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Remote Desktop Commander v5.1 Now Available!

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Greetings friends and current Remote Desktop Commander customers!  We’ve just released Version 5.1 of our Remote Desktop Commander Lite, Premium Management Features, and Remote Desktop Commander Suite solutions.  While largely a maintenance release, Version 5.1 introduces a new Drain Mode Helper for RDS collections and AVD hostpools – and this feature is available in both the free Remote Desktop Commander Lite and commercial Premium Management Features and Remote Desktop Commander Suite releases.  In addition to this new feature, Version 5.1 offers some performance enhancements and improvements to the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Premium Management Features solutions:

  • The Remote Desktop Reporter Service has been further optimized for larger environments.  Specifically, SQL query improvements have been made to reduce locking and waits when inserting lots of agent data.
  • The new CPU Usage By Application Dashboard has been optimized for larger environments, so that it loads relevant data faster.
  • Areas of the software that research items online, such as process names, connecting IP addresses, disconnect reasons, etc., now load a full instance of a web browser when researching those items on Google.  This makes those research features more compatible across a wider variety of operating systems and web browsers.
  • It’s now easier to build custom computer groupings for related RDS or AVD hosts in the Remote Desktop Commander Session Navigator.  We’ve improved the code that retrieves computer accounts from the domain controller, making it easy to add both server and workstations to the Remote Desktop Session Navigator for management tasks.

Finally, as we begin development on the next version of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, we want to hear from you regarding the new features you want to see in our products.  Read on for a link to our product features survey below – all participants in the survey will be entered into a drawing for a $150 Amazon Gift Card, in which a winner will be selected at random after the survey deadline closes.

In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:

Using The New Drain Mode Helper

New Performance Enhancements and Tweaks in Version 5.1

Participate In Our Product Features Survey For A Chance To Win a $150 Amazon Gift Card

Version 5.1 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

Check On and Change the Status of Drain Mode On Multiple RDS and AVD Hosts With Our New Drain Mode Helper

Managing Drain Mode on Hosts in RDS Collections and AVD Host Pools Just Got A Lot Easier

Administrators of medium and larger sized Remote Desktop Services and Azure Virtual Desktop environments know how tricky it can be to manage drain mode across all of their session hosts. It’s easy to put a host into drain mode for maintenance yet forget to take it out of drain mode later, causing problems related to load balancing. When too few servers have to pick up the slack of too many sessions, bad things happen.

As a result, we created the new Drain Mode Helper, which is now available for ALL of our user base – both users of the free Remote Desktop Commander Lite utility and our commercial Premium Management Features and Remote Desktop Commander Suite customers can leverage this feature.

Using the Drain Mode Helper is easy. Simply select the RDS collection, AVD host pool, or manual grouping of RDS session hosts from the left hand tree view in the Remote Desktop Commander Client’s Session Navigator. Then choose the “Check and Manage Drain Mode on Computers” menu item.

The Drain Mode Helper will then launch and quickly retrieve the drain mode status on all of the hosts in that RDS Collection or AVD Host Pool. You can easily select all of the hosts that are in drain mode to take them out of drain mode, or vice versa.

This tool is sophisticated enough to realize when it is dealing with an RDS collection versus an AVD host pool. When dealing with an RDS collection, it adjusts drain mode on the individual servers. When working with an AVD host pool, it adjusts the drain mode status of the host(s) directly via the Azure Virtual Desktop brokering infrastructure.

New Performance Enhancements And Tweaks In the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Premium Management Features

At RDPSoft, we’re always working to further improve and optimize our software based on customer feedback. Version 5.1 has several of these optimizations, as discussed in depth below.

First, we optimized some internal SQL statements in the Remote Desktop Reporter Service, which reduces locks and waits when Remote Desktop Commander is transferring large amounts of agent data collected from session hosts into the relevant tables. This results in reduced resource usage on the SQL Server and speeds up the time it takes to transfer this data into the SQL database.

Secondly, in our newer CPU Usage By Application dashboard, we added optimizations so that this dashboard will only show up to 2500 records maximum of programs using the most CPU, regardless of the size of the environment. This will speed up the loading and display of data in this dashboard for our larger customers.

CPU Use By Application Report
CPU Usage By Application Dashboard – Now Optimized!

Thirdly, we improved the “research” buttons throughout the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Premium Management Features tools, that would automatically try to lookup things like process names, IP addresses, and RDP disconnect reasons via Google. In previous versions, we’d use an internal web browser component to display the results, but this did not always work reliably on some operating systems with certain security settings, so now research tasks shell out to a separate default web browser instance for improved compatibility.

Researching Items Online Now Launches a Separate Web Browser

Finally, we updated the Computer Group builder in the Remote Desktop Commander Client. In certain environments, like Citrix, you may need to build logical groupings of session hosts or virtual desktops that don’t correlate to an RDS collection or AVD host pool. Version 5.1 makes it easier to build computer groups – simply enter in your domain name, click the Refresh button, and Remote Desktop Commander will quickly do a deep search in Active Directory to return all servers, and optionally, all workstations. You can then select the ones you want to incorporate into a custom computer grouping.

