One of the biggest criticisms leveled against Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services as an end user computing (EUC) platform is its complete lack of integrated management and monitoring tools. In contrast with EUC platforms like Citrix, VMWare, and, to a lesser extent, Azure Virtual Desktop, RDS only provides the “Remote Desktop Services Manager” inside Server Manager.
When contrasted with Citrix Director, for instance, the Remote Desktop Services Manager is clunky, extremely slow, and doesn’t provide any actionable insights about the health of your RDS collections (farms). No login time information is provided, little to no information about user session load can be found, and performance insights about your remote desktop gateways, connection brokers, and session host collections are completely absent. Similarly, forget about having any user activity monitoring features, shadowing/remote assistance that “just works” when you need it, historic reporting, licensing tracking, or network connection quality metrics.
This is a shame, because when well engineered, designed, and monitored, Microsoft RDS is an extremely robust platform for end user computing that costs a fraction of what Citrix or Azure Virtual Desktop does, especially when hosted on premises or outside of public cloud services like AWS and Azure. In fact, the modern Remote Desktop Protocol, with its dual transport UDP and TCP delivery, works just as well as competing remoting protocol technologies from Citrix and VMWare in most use cases.
Over the past 9 years, we have diligently developed a bundle of RDS monitoring and management tools to overcome all of these shortcomings, a bundle that we price extremely competitively at only $19.99 per server monitored per month, with volume discounts available. When added to RDS licensing costs from Microsoft (e.g. RDS CALs/SALs), RDPSoft plus Microsoft RDS still remains a fraction of the cost of offerings from Citrix or VMWare, and when considering hefty public cloud compute costs, remains less expensive than AVD.
These development efforts have culminated in our latest version (V6) of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite, which now offers Single Pane of Glass Monitoring and Management for Remote Desktop Services. Rivalling – and in many cases – exceeding the features of Citrix and VMWare’s own management tools, our Remote Desktop Commander Suite provides amazing visibility into the health of your RDS environment AND offers incredible “drill down” features so you’re literally only a few mouse clicks away from troubleshooting most all issues in your RDS deployment. When integrated with Remote Desktop Canary – our synthetic RDP login monitoring solution – login times, connection failures, and login delays also flow into the dashboard, alerting you to potential issues (e.g. slow GPOs, FSLogix/user profile problems) not revealed by general performance monitoring.
To see how easy it is gain this level of insight into RDS deployment health, as well as remediate issues and manage user sessions in your environment, please watch this video below. Then, start a monthly subscription to our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle for RDS for only $19.99 per monitored server per month, with volume discounts available. Want to talk to a sales engineer first about your needs? Click here to book a conversation and/or online demo with us.
