Remote Desktop Services

A Remote Desktop Log Viewer Tool . . . For Free

April 13, 2018 By admin Leave a Comment

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 . . .

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.

Updated: October 2020.

Version 4 of Remote Desktop Commander Almost Ready!

December 14, 2017 By admin Leave a Comment

Hello friends and existing customers! We’re excited to let you know that the release of Remote Desktop Commander v4 is just about ready, and wanted to give you a sneak peak of all of the new features it contains.

We will be releasing Version 4 shortly after the start of the new year, along with a small price increase – our first price increase in over 18 months. If you’d like to test drive a release candidate of version 4, please complete the form here and mention that you want to try the release candidate of Version 4 in your comments.

New Remote Desktop Commander 4 Features

Now You Can Pinpoint Historic CPU, Memory, and Other Session Load Bottlenecks on Servers Instantly With the “Historical Performance and Load Across the Farm” Dashboard

Previous versions of Remote Desktop Commander allowed you to view recent performance metrics across your servers, as well as pull up snapshots of performance for all user sessions given a specific period of time. However, the new Historical Performance And Load Across The Farm Dashboard allows you to scroll through hour-by-hour graphs of when your RDS session host servers were under peak load, in terms of memory, CPU, or session count. The graph is interactive, so you can click on a point of interest, and you will immediately be transported to another dashboard that shows you all of the sessions active in that time frame, so you can review the user session(s) that contributed most to the server load and determine what they were doing at the time.

Historical Performance And Load Across the Farm — Track CPU, Memory, and Session Counts On Your RDS Servers Over Time

Historical Performance And Load Across the Farm (2) — Pinpoint Times of High Resource Utilization on RDS Session Hosts.

Review Which Users Caused High Resource Utilization — After Clicking On a Timeframe of High Resource Utilization, Immediately See Which Users Impacted the Session Host(s) Most.

Quickly Filter Dashboards By Date Range and RDS Collection Name / Server Groups

For organizations with larger RDS deployments, attempting to review all of the session host servers in a single dashboard can get complicated. Version 4 of Remote Desktop Commander allows you to quickly filter dashboards by an 1.) RDS collection name, 2.) a user-defined group of RDS servers, and 3.) in some cases, a date range lookback. By doing so, you can keep multiple dashboards up and running inside the Remote Desktop Commander Client, with one dashboard per RDS collection.

Filter Dashboards By RDS Collections — Limit the Scope of Session Hosts Shown in Dashboards By Filtering By Collection Name or Computer Grouping.

Filtered Dashboard By Computer Group — A Dashboard With Fewer Elements Filtered By RDS Collection Name / Computer Group

Azure and Standard SQL Server Authentication Support

Previous versions of Remote Desktop Commander required use of a local SQL Server deployment with Windows Integrated Authentication. Version 4 now also allows you to use a.) an on-premise SQL server with Standard (explicit username/password) Authentication and/or b.) a Microsoft Azure SQL Server deployment. This provides organizations with the flexibility to create multiple SQL databases for multiple RDS deployments on a single SQL Server, even when each deployment is isolated in a different, non-trusting Windows domain.

Now Use Standard SQL Connections and Azure SQL Connections to Store and Review RDS Data

Other Performance Improvements

In addition to the features listed above, we’ve made many other performance improvements and bug fixes in this version. Stay tuned for our official launch announcement shortly!

Repping RDS at Techmentor 2017

August 13, 2017 By admin Leave a Comment

Check out our CEO Andy Milford speaking at last week’s prestigious Techmentor event, at Microsoft’s renowned Redmond Campus.

This was Andy’s second straight appearance as an expert speaker at Techmentor – this year giving back-to-back talks on the topics of Remote Desktop Services in Window’s Server 2016, as well as alternatives to Azure Remote App.

RDS and Citrix enthusiasts also had the opportunity to break bread with Andy at the “Bird’s Of A Feather” luncheon.

Watch our blog or follow our twitter @RDPSoft for upcoming posts with highlights from these talks!

Love Pouring In For Remote Desktop Commander!

March 9, 2017 By admin Leave a Comment

Greetings, loyal friends and RDPSoft customers. Today, we wanted to thank you all for the warm feedback we’ve been receiving lately from users of our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite Citrix/RDS Session Manager, as well as the full Remote Desktop Commander Suite. We’re hard at work on Version 4 of Remote Desktop Commander, which will be released in Q2 of 2017, which we’ll let you know about more shortly.

In the meantime, we wanted to share some of the great customer feedback we’re getting – your input and kudos continues to motivate us to make the best and affordable monitoring and management tools for Microsoft Remote Desktop Services and Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop. Enjoy!

Just wanted to drop you a note and thank you again for everything. The full version of this software is really, really good. So many metrics that we didn’t have before, and the console is much better to monitor sessions from than Citrix Studio (or Director) in my opinion.

Love this software. Brilliant!!! Exposure is all that is needed. Great Stuff, life savior in the world of offshore software development.

Great news!!! RDPSoft is operating well with an excess of 110 users on all servers.

Great software and stats, was a huge help.

If you’d like to see what the buzz is about firsthand, feel free to download and use our completely free Remote Desktop Commander Lite tool for all of your RDS/Citrix active session management needs. Or, start a monthly subscription of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite software for only $9 per server per month, and start gaining insight to your entire farm with dashboards and over 80 pre-built reports.

Remote Desktop Services Logon Failures

January 24, 2017 By admin Leave a Comment

Have you ever found yourself trying to hunt down the source of logon failures in your Remote Desktop Services farm? It’s trickier than you may have realized.

Our very own Andy Milford, Microsoft MVP in Enterprise Mobility / Remote Desktop Services, just wrote a lengthy article on the topic you can read at his RDS MVP outreach site – http://www.purerds.org.

In the article, he talks about how Group Policy authentication settings like Network Level Authentication and the RDP security layer directly affect how Remote Desktop Services logon failures are recorded in the Security log (Event ID 4625). He also shares tips regarding additional events you can use in a little known event log to correlate where logon failures are actually coming from if the Remote Desktop Session Host is running Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2016.

We look forward to building some of this hard won knowledge into our Remote Desktop Commander product line soon. In the meantime, please enjoy some of Andy’s detailed research on the subject.