Remote Desktop User Activity Monitoring

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.

Remote Desktop User Activity Monitoring – Soft Auditing

In this use case, an organization uses Microsoft RDS session hosts, Parallels RAS session hosts, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) hosts, or Citrix session hosts to provide session-based workspaces for its employees. Management requests a “soft audit” of routine teleworker activity on a daily and weekly basis to correlate remote work with the hours that employees should be working when working remotely.

In this scenario, our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution can be deployed to collect user activity time tracking data, such as total session time, total idle time, total disconnected time, and calculated active time. User session data can be collected remotely over the network from a VM hosting our software without the need to install any software on the session hosts, and then aggregated into user time tracking reports like so:

Note that we offer even more helpful information related to performing these kinds of “soft audits” in another article on viewing Remote Desktop sessions.

Remote Desktop User Activity Monitoring – Intensive Auditing

Of course, for more highly regulated industries, or special HR scenarios, more intensive user activity monitoring may be warranted – going well beyond the basic need to simply view Remote Desktop sessions. In this case, the Remote Desktop Commander Suite server-side agent can be deployed on all Microsoft Remote Desktop session hosts, Citrix session hosts, Parallels RAS hosts, or Azure Virtual Desktop hosts.  Then, Remote Desktop Commander can be configured to do periodic screen captures, plus capture detailed information regarding program window captions and websites visited, inbound/outbound UDP/TCP activity, and program use, as shown in the images below.  Intensive auditing is a great way to defeat more recent USB-based “mouse jiggler” devices that some unscrupulous workers may attempt to trick idle time measurements.  When screen shots are recorded, it becomes obvious when a user isn’t actually performing work, even if a “mouse jiggler” is keeping a session active.

All of the above reports can be run manually, or scheduled to run daily, weekly, or monthly with a corresponding look back history. Managers and other key stakeholders can receive key user activity reports in their inbox each morning as required, and these reports can further be filtered dynamically to only include their direct reports as desired.

Live RDP Session Monitoring

In some cases, managers may need the ability to do “live” or “spot check” RDP session monitoring of multiple user sessions from different Microsoft RDS session hosts, Citrix hosts, Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts, or on-premises physical workstations all at once. Fortunately, the newer shadowing and remote assistance architecture integrated into Windows Server 2012, Server 2016, Server 2019, Server 2022, Server 2025, Windows 10 and Windows 11 makes this possible. Using our Premium Management Features companion product, a manager can keep an eye on multiple user sessions at once, no matter the system they are connected to, and zoom in/out to observe user activity tacitly in the background.

VDI and Corporate Workstation User Activity Monitoring

Of course, all of the above scenarios can be replicated if you also need to monitor VDI VMs or physical workstations located inside your corporate network or datacenter. The Remote Desktop Commander agent can be deployed in the exact same manner, and once it has been so deployed, you can conduct both soft audits and hard audits of user activity in these environments as well.

Integrated SQL Server Express 2025

Version 8 of Remote Desktop Commander Suite currently ships with SQL Express 2025, which now includes up to 50GBs of storage.  This level of storage, plus our software’s tunable parameters for database retention and maintenance, makes our software ideal for SMB companies.  However, if you have an even larger environment, you can also use the full version of SQL Server, or Azure SQL, should you wish to.

Don’t Break the Bank To Monitor Remote Desktop User Sessions

The assumption is that this kind of capability is costly. Many companies that specialize in user activity monitoring price their tools between $500 and $1000 a server per year, or $180 per user per year, which is cost prohibitive for most SMB organizations.  Our solutions, in contrast, start at only $135.99 per RDS, AVD, Citrix, or Parallels RAS multi-user host per year, or $12.99 per host per month, with volume discounts available.  Consequently, we’ve made it far more cost effective to start auditing user sessions in your organization.

One of the best bonuses when comparing our solutions to competing ones focused solely on user activity monitoring is that our tools also monitor so much else on your Microsoft RDS, AVD, Citrix, or Parallels RAS environment, such as performance, digital employee experience (DEX), licensing, network connection quality, client endpoint issues, and so much more.  In this way, we deliver even more value than our competitors.

Interested? Find out even more about the features of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite or look into pricing for a monthly subscription.  Or better yet, reach out to our sales team to schedule a live demo, where you can learn more about all of the capabilities of our solutions.

Updated: April 2026.