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Remote Desktop Commander v6 Sneak Peek

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Greetings, friends and customers! For our U.S. based customers, we hope you enjoyed a great Thanksgiving holiday last week.

We wrote this blog post to give you a quick update on development progress in Remote Desktop Commander v6, which will be released in Q1 of 2022. Read on to learn how you can participate as a beta tester for this new version. Also, if you are a user of our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite tool, read on to learn about a special promotion available to you if you start a monthly subscription with us before December 31, 2021.

In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:

Remote Desktop Commander Version v6 Sneak Peek and Beta Signup Link

End of Year Promotion for New Customers Who Start a Monthly Subscription

Remote Desktop Commander Version 6 Sneak Peak

First of all, a big thank you to all of our customers who participated in our product feature survey we sent out a few months ago, and congratulations to James W., our winner of the randomly drawn $150 Amazon Gift Card. Based on your feedback, the biggest need identified was a comprehensive, top level dashboard displaying the health of your RDS deployment. So that’s what we’ve been hard at work on, and that’s what will be the cornerstone feature of our upcoming Version 6 release.

While currently a work in progress, the Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard will show you things like login times monitored by Remote Desktop Canary, Remote Desktop Gateway health, Remote Desktop Connection Broker health, and the health of your various RDS collections and AVD host pools.

Version 6 of Remote Desktop Commander will offer better integration with Remote Desktop Canary databases so you can see recent login durations and errors directly atop the new dashboard. The health status of your Remote Desktop Gateway servers and Connection Brokers will also be displayed, in terms of whether or not those infrastructure services are running, their CPU and memory loads, connection statistics, database response times, etc. Finally, you can see the general health of specific collections and host pools in your RDS and AVD deployments, in terms of things like CPU/Memory load, session counts, average sessions per host, latency, and user input delay.

Clicking on specific subitems in the dashboard will in turn launch other dashboards and reports so you can quickly drill into areas of interest for a closer inspection.

Furthermore, Remote Desktop Commander v6 will offer additional new reports related to Remote Desktop Gateways and Connection Brokers, such as connection statistics, reason for connection failures, connection broker database responsiveness, and other metrics.

We’d love for you to participate in a beta of Remote Desktop Commander v6 once it is ready. To do so, please sign up here and we’ll notify you when the beta becomes available.

20% Off For New Customers Who Start a Monthly Subscription

We have many customers worldwide who currently use one of our commercial tools (Remote Desktop Commander Suite, Remote Desktop Canary, Premium Management Features) for monitoring their Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) environments. We have an even larger user base who utilizes our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite solution to do basic user session management in RDS and AVD. We greatly appreciate both of these groups, as they are the reason for our success.

If you’re in the latter category, but have contemplated a move to one or more of our commercial RDS and AVD monitoring tools, please go here to request a quote and mention that you want your special 20% off coupon code to start a monthly subscription with us. We’ll write back with your coupon code and we’ll also do a quick needs assessment before your purchase to make sure you order exactly what you need. Here are the details of the promotion:

  • You must be a new customer who is not currently licensing the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, Remote Desktop Canary, or Premium Management Features applications from us.
  • The offer applies to monthly subscriptions only (not annual subscriptions)
  • The discount applies to the first 3 months of the subscription, at which point the price will revert to the regular price.
  • You must sign up for a monthly subscription on or before December 31st, 2021.

Whether you have a limited time need or ongoing need for comprehensive RDS/AVD monitoring and management, this promotion is a great way to get started.

Remote Desktop Monitoring as a Service

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Greetings everyone. I’m excited to tell you about a brand new feature we’ve added to Version 3 of our Remote Desktop Canary product, which is its ability to perform Remote Desktop Monitoring as a Service (RDMaaS).

We have spent months rearchitecting Remote Desktop Canary to run as a Windows service application, so you can now set it up on a virtual machine (running inside or outside your networks) to monitor RDP, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Remote Desktop Services connectivity and login times on a continual or scheduled basis. If the VM Remote Desktop Canary runs on is restarted – to apply updates or for any other reason – it will now restart its testing processes automatically, in accordance with the schedule you have designed.

Please watch the two videos below – make sure to expand to full screen, and change your YouTube settings to view them in high resolution. Then, read on below to learn even more about these features.

Learn how to configure Remote Desktop Canary’s service with a user account that it can utilize to spin up Remote Desktop Monitoring tests.
Remote Desktop Canary v3 is now a true Remote Desktop Monitoring as a Service solution!

Remote Desktop Canary, With Its New RDP Monitoring as a Service Capability, Is Now a True Set and Forget Monitoring Solution for RDS and AVD

Because Remote Desktop Canary now operates as a service, you can program exactly the types of tests (basic RDP connectivity checks, total login duration checks, etc.) that you want to run against individual Remote Desktop Session Hosts, Azure Virtual Desktop Hosts, or even full RDS collections. Then, you can rest easy knowing that the Remote Desktop Canary service will perform the tests you want around the clock, according to the schedule you have defined.

Even if the Windows Server VM you have installed Remote Desktop Canary on is rebooted due to Windows updates, patching, or other maintenance tasks, Remote Desktop Canary will pick right back up where it left off, based on its testing schedule.

New Scheduling Features Let You Stop Synthetic RDP and Azure Virtual Desktop Login Tests During Maintenance Periods

Many organizations do nightly or weekly reboots of their Remote Desktop Servers to improve reliability and make sure necessary Windows updates are applied. You can easily plan around those timeframes with the Remote Desktop Canary 3.0’s new scheduling engine.

Similarly, if you run Azure Virtual Desktop, you are probably shutting some of your AVD hosts down at non-peak times to save money. You can now have Remote Desktop Canary stop monitoring certain hosts in the evening, and then resume monitoring in the morning.

Even more importantly, you can now schedule a separate “sanity check” test to make sure all of your AVD hosts or RDS session hosts are fully responding and providing desktops each morning – which is critically important if you leverage FSLogix, or other user profile management solutions, that could fail to load if Azure Files or other required Azure services are offline. We’ve even heard of the Azure Virtual Machines themselves not loading properly after a cold start in the morning, but Remote Desktop Canary will sound the alarm if any of them are unresponsive, alerting you to the issue ahead of time, allowing you to fix an issue before the morning login storm of users.

Learn More About Remote Desktop Canary’s Features, Pricing, and How to Start a Monthly or Annual Subscription

Remote Desktop Canary can be purchased separately or as part of our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS and AVD.

Have more questions or want to schedule a demo of its capabilities over Zoom? Please reach out to our sales team today.

From the RDPSoft Blog

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