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Remote Desktop Canary v2.3 Now Available!

September 30, 2020 By admin Leave a Comment

Greetings friends and current RDPSoft customers!  We’ve just released Version 2.3 of Remote Desktop Canary, our synthetic RDP and WVD monitoring and alerting workhorse.  This new version offers:

  • WVD support.  Whether you’re still using WVD classic (e.g. Fall 2019 Mode), or you’ve migrated over to WVD in ARM mode (e.g. the Spring 2020 Update), Remote Desktop Canary now supports WVD.
  • An enhanced workflow cloning wizard.  Now, if you want to test each of your session hosts or WVD hosts “all the way to the desktop” using OCR event detection, our new wizard duplicates your test settings across all of your hosts in one easy step.
  • We’ve improved our OCR alerting engine, so if specific text you are screening for is not seen within a certain number of seconds, Canary’s email alert will include all of the screenshots during the login sequence.  As a result, you will immediately see if the login attempt has stalled while loading user profiles/FSLogix, encountered a black screen, or encountered another issue.

We’re also excited to announce that you can now purchase Remote Desktop Canary as part of our brand new Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS and WVD!  Please read on for more details.

In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:

Remote Desktop Canary Now Supports WVD

New Workflow Cloning Options

New Login Sequence Screenshot Playback With OCR Alerts

The Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS and WVD

Version 2.3 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

Windows Virtual Desktop Support in Remote Desktop Canary

Set up comprehensive synthetic Windows Virtual Desktop login tests in a matter of minutes with Remote Desktop Canary

Some organizations are starting to look towards migrating to Windows Virtual Desktop in Microsoft Azure as their end user computing platform. As one of the Microsoft’s original WVD partners, RDPSoft is committed to supporting WVD throughout our product line. Most recently, we have now added support for WVD within Remote Desktop Canary.

Whether or not you are still running Windows Virtual Desktop in Fall 2019 (Classic) mode, or have migrated to the new ARM-based WVD model (Spring Update), Remote Desktop Canary supports both versions.

Since WVD now takes care of infrastructure components for you (e.g. brokering sessions on to hosts, providing a gateway that routes incoming connections into your hostpools in Azure, etc), Remote Desktop Canary’s value rests in testing each of your individual WVD hosts to make sure they are responding properly and can serve up a desktop quickly. Remember, issues with user profiles, FSLogix, and other components can turn session hosts sluggish, resulting in slow login times, and these sorts of issues cannot necessarily be deduced by WVD diagnostics information alone.

By building a “direct to server” workflow test against one of your WVD hosts, and then using our new cloning wizard (see below) to replicate that test across all of your different hosts, you can quickly set up an entire testing regime to keep eyes on each host’s responsiveness.

Moreover, with Remote Desktop Canary’s scriptable command line interface, you can schedule routine early morning “sanity checks” to make sure your WVD hosts are now up and online, especially if you have already established scaling automation to shutdown hosts and spin them back up each day as your users start to log back in.

Workflow Cloning Improvements

In initial versions of Remote Desktop Canary, cloning was done one workflow at a time. However, many of our users expressed interest in doing scheduled or routine RDP login testing of ALL of their RDS session hosts and/or WVD hosts individually. In order to make this easy, we have expanded our cloning feature so that you can define a synthetic login test for a single RDS or WVD session host, but then rapidly duplicate that test across many different servers from your Active Directory or WVD hosts in your Azure resource group.

Quickly clone an existing “single host” RDP synthetic login test to many different hosts in your domain or WVD tenant

To perform this type of cloning operation, simply:

  • Define a workflow synthetic RDP login test against one of your RDS servers or WVD hosts.
  • Test it to make sure it works exactly the way you want it to.
  • Select the workflow, and press the “Clone” button.
  • Use the wizard to select additional terminal servers or WVD hosts from your Active Directory or Azure Resource Group.

Remote Desktop Canary will then replicate your testing settings against all of the selected hosts, creating a new workflow testing entry for each host. That’s all there is to it!

If Canary Cannot Login and Access a Full Remote Desktop Quickly, You’ll Now See What Happened Via a Full Login Sequence Playback

Since the release of Remote Desktop Canary version 2.0, more and more of our users have started using OCR event detection to be notified if it takes too long for a user’s desktop to appear in a Remote Desktop session.