Define Custom Computer Groupings
Defining Custom Computer Groupings Is Now Even Easier in the Remote Desktop Commander Client

What New Features Would You Like Us To Add?

We’ve got many great ideas about new features that we want to add to Remote Desktop Commander, but we’d like you to help us prioritize them- so that we add the features that will benefit the majority of our clients first.

As a way of saying thank you, if you complete the survey at the link below, you will automatically be entered into a drawing for a $150 Amazon gift card. Please, only complete one survey per person. The survey closes on September 30th, 2021, and we will inform the winner shortly thereafter.

To start the survey, please click here.

Remote Desktop Commander 5.1 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

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

If you are an existing Remote Desktop Commander Lite or Premium Management Features customer, proceed to the Remote Desktop Commander Lite download page to download Version 5.1 of the client.  Then install it over your previous version.

If you’d like to learn more about the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, including its feature set and how to start a subscription for only $11.49 per server per month, click here.

If you’d like to learn more about Premium Management Features, including its feature set and how to start a subscription for only $114.99 per named admin or technician per year, click here.

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

Remote Desktop Commander v5.0 Now Available!

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Greetings friends and current Remote Desktop Commander customers!  We’ve just released Version 5.0 of our Remote Desktop Commander and Premium Management Features solutions.  This new version 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 comes with 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.

We’re also excited to announce a new promotion that is valid until March 31st, 2021, and to share with you Andy’s very candid take on Windows Virtual Desktop, so please read on!

In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:

Track Terminal Server CPU Usage By Application

Tune Our Agent Service Using a New Agent Diagnostic Report and Polling Tuning Wizard

Troubleshoot RDP Disconnects With the Client Connection Analyzer

Session Connection Time Now Available in the Remote Desktop Commander Client

Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle Promotion For Existing Customers

Windows Virtual Desktop – Separate Fact From Fiction, and Look Past the Hype

Version 5.0 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

Quickly Find Out Which Applications Use the Most CPU on Your Terminal Servers

CPU Use By Application Report

Several of our customers have asked for the ability to quickly find out which programs are using the most memory on their terminal servers, much like we already do with dashboards that profile application memory use.

Version 5.0 now supports this feature. You can either use the new CPU Use By Application Dashboard to review this, or you can run or schedule the CPU Use By Application Report.

For more information on this, including a full demonstration video, please read this recent blog article covering Terminal Server CPU usage and more.

CPU Use By Application Report

Centrally Optimize Our Agent Service and Run Diagnostics With a Click of a Button

Many of our customers choose to deploy the Remote Desktop Reporter Agent Service on their session hosts to collect additional insights on terminal server performance, or to enhance user activity monitoring. Due to the fact that no RDS or WVD environment is alike, in terms of things like server load, disk space available for SQL Server, etc, it is often necessary to tweak agent service parameters. Such parameters include the rate at which the agent service gathers data, the rate at which the master Remote Desktop Reporter service gathers the agent data, and the type of data collected by the agent.

Previously, this was done manually on individual session hosts by changing registry settings or redeploying the agent with different installer command line parameters.

In Remote Desktop Commander Version 5.0, you can adjust agent polling rates and other agent related settings centrally. Simply make the desired changes in a wizard, then let Remote Desktop Commander contact each session host to adjust the polling parameters and restart the agent service for you.

Remote Desktop Commander Polling Tuning Wizard
The Remote Desktop Commander Polling Tuning Wizard quickly reconfigures all agent and master polling parameters to increase/decrease agent service resource use and database storage requirements

Similarly, Version 5.0 now includes an Agent Diagnostics Report, which presents statistics about how agents are performing on your session hosts. For instance, you can view the average number of data points each agent transmits during each polling cycle, how quickly the agent service is gathering that data, and how quickly it is transferring that data to the primary Remote Desktop Reporter service across the network. You can then use the results of this report to fine tune agent polling intervals within the Polling Tuning Wizard mentioned above.

Agent Diagnostics Report
Run the Agent Diagnostics Report to find out how our agent service is performing on each of the session hosts where it is deployed

Figure Out What’s Causing RDP Disconnects and Make Your Users Happy Again!

Ever had a user who just could not stay connected to your Remote Desktop Services deployment? They’ll promptly call up your IT department and offer vague complaints, telling you that their terminal server client (e.g. MSTSC.EXE) is trying to reconnect constantly, their session freezes and then they get kicked out, and on and on.

While previous versions of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite have been able to produce reporting on the latency and quality of the RDP collection for specific users, most of the valuable information regarding disconnects and other RDP connection failures exists on the client’s Windows computer, NOT the terminal servers themselves.

Client Side Connection Analyzer
The Client Side Connection Analyzer, part of our Premium Management Features solution, makes it easy to troubleshoot RDP connection problems for specific users.

