Keep an eye on the health of your Remote Desktop Services infrastructure from the outside in with Remote Desktop Canary, our RDS synthetic monitoring tool. Or monitor your Azure Virtual Desktop hosts inside your host pools, to make sure they are responsive and are loading applications and desktops in a timely manner.
RDPSoft’s Remote Desktop Canary ™ is our full-featured yet affordable synthetic monitoring tool for Remote Desktop Services, Azure Virtual Desktop, and other EUC platforms. Deploy it today to immediately be notified when your Remote Desktop Services or other EUC environment goes offline or is slow to respond to incoming RDP login requests. Capture RDP login time statistics for integration with your own network monitoring solutions. Determine exactly where the bottleneck is in your RDS infrastructure – whether it be at your Remote Desktop Gateway, Connection Broker, or Session Host. Capture screenshots during the RDP client login sequence to profile application load times in your login scripts. Perform OCR against those screenshots to receive alerts about slow application load times, user profile problems, and other error conditions inside an RDS or AVD session.
Key Features
- Leverage Remote Desktop Canary’s wizards to rapidly and easily set up synthetic login monitoring for your EUC environments, such as RDS, AVD, Citrix, Parallels RAS, or VMWare.
- Run Remote Desktop Canary 24/7 as a Windows service on a VM inside or outside your end user computing environment. It is capable of reinitializing its testing automatically if its host VM is restarted for updates or maintenance.
- Test connectivity, login times, and desktop/app loading times in full Remote Desktop Services environments (e.g. RDS collections), standalone servers accessible over RDP (including Citrix, Parallels RAS, and VMWare Horizon hosts), or AVD hosts running in Azure.
- Conduct internal OR external tests against your RDS environments. Note: External tests require that a Remote Desktop Gateway is part of your RDS deployment.
- Conduct internal tests against your AVD host pools, Parallels RAS hosts, Citrix hosts, or VMWare Horizon hosts. Verify that your hosts are up and responding to RDP logins in a timely manner in a much more robust way than relying solely on standard AVD diagnostics. For instance, be alerted to slow login times or black screens caused by FSLogix failures, user profile problems, or Group Policy problems.
- Conduct routine, rapid multi-server connectivity tests against all session hosts in RDS collections, AVD hosts in host pools, and Citrix/Parallels RAS/VMWare Horizon hosts if desired.
- Do “sanity checks” of every EUC host in your environment each morning, to make sure they are running, responding, and can serve up user desktop and app sessions properly.
- Receive alerts when servers or Remote Desktop Services collections are inaccessible via RDP, accompanied with the specific reason why the connection failed based on the error received by our testing client.
- With Remote Desktop Canary is deployed inside your end user computing environment, automatically collect and transmit relevant error and warning event log entries from RDS, AVD, Parallels RAS, Citrix, and VMWare hosts when synthetic login tests fail, to provide instant context about developing issues.
- Create as many testing workflows as needed to test different named RDS collections (farms) or individual groups of RDS, AVD, Parallels RAS, Citrix, and VMWare hosts.
- Schedule different workflow tests to run at different times of day using the scheduling component of the Remote Desktop Canary service.
- Specify a “login threshold time” in seconds so you are only notified when Remote Desktop logins take longer than average. Learn what your average logon time is by reviewing digest reports generated by Remote Desktop Canary that track these and other statistics.
- Bypass login banners automatically with generated synthetic input, so the login sequence can continue for OCR testing.
- Turn on OCR detection to generate alerts when an application does not appear in our RDP client after a certain number of seconds, or to generate alerts when other error conditions appear (user profile loading problems and group policy issues, for instance).
- Receive digest emails every day or multiple times a day that summarize connection times and application startup times at different times of day, in order to see how server load impacts user connection times. Then, cross reference connection times with server performance data collected by our Remote Desktop Commander Suite.
- Send alert emails to one set of recipients (e.g. service ticketing application, admin on call) and summary emails to other recipients.
- See how long it takes each RDS infrastructure role service to respond in the RDP connection sequence (Gateway > Broker > Session host).
- Store RDP connection time statistics in a SQL database table, providing integrated dashboard visibility with our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution. Or, link into this data from other NMS solutions like Paessler, Ipswitch WhatsUpGold, and Solarwinds.
- If desired, receive emails with attached screenshots so you can trace how long it takes for initial programs to load and other login script actions to complete, in conjunction with OCR-based alerting.
- Use our companion “Signed In” and “Canary Program Tester” applets in login scripts to detect when a user desktop or app has loaded completely, and then auto-logoff that testing session in preparation for subsequent tests.
- Toggle specific workflows in and out of maintenance mode, to suspend alerting if specific Remote Desktop servers or collections are being patched or taken out of service.
Affordable Pricing
Remote Desktop Canary’s pricing is affordable and straightforward, and is licensed in blocks of 10 server/host “workflows.” For instance, if you have an RDS or other EUC environment with 30 different hosts, you would need 3 workflow licenses. There is no limit to the different combinations of testing (internal, external, RDS collection versus host tests, etc) you can perform once the correct number of hosts have been licensed.
We sell our workflow licensing in bundles.
| Workflow Count | Monthly Subscription | Annual Subscription |
| 1 workflow (Up to 10 Hosts) | $79.99 per month | $699.99 per year |
| Up to 3 workflows (Up to 30 Hosts) | $157.99 per month | $1349.99 per year |
| Up to 5 workflows (Up to 50 Hosts) | $197.99 per month | $1699.99 per year |
| More than 5 / I need perpetual licenses | Contact Us For Quote | Contact Us For Quote |
Demos and Learning Library
If you’d like to request a demonstration from an RDPSoft sales specialist, please click here. Please also enjoy these pre-recorded demonstration videos below that show how Remote Desktop Canary works and how it can be configured to meet the needs of your environment.
