Greetings friends and current Remote Desktop Commander customers! We’ve just released Version 6.5 of our Remote Desktop Commander solution. This mid-cycle release version introduces new features such as a consolidated RDS Event Viewer and automatic adjustment of monitored session hosts via broker consultation.
[Read more…]Remote Desktop Commander v6.0+ Highlights
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.
Remote Desktop Commander v5.0 Highlights
Version 5.0+ of the Remote Desktop Commander and Premium Management Features solutions offers something for everyone – whether you use our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite Client, or you have a license for our commercial products. For instance:
- The Remote Desktop Commander Suite now includes a brand new dashboard and report to track CPU usage by application, plus a new Agent Tuning Wizard and Agent Polling Diagnostics report.
- Our Premium Management Features overlay now offers the Client Side Connection Analyzer, which makes it very easy to troubleshoot RDP disconnects and other connection problems that your users experience on their Windows PCs.
- The Remote Desktop Commander Client now displays, sorts, and groups by user session connection time. [Read more…]
How To Easily Track Terminal Server CPU Usage By Application
The Remote Desktop Commander Suite introduced a new dashboard and report in version 5.0 that tracks terminal server CPU usage by application.
That was a significant development, because with that update – whether you run Remote Desktop Services (RDS), Citrix, or Windows Virtual Desktop – figuring out which programs are taxing processor time is now only a single click away.
[Read more…]Remote Desktop Performance: Key Metrics to Watch
So, you’ve implemented a brand new Remote Desktop Services (RDS) or Citrix XenDesktop farm. Now, you want to start monitoring different metrics to get a better handle on Remote Desktop performance in general or maybe determine which users and/or clients are the most costly in terms of resources used.
Here are the key remote desktop performance categories you need to keep an eye on, and why they’re so important:
CPU Usage
While RDS Dynamic Fair Share Scheduling (and the built in Citrix XenApp equivalents) help evenly distribute CPU load amongst “plain vanilla,” “task worker” user sessions, this technology is not a panacea. For some MSPs and on-premise Remote Desktop Services shops, some users will require a much larger share of CPU (implemented via the Windows System Resource Manager) in order to run their beefier software. In other situations, Dynamic Fair Share Scheduling may let you inadvertently stuff too many users on an existing virtual machine, because DFSS will dutily throttle available CPU down to the point where common tasks may take *forever* to complete. Therefore, it is still very important to look at remote desktop CPU consumption patterns by user, even down to the process level running in the user sessions.
Memory Usage
Unlike DFSS above, there is no way to throttle available remote desktop memory per user session, which makes it even more critical to monitor remote desktop memory consumption both by user session aggregate and on a per process basis. By analyzing memory use by user and by process, you can better optimize the farm, and/or silo certain users and/or applications on specific servers that are better provisioned for their memory needs.
Bandwidth Usage
We’ve written at length about Remote Desktop Bandwidth consumption here and here, but many admins continue to be surprised at how much bandwidth RDP or ICA can use, depending on how it has been configured. Remote Desktop Protocol Version 8 and higher can double, triple, or even quadruple bandwidth use in certain use cases when UDP is enabled alongside TCP for transport. Moreover, if you permit transfer of files and screenshots via cut and paste, bandwidth can be consumed in a hurry. Since this has a significant impact on the user experience for others if RDP usage saturates the external Internet link, it’s important to see which users consume the most bandwidth, and what they are doing when they consume it.
Connection Quality
If you’ve moved your RDS farm to Windows Server 2012 or later, you can now get a much greater handle on individual user session latency and “potentially available bandwidth” via new RemoteFX performance counters. This quickly lets you determine if user connection problems are on their end, or if many of your users are experiencing high latency due to a load or networking problem on your end. Unfortunately, these performance counters are not very easy to correlate with individual users, but fortunately, our Remote Desktop Commander Suite can do this automatically for you.
Leverage an Affordable Remote Desktop Performance Monitoring Solution
We’ve touched on four big remote desktop performance monitoring areas above. While Citrix provides some monitoring capabilities in its expensive, upper licensing tiers (via EdgeSight / Director), smaller shops running regular Microsoft Remote Desktop Services are not provided with built in monitoring tools, short of what an admin can script together with PowerShell. While you can look at upper tier monitoring solutions, the per concurrent user price of these tools are rather steep, especially as they are sold through the channel.
For only $9 per server per month, let our Remote Desktop Commander Suite offering monitor each of those areas for you.