In previous versions of Canary, if specific OCR text was not detected within a certain time period, an email alert would be logged stating this fact. Now, in Version 2.3, we have expanded these email alerts to include all of the periodic screenshots Remote Desktop Canary captured during the login sequence.

Remote Desktop Canary will now show you exactly what the login sequence looked like when a desktop could not be loaded in a timely manner. Was it a black screen? Or a roaming profile/FSLogix problem?

Thanks to this login sequence playback with screenshots, a support desk worker or admin can immediately see the likely cause of the delay when loading a desktop, such as roaming profile problems, FSLogix initialization issues, or the dreaded black screen during login.

The Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS and WVD

Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS and WVD

At RDPSoft, we’re constantly seeking ways to deliver more features and more value to our clients, at an unbelievable price point. In furtherance of that goal, we have now released the Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS and WVD. Starting at only $16.99 per server per month or $185.99 per server per year – with a 3 server purchase minimum and volume discounts available – you gain access to all three of our products, including Remote Desktop Canary!

Even better, if you’ve deployed or are getting ready to deploy WVD, we have a special promotion for you on this Complete Bundle, but act fast, as it goes away on December 31st, 2020.

Please contact our sales department for a quote if you’re an existing customer who would like to upgrade to this new offer, OR if you use our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite tool and would now like to obtain full monitoring and management capabilities for your RDS or WVD deployment. Just mention you’re interested in our new “Complete Bundle” when you fill out the form.

Remote Desktop Canary 2.3 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

If you are an existing Remote Desktop Canary subscription licensee and/or active maintenance agreement holder, click here to request upgrade instructions.

If you’d like to learn more about Remote Desktop Canary, including its feature set and how to start a subscription immediately, click here. 

If you’d like to learn more about our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle For RDS and WVD, click here.

Request a web demo with an RDPSoft solutions expert to see all our solutions’ features in depth.

Filed Under: Cloud RDP Monitoring, RDP Login Time, Remote Desktop Performance, Software Releases, Synthetic RDP, Terminal Server Monitoring, Windows Virtual Desktop, WVD Login Time Tagged With: rdp login time, rdp logon time, rds farm health, remote desktop services uptime, terminal server login time, terminal server logon time, windows virtual desktop, WVD, wvd host health, wvd login time, wvd logon time, wvd uptime

Flexible Licensing for RDS Tools

December 14, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

Years ago, we launched a flexible month-to-month subscription licensing program for our Remote Desktop Commander Suite, and the result was phenomenal. The traditional channel-driven, expensive perpetual licensing models used by our competition were simply making less and less sense.

While occasionally we offer promotions, you can always count on this: We offer month-to-month licensing that starts at less than $10 per RDS/XenApp server per month, and at about a $1 per virtual desktop/physical workstation.

For more details, check out our pricing for Remote Desktop Commander.

RDS Tools for Specific Tasks . . . And Within Reach

Small and medium-sized businesses who run server-based computing farms designed around Microsoft Remote Desktop Services or Citrix XenApp continue to enthusiastically embrace our licensing model, thrilled to finally have reliable tools that cover areas like:

  • User activity monitoring
  • Remote Desktop connection logging
  • Remote Desktop session management

. . . and the little features that help with things like enabling Remote Desktop remotely and the demystification of RDP logs.

All with so little additional cost.

Not sure where to start? Determine what your needs are for RDS tools or Learn more about Remote Desktop Commander Suite and its many features.

Updated: January 2021.

Filed Under: Cloud RDP Monitoring, Performance, Remote Desktop Memory Usage, Remote Desktop Protocol, Remote Desktop Reporting, Remote Desktop Services, Terminal Server Monitoring, Uncategorized, XenApp Monitoring, XenApp Reporting Tagged With: RDP monitoring, RDS monitoring, Terminal Server monitoring, XenApp monitoring

RDP Latency – Yes, Virginia, You Can Track It Now…

September 2, 2015 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

RDP Latency IS Now Trackable in Windows Server 2012

Several weeks ago, I gave a really fun talk at BriForum about the hidden benefits found inside Version 8 of the Remote Desktop Protocol – specifically, the fact that for any given RDP 8 connections to a Windows Server 2012 (or Windows 8) system, you can now track things like session latency, data throughput, assessed bandwidth, error rates, and much more. Provided you know which performance counters to query and how to query them.

