
- You can now enable an “automatic retry” option when connections to RDS collections or session hosts timeout, which will reduce alert notifications for transient issues that self-correct on their own.
- Direct to session host tests no longer require admin rights – Remote Desktop Canary can configure permissions on the hosts to receive /admin style, non-redirected RDP connections from standard users.
In addition to discussing Canary v4’s new features, we also want to make you aware of some pricing changes that are coming over the next few weeks, and we invite you to contact us for an account review so we can make sure you’re receiving the most value from our solutions at the most affordable pricing.
In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:
All About the Time Saving Features of Remote Desktop Canary’s New Workflow Builder Wizard
Configuring the New Remote Desktop Canary Program Tester Applet for Advanced App Presence Testing
Other New Features in Remote Desktop Canary v4
New RDPSoft Product Pricing and a Special Offer
Existing Customers Can Test Drive Remote Desktop Canary v4 and Sysmundo for 14 Days
Microsoft Remote Desktop Services – Microsoft 365 Apps, Server vNext, and the Road Ahead
Version 4.0 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links
How Remote Desktop Canary’s New Workflow Builder Wizard Works
Since its introduction, Remote Desktop Canary has been a very affordable yet very powerful solution for keeping tabs on the uptime and responsiveness of your RDS, AVD and other EUC environments- whether it be through desktop testing, app testing, or a combination of both. That said, with power comes complexity, and that can increase the time and effort needed to properly configure our solution.
In Version 4, we worked hard to streamline all of the steps that an administrator would previously need to perform on their own when setting up synthetic testing with Canary, such as:
- Creating testing accounts in Active Directory,
- Querying connection brokers directly to import connection information for RDS collections automatically,
- Moving testing helper applets to the NETLOGON directory and assigning login scripts, and
- Setting permissions on individual hosts to enable synthetic RDP tests
Using the Workflow Builder Wizard while logged in as an admin inside your environment, as shown in the video above, takes care of all of these steps for you, and helps you set up synthetic login monitoring in your EUC environment in a matter of minutes. In a world of enterprise solutions that require multiple sessions with sales engineers to configure properly, isn’t it nice to have an “easy button” that helps you get started right out of the gate?
Test for Successful App Launches In More Scenarios With the New Remote Desktop Canary Program Tester Applet
In previous versions of Remote Desktop Canary, if you wanted to test whether or not an application could launch successfully, you needed to:
- Write a batch file that launched the program,
- Have Remote Desktop Canary attempt to look for text in the application using OCR matching of text on screen,
- Have the batch file logout the Canary testing session
Our customers reported that for certain applications, it could be tricky to consistently perform OCR tests against application text. So, in Canary v4, we created the Remote Desktop Canary Program Tester Applet to simplify things. This new Remote Desktop Canary Program Tester Applet:
- Allows you to select an application on a session host you wish to launch and pass any command line arguments to,
- Allows you to grab text from the program’s title bar, or from many types of internal window controls in the app (e.g. text boxes, etc),
- Prompts you to specify what text to match on, and whether or not you want to perform an exact or substring match,
- Asks you to specify the time you want to wait for the application to fully load with the targeted text displayed,
- If the application launches successfully with the targeted text, it displays an easy to OCR banner that Remote Desktop Canary can detect, and
- At the conclusion of testing, it completely logs out the test session in preparation for a subsequent test.
Other New Features In Remote Desktop Canary v4
We’ve added many other new features to Remote Desktop Canary v4 that we think you’ll enjoy. For instance:
- You can choose to perform synthetic login tests with two different versions of our lightweight RDP client. The legacy RDP client is selected by default, as it offers the most compatibility across the most environments and uses the fewest system resources.
- You can instruct Remote Desktop Canary to automatically retry failed connections to servers over RDP a certain number of times, before sending an alert email. This can reduce the number of email alerts in environments that periodically have transient connection or timeout issues.
- Remote Desktop Canary now fully supports mail servers that require TLS 1.2 for secure mail relay.
- You can now multi-edit the common properties (e.g. credentials, test frequency, alert recipients, OCR settings) for multiple synthetic tests at the same time, making reconfiguring a series of workflow tests super easy.
RDPSoft Pricing Changes
This month, we introduced a modest price increase (between 10 to 15%) across all of our product lines. Even though it seems that every other software vendor has been raising prices annually, we have not raised our prices since the summer of 2021, and this new price increase reflects all the additional features and products we’ve added to our offering in that two-and-a-half-year span. Even with this small price increase, we remain the most competitively priced total solution for RDS, Citrix, Parallels RAS, and AVD monitoring and management in the market. You can review the new pricing at the product pages below:
- Remote Desktop Commander Suite
- Premium Management Features
- Remote Desktop Canary
- Sysmundo
- Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS and AVD
That said, we encourage any customer to contact us to schedule an account review using our sales contact form if they would like to. An account review can help you better understand the products you are using and are entitled to, and the various licensing options and pricing tiers available to you, to ensure that you are receiving maximum value at the lowest possible cost. For example, monthly subscription customers can convert to an annual subscription to save money, or single product users can upgrade to our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle to gain access to many more features for a very small increase in cost.
Existing customers can expect to see these modest price increases take effect on their upcoming monthly or annual subscription rebill & renewal dates soon. Again, please reach out to us for an account review if you wish, and we’ll be happy to help you maximize the value and benefit of your subscriptions with us.
Existing Customer? Sign Up Now for a Complimentary Trial of Remote Desktop Canary v4 and Sysmundo.
Are you an existing customer of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite or Premium Management Features solutions? Would you like to try out either version 4 of Remote Desktop Canary, or Sysmundo, our brand new digital forensics and incident response tool that helps you pinpoint bad (or malware) behavior on your Windows servers? We’d love to have you test drive either or both solutions. To do so, please go to our Request a Demo form, and in the comments, indicate that you’re an existing customer and the solutions you want to try. We’ll reply back with 14-day trial licensing.
Both Remote Desktop Canary and Sysmundo come as part of our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS and AVD, which doesn’t cost much more than our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution by itself. So if you wish to add either product to your RDS monitoring stack, you can be assured that it won’t dent your IT budget.
Microsoft Remote Desktop Services – M365 Apps Support and the Road Ahead
If you follow our CEO Andy Milford’s Twitter feed, or his articles on his PureRDS.org blog, or his videos on his RDPHard Youtube channel, you’ve probably seen him express plenty of skepticism and criticism towards Microsoft’s “one size fits all” push for organizations to move all IT assets (including RDS) up to Azure and Azure Virtual Desktop. As Andy has mentioned many times, pure cloud approaches often increase IT costs drastically and can cause migration nightmares during the “lift and shift” process. He continues to counsel a hybrid cloud / private datacenter approach, especially for static RDS workloads whose user counts stay consistent from month to month.
As a result, he was very pleased to see Microsoft make a renewed commitment to RDS in the next upcoming version of Windows Server (vNext). Microsoft announced during Ignite a few weeks ago that Remote Desktop Services will remain in the next version of Windows Server, that they will be bringing GPU partitioning (GPU-P) back to Windows Server, and that they will also guarantee Microsoft 365 Apps support on the next version of Windows Server, all the way out to 2029. For more information about these developments, and to watch one of Andy’s latest videos on this topic, please visit his PureRDS.org blog article here.
Remote Desktop Canary 4.0 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links
To purchase Remote Desktop Canary online, please review our licensing model here, and choose the workflow quantity that meets your needs. If you have more than 50 RDS servers or AVD/Parallels RAS/Citrix hosts, please click here to request a quote.
Request a web demo with an RDPSoft solutions expert to see all our solutions’ features in depth.
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