So, to make your life as an administrator or help desk tech easier, we created the Remote Desktop Connection Analyzer and built it into our Premium Management Features product. You can now send users having issues to our website, to download a lightweight applet which they run with no special user rights required, and no installation required. The applet will quickly gather up and translate all the RDP disconnection reasons, plus relevant registry keys that affect the Terminal Services Client and the Windows update history on their computer. It will then save all of this data to an encrypted file and prompt them to send that file back to you.

From there, you simply load that file into the Client Side Connection Analyzer, and voila! – you have the information you need at your fingertips. You can even do further research on the disconnect reasons via Google with a single click.

For more information on the Client Side Connection Analyzer, including a demonstration video, see this article on RDP disconnects.

Track and Sort By Session Connection Time in the Remote Desktop Session Navigator

Users of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite or our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite tool are very familiar with the Remote Desktop Session Navigator. This is the portion of the Remote Desktop Commander Client that allows you to manage active sessions and processes on RDS, WVD, and Citrix deployments.

When in Session View, you can sort and group sessions by things like Client Build, Username, Computer, Idle Time, etc. Many of our users have also requested that we include the Session Connection Time, so they can see when the user initially established their session on the server. Also, if you allow users to establish multiple sessions on terminal servers or on the farm in general, this feature comes in handy, as you can identify the oldest of a specific user’s sessions.

RDS Session Connection Time
Now you can group and sort by session connection time in the Remote Desktop Session Navigator

Note: If you upgrade your existing Remote Desktop Commander Suite or Remote Desktop Commander Lite programs (see below), you may need to make this new column visible first. Simply right mouse click on the column headers in the Remote Desktop Session Navigator, then place a check by the Connect Time column, and it will become visible.

Are You An Existing Customer of One Of Our Tools? Step Up To the Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle With This Special Offer

More and more of our clients are opting to purchase the Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle, which gives them access to all three of our monitoring and management tools for RDS and WVD – the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, Premium Management Features, and Remote Desktop Canary.

If you already have a subscription to one or two of our three tools, and would like a quote to step up to the bundle, click here to request a quote from sales, and indicate in the form that you want to step up to the bundle. If you then step up to the complete bundle of products before March 31st, 2020, you will be entitled to a special discount that further reduces your monthly or annual cost for 12 months. You’ll quickly see that for very little extra cost per server, you can get the comprehensive monitoring, reporting, alerting, and management tools you need to run your RDS or WVD environment successfully!

Let’s Get Real About WVD

Yes, we’re an original Microsoft WVD partner, and yes, we anticipate that this technology will grow over time, but it’s very important that you have a true understanding about the pros and cons of WVD before you consider migrating away from Classic RDS.

In the first two articles of his new blog series, our CEO and Microsoft MVP Andy Milford challenges a ton of assumptions about WVD, and questions some of Microsoft’s motives around decisions like:

  • refusing to make Windows 10 Multisession available outside of Azure,
  • the inability to use WVD infrastructure components with session hosts located outside of Azure,
  • the cost of WVD compute and Azure IaaS compute as compared to running RDS on-premises or in a private cloud,
  • various WVD licensing pitfalls, especially for MSPs and ISVs.

Andy has written the first two blog posts in the series. See:

WVD – The Bloom Is Off The Rose – Part 1
WVD – The Bloom Is Off The Rose – Part 2

He is just getting started though, and there are many additional posts that will be added shortly to this blog series, so stay tuned!

Remote Desktop Commander 5.0 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links

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

If you are an existing Remote Desktop Commander Lite or Premium Management Features customer, proceed to the Remote Desktop Commander Lite download page to download Version 5.0 of the client.  Then install it over your previous version.

If you’d like to learn more about the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, including its feature set and how to start a subscription for only $9.99 per server per month, click here.

If you’d like to learn more about Premium Management Features, including its feature set and how to start a subscription for only $99.99 per named admin or technician per year, click here.

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

A Remote Desktop Log Viewer Tool . . . For Free

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It has been around a while, but if you’ve missed it, RDPSoft released a free Remote Desktop log viewer tool quite sometime ago called RDS Log Viewer. And since this post was first written in April of 2018, it’s been updated. So, the later versions are even better now.

For more information, you can see the details on the Remote Desktop Gateway features and get the download link.

But first, here’s a screenshot of it in action . . .

RDSLogViewer

To summarize the features very briefly, this tool displays both logon failures and successful logons from RDS session hosts. It has many features to assist you in finding the user account of an logon failure and then locating the attacker’s source IP, including:

  • Displaying traditional “security log only” RDS failures when the Security Layer is RDP
  • Correlating logon failures with NLA when the Security Layer is TLS/SSL

In addition, there are other features such as:

  • Showing all successful RDS authentifications
  • Ability to export the results to comma-delimited text
  • Ability to geolocate the attacker’s IP address

. . . And of course, there is much more now.

Read more and download the tool for free.

Updated: October 2020.

From the RDPSoft Blog

We Do “Single Pane of Glass” Monitoring and Management for RDS

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