azure virtual desktop monitoring

Organizations throughout the world often implement Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop to facilitate telework for their employees and contractors. Once AVD has been deployed, companies may decide to more closely monitor user activity for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to:

Verifying that employees and contractors are working regularly as per their employee agreements,
Verifying that activity on Azure Virtual Desktop systems is compliant with corporate Acceptable Use Policies,
Verifying that the Digital Employee eXperience (DEX) is up to standard for remote workers,
Auditing the use of critical line of business applications, and
Preventing data loss/theft

There are several ways to monitor this user activity, including:

Storing user idle and active times, and preparing historic reports based on that activity,
Recording screenshots and program captions (e.g. application title bars), and providing a user interface to review them, and
Live monitoring one or more active user sessions at the same time via shadowing interfaces

Using RDPSoft solutions, it is easy to provide comprehensive user activity monitoring for AVD systems. Here are the steps required to do so.

Step 1 – First Sign Up and Deploy the Remote Desktop Commander Suite

Determine how many AVD multi-user session hosts you have running in your host pools at times of peak usage. Then, start a monthly subscription for the Remote Desktop Commander Suite for only $12.99 USD per monitored host, entering this number in the server count field when prompted. If you have more than 10 hosts, or would like to start an annual subscription, contact our sales team for a quote.

Immediately after establishing a subscription, you will receive a link with a license file and download instructions for the Remote Desktop Commander Suite. Follow the link to the release notes, and follow the guided videos to set up our software on a VM running inside the VNet hosting the AVD hosts in your host pool(s). Small orgs with 10 or fewer AVD hosts can use our built in SQL Express instance, larger orgs with more than 10 hosts can leverage an Azure SQL instance or an internal SQL Server Standard instance they are already using in their AVD environment.

Step 2 – Schedule AVD User Activity Time Tracking Reports in the Remote Desktop Commander Suite

While the Remote Desktop Commander Suite contains over a dozen user activity reports, the two most popular are:

User Sessions – Session Activity By User (With Time Tallies)
User Sessions – Productivity (Detailed)

These two reports provide both a detailed and executive summary of AVD user activity by user, indicating the total time they were connected to a session on an AVD host, and how much time they spent active versus idle.

These reports can be scheduled to run daily or weekly, with a Prior Day or Prior Week lookback filter. You can also provide mail server information so that the reports are automatically sent to stakeholders, and you can also filter these reports by Active Directory group, so that various managers can receive the reports associated with their direct reports.

Schedule an AVD User Activity Report — Scheduling a report to track daily AVD user activity is easy

Step 3 – Optionally Turn On Screenshot And/Or Window Caption Recording for Specific Users

If you need enhanced user activity monitoring for certain users, or if there is a concern that specific users are using mechanisms like USB mouse jigglers to defeat idle/active time tracking, you can also enable periodic screenshot and window caption recording. This activity can later be reviewed via the Remote Desktop Commander Client interface, and via scheduled reports and HTML file outputs of screen activity.