RDPSoft

Remote Desktop and Terminal Server Software

We Make RDS, XenApp & VDI Monitoring/Reporting Easy and Affordable
  • Products / Services
    • Not Sure Where To Start?
    • The Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle For RDS and WVD
    • RDS / WVD Monitoring & Reporting
      • Remote Desktop Commander Suite
    • RDS / WVD Management and RMM Tools
      • Remote Desktop Commander Lite (Free RDS/WVD Management Tool)
      • Remote Assistance RMM Tool + Delegation of Management for RDS/WVD Support Desk
    • RDS Synthetic Login Monitoring / Connection Time / Uptime Monitoring Tools
      • Remote Desktop Canary
    • Consulting and Professional Services
      • RDS Performance Audit
      • Custom Report Design Services
      • Training and Other Professional Services
  • Download
    • Lite: Free RDS/Citrix Session and Farm Manager
    • Lite With Premium Management Features
    • Suite: Installer and Release Notes
    • Remote Desktop Canary – Request a Demo/Trial
    • Request Upgrade To New Version
  • Buy
    • The Complete RDS/WVD Monitoring and Management Bundle Purchase Options
      • Start Monthly Subscription Now
      • Start Annual Subscription Now
    • Remote Desktop Commander Suite Purchase Options
      • Start Monthly Subscription Now
      • Start Annual Subscription Now
      • Buy Perpetual License(s)
    • Premium Management Features Purchase Options
      • Start Monthly Subscription Now
      • Start Annual Subscription Now
    • Remote Desktop Canary Purchase Options
      • Start Monthly Subscription Now
      • Start Annual Subscription Now
    • Buy Incident Based Support Packages
    • Pricing
  • Blog
  • Support
    • Contact Support / Submit Ticket
    • RDPSoft Knowledge Base
  • Contact
  • Partners

TSAdmin Replacement For Server 2012, 2016, and 2019

July 22, 2020 By Andy Milford 1 Comment

TSAdmin on Server 2012For more than 7 years, I have had the privilege of talking to server based computing admins worldwide, discovering the key pain points they must overcome when taking care of their day-to-day management tasks, especially if they manage Remote Desktop Services deployments.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loss of TSAdmin featured prominently in these discussions. But, more on that in a moment.

The result of these discussions? Remote Desktop Commander. This next step in the evolution of our Remote Desktop Services solution set was developed in direct response to the specific pain points I heard articulated time and time again by RDS admins.

No More TSAdmin in Windows Server 2012

Without a doubt, one of the biggest issues Windows server admins have been dealing with as they migrate from Server 2008 RDS deployments to RDS on Server 2012, 2016, and 2019 is the lack of a simple and powerful RDP management tool. The realization starts when TSAdmin.msc isn’t where it’s supposed to be. After a little more research, they discover that the TSAdmin msc isn’t there at all!

For almost everyone, TSAdmin had been the go-to for some of the most common terminal server user session and process management tasks to perform on terminal servers and session hosts in their RDS collections