cloud RDP monitoring

How To: Monitoring RDP Bandwidth In Real Time and Session By Session

July 13, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

We’ve written at length about how the Remote Desktop Reporter component of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite excels at tracking RDP bandwidth consumption over time and how it is capable of generating many different reports to track this consumption by user or by computer. We’ve also mentioned how crucial it is to apply the recently released Microsoft Hotfixes so that bandwidth data is queryable on a Windows 2012 server.

But, is there an easier way to at least keep an eye on RDP bandwidth without the reporting?

The Growing Importance of RDP Bandwidth Monitoring

It is imperative that admins do something – even if it doesn’t involve reporting – before bigger problems crop up. Now that more and more shops are migrating to Windows Server 2012, it is all the more important to start monitoring RDP bandwidth. Why? Due to vast improvements in the RDP 8.0 protocol, such as adaptive graphics and combined UDP/TCP transport of data, remote desktop data throughput has been greatly enhanced.

And, what does that mean? Much larger amounts of data transferred on average. Therefore, it’s perhaps more important than ever before to stay on top of it.

Reviewing RDP Bandwidth Data In Real Time

In many cases, admins may want to simply review this data in real time, to see on a day-to-day basis which users are transferring the most data. If this is the case, our Remote Desktop Commander Suite offering (at least at first glance) might appear to be overkill.

Not a problem. Our Remote Desktop Commander Lite is perfect for this purpose.

When in session view, Remote Desktop Commander Lite automatically displays total RDP bandwidth transferred in each user’s session. If you click on the RDP bandwidth column, users are grouped sorted from greatest consumption to least consumption.

When arranged in this fashion, it’s easy to spot the outliers. From there, you can message the user to find out what they’re doing and disconnect or reset their session. You can also jump into process view to see what programs they’re running that could be the culprit.

Happy hunting of your bandwidth hogs – please be merciful to your users!

Do you have questions about how Remote Desktop Commander Lite can assist with your RDP bandwidth monitoring needs? Contact RDPSoft or start a conversation below.

Monitoring Remote Desktop Memory Usage in Real Time With Remote Desktop Commander

June 29, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

Of all the critical system resources that must be monitored on a Terminal Server or other Server Based Computing environment, memory usage is one of the most important.

If you’ve worked with Citrix or Microsoft RDS for any length of time, you’ve seen how servers can grow unresponsive when an errant process has a memory leak, which is more common then many might think. The RDP Clipboard applet (rdpclip.exe), which runs in each user’s session, is one of the most notorious culprits in this regard.

Which is why we at RDPSoft always found it odd that the Remote Desktop Services Manager (aka TSAdmin) never had an integrated way of showing memory usage by process, by user, by computer, or by session.

Enter Remote Desktop Commander

We decided to fix that in Remote Desktop Commander Lite, our integrated Terminal Server session and process management utility.

Process Memory Consumption

Rather than attempting to get this information from performance counters with WMI, which can be dreadfully slow, we used low-level native calls in a multi-threaded architecture to return memory statistics with blazing fast speed across systems in your farm.

Peak Process Memory Consumption

More than just current memory usage by process, you can also track peak memory usage by process. This is incredibly important, because sometimes a process temporarily allocates a huge chunk of memory, works with it, and then deallocates it.

However, during that peak allocation, if memory is already running near maximum capacity, this can cause a performance impact on your server. And even if the process goes back to “normal memory use,” you can still get a clue as to how greedy it was with memory at a prior moment.

Memory Consumption Per User, Computer, Session, and More . . .

And finally, reviewing memory consumption per user, per computer, or per session is trivially easy.

View of process memory consumption by user group — Viewing process memory consumption by grouped user

Simply switch into Process View in Remote Desktop Commander Lite, and then click on the appropriate column (e.g. User, Computer, or Winstation).

Voila. Remote Desktop Commander will automatically tally the total memory for each grouping and display it to you.

How Can You Leverage These Capabilities Today?

Trial software for Remote Desktop Commander Lite is available for free, and you can download it right now.

Questions? Reach out to RDPSoft or comment below.

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