The big catch here is not on the client side – you can get Windows 7 updated to use RDP Version 8, and Windows 8 and Windows 10 already run it natively. Plus, most thin clients (the good ones anyway) now support RDP 8.

No, the challenge is on the server side. Each week I talk to evaluators of our tools and ask them what server platform they’re running. Inevitably, the majority seem to answer Windows 2008 R2. Yes, I get it. Windows 2008 still gives you that nice Start Menu that your users know and love. But, to be frank, RDP Version 7 (which is what Windows 2008 uses) stinks when compared to RDP 8.

Why is Version 8 So Awesome For Higher RDP Latency Connections?

Two words: UDP transport. Yep, Microsoft’s RDS gurus REALLY did things right in RDP 8. By default, unless you disable it intentionally or unintentionally (more on that in a later blog article), RDP 8 uses both TCP AND UDP to serve up remote desktops to your clients. I won’t bore you to tears with the internal mechanics, but the key takeaway is this – on marginal, high latency connections (e.g. spotty Wifi, 4G mobile hotspots, overseas WAN links, or satellite), adaptive UDP transport overcomes much of the inherent “guaranteed delivery” limitations of TCP. In doing so, it effectively can increase data throughput from 3x to 10x over previous RDP versions, all while improving the responsiveness experienced by clients interacting with their sessions.

So Beyond Improved RDP Throughput and Responsiveness, Why Should I Upgrade to Windows 2012 Server?

Good question. Because once you do, you can use our software to track every aspect of network connection quality between your RDS servers and your client sessions, whether you want to do it in realtime, or via leveraging the ever expanding set of reports we’re creating. Seriously, what we can do with this information is awesome – it lets you, the admin, get in front of those annoying damn calls from users kvetching about how the connection is dropping, or their screen updates are too slow – etc. See for yourself by watching this video we just recorded showing these features in action:

Tracking RDP Latency and Connection Quality With Remote Desktop Commander

 

That is really awesome stuff. And I have some Windows 2012 servers already deployed. How can I get a copy of your software to profile my users’ RDP latency and connection quality?

That’s super easy – simply start a monthly subscription of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite for only $9 per server per month. For this extremely affordable monthly rate, you can track RDP latency, RDP bandwidth consumption, CPU and memory consumption by session, plus review detailed session recordings for root cause RDS performance problem analysis and/or terminal server user auditing.

We haven’t rolled on Windows Server 2012 yet. We may wait for Windows Server 2016 next year. Is there anything in the meantime we can do to get some of this information?

Absolutely. Stand up at least one Windows Server 2012 instance in your farm, populate it with the same apps/desktop environments your users need, and then send your “problem children” clients directly over to the Windows 2012 server. If you do that, you can use our software to keep tabs on their connection quality, PLUS they’ll be able to leverage the awesome UDP transport offered by RDP 8.

Filed Under: Cloud RDP Monitoring, Performance, RDP Latency, Remote Desktop Bandwidth, Remote Desktop Protocol, Remote Desktop Reporting, Terminal Server Logging, Terminal Server Monitoring Tagged With: RDP Latency

SaaS Over Remote Desktop: License and Resource Metering Techniques

December 30, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

Believe it or not, there’s a nice sized portion of SaaS vendors in the marketplace that are delivering their SaaS applications to clients over RDS (Remote Desktop Services) as opposed to the Web.

Why Remote Desktop and RemoteApp?

There are several reasons many software vendors choose remote desktop (or RDS) and RemoteApp as the mechanism by which to provide their software as a service over the Internet. Here are the big reasons:

  • Inherent limitations in building a web application with a consistent, rich, and responsive user interface.
  • Additional development and QA costs associated with web apps.
  • The costs to migrate an existing non-Internet based application.
  • Security considerations.

But Don’t Forget License and Resource Metering

As we do more and more business with “Saas over Remote Desktop” vendors, one of the biggest problems we see them experience is license and resource metering.

