Computers Disappear / Reappear From the Current Performance And Load Across the Farm Dashboard
When running the Remote Desktop Commander Client, you experience a phenomenon where computers disappear and reappear from the Current Performance And Load Across the Farm dashboard.
This occurs because the Remote Desktop Commander agent service (RDPSoft RDR Agent Service) you have deployed on your session hosts cannot transfer over data it collects in a timely manner to the main system running Remote Desktop Commander, causing this dashboard to go out of sync. This is typically due to one of two reasons:
1.) Your session host servers are under so much load that our agent service takes too long to collect a data set, making it start to “run behind,” OR
2.) Networking between the system running the Remote Desktop Commander components and the session hosts is impaired in some way, either due to higher than typical latency, or a low level of network IOPS available. This results in too long of a data transfer time between our agent service and the main Remote Desktop Commander system.
3.) You are monitoring a large number of RDS servers (e.g. 50 or more) from a single Remote Desktop Commander Suite instance.
The solution in both cases is to tune how Remote Desktop Commander polls data from its agents. Fortunately, this is very easy to do using the Agent Tuning & Deployment Wizard found in the Remote Desktop Commander Configuration Tool. Here are the steps you can use in this wizard to tune agent collection:
First, launch the Agent Tuning & Deployment Wizard from the Polling & Agents tab in the Remote Desktop Commander Configuration Tool. Then:
- Click “Adjust Advanced Agent Settings”
- Check “Do Not Collect TCP/UDP data,” and check “Operate in Turbo Mode.” Finally, check “Maximum Number of Concurrent Users Supported,” and enter at least 50. If you have more concurrent users connecting to each host than 50, raise this number.
- Leave the Radio button at “Change Settings Only.”
- Click “Apply Changes.” When all computer agents have been modified and the agent service restarted on each computer, click “Close and Exit Wizard.”
- The main Remote Desktop Reporter service will restart. Wait at least 15 minutes, and then see if the dashboards sync up better with all computer data displayed.
- If the dashboards do not sync, retry the above operation, but this time, move the top slider to “Lighter,” with a 5 minute master poll and a 2 minute agent poll.
Additionally, you can check and see how long it is taking Remote Desktop Commander to collect all of the agent data, by running the Agent Polling Diagnostics report, available from the Polling & Agents Tab in the Remote Desktop Commander Configuration Tool.
When this report is raised, you can review the Average Agent Gather Time and Average Agent Transfer Time columns. Add both of these columns up, and make sure that these times are less than the polling frequency cycle you selected in the Agent Tuning Wizard. For instance, if you selected a Light polling cycle (e.g. every 3 minutes), it needs to take less than 180 seconds to collect and transfer data from any monitored server.
If one or more servers have excessively long polling times, even after making the changes above, please reduce the load on your servers by adding more session hosts to the collection/host pool, and/or deploy an instance of Remote Desktop Commander on the same network segment/VNET as your hosts, as polling agent data across WAN links and firewalls is not recommended.