SaaS vendors using remote desktop have some numbers to crunch.
If you’re an SaaS vendor using Remote Desktop to deliver your application, you’ve got some numbers to crunch when it comes to license metering.

It’s one thing to develop and bring a SaaS application to market.  It’s quite another to figure out how to:

  • Capacity plan for additional hardware / virtualized servers in your server farm as your client base grows.
  • Attribute costs of business to specific clients (How much bandwidth/memory do they use?).
  • Reliably meter client usage of your application for billing purposes . . . and to know when to bump your clients up to the next subscription level based on that usage.

. . . or the Bottom Line

We then help SaaS vendors solve those very problems. As an aggregator of Remote Desktop Session metrics, our Remote Desktop Reporter solution is being used to produce lots of different reports that help a SaaS vendor stay on top of client license and resource usage, and in turn, significantly improve their bottom line.

Some of those metrics include:

  • RDP bandwidth by user.
  • Peak concurrent sessions by server and/or by user.
  • Distinct RDS users by time period.
  • Total time by RDS user.
  • Specific application use by user.

Are You a SaaS Vendor in a Similar Situation?

We can provide a web demonstration of how to configure our software and establish these reports. Reach out to us here or message us on Twitter @RDPSoft.

Or, post a question below and continue the discussion!

Filed Under: Cloud RDP Monitoring, RDS License Metering, Remote Desktop Bandwidth, Remote Desktop Reporting, Terminal Server Logging, Terminal Server Monitoring Tagged With: license metering, remote desktop, resource metering, SaaS

Windows Azure RDP Monitoring, Cloud RDP Monitoring

November 1, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

More and more frequently, we’re hearing from clients who need to RDP Monitoring and Terminal Server Monitoring on their virtual servers located in the cloud.  When a company elects to adopt Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), making sure that activity on the virtual server gets monitored is paramount.

For new and startup businesses, IaaS makes a lot of sense, as it allows them to effectively lease at a low rate both the hardware and personnel required to service the machines running their mission critical applications and services, freeing them up to focus on expanding their core business.  It also lessens the pain of making their workforce truly global; they can quickly spin up a few virtual machine images, load critical software on the virtual machines, and provide access to offshore workers as needed.

One of the key facilitating technologies that allows this all to happen is the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).  As not all businesses can leverage web-based access to their products and services, RDP becomes very important, as it allows access to rich-client applications over the Internet.  Therefore, it’s no surprise that one of the default protocols enabled on a freshly provisioned Windows Azure virtual machine is in fact RDP.  RDP has become the de facto method of administering and working inside cloud-based Virtual Machines.

Having a reliable way to measure how employees and customers connect, work, and interact in their remote desktop sessions is vital.  Sadly, most “cloud-based monitoring” vendors completely ignore this aspect of monitoring.  Instead, they are focused on the broader, anonymous metrics associated with end user and general performance monitoring.  These solutions can verify if the servers in the cloud are up and running, and the level of load they are under, but cannot tell you who specifically is connected to them, and how they are working inside them.

Therefore, tools like our Remote Desktop Reporter become absolutely critical.  First, it’s important to note that Remote Desktop Reporter can be deployed directly inside cloud-based Virtual Machines – we’ve tested it successfully on stock Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 images provided by Windows Azure.  More importantly, once deployed, management and IT can gain key insight into how customers and employees are accessing mission-critical servers – for instance, they can find out how long their sessions run, how active they are in their sessions, how much bandwidth they consume in their sessions, and the type and quantity of applications they run.  They can also derive information such as the names of unique users that visit the server each day, and the peak number of concurrent users connecting to the server each day, week, or month.  The latter especially is of tremendous value to businesses that license access to applications and services based on inbound RDP connections.

So, whether you’re brand new to the “cloud,” or are greatly expanding your mission critical business infrastructure into a cloud services partner, don’t forget to budget for an RDP monitoring and management solution like Remote Desktop Reporter.  We know you’ll be glad you did.

 

Filed Under: Cloud RDP Monitoring

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Recent Posts

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From the RDPSoft Blog

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RDPSoft’s Service Provider Licensing Tracker (SPL Tracker) keeps track of SPLA licensing on various shared … Learn more about SPL Tracker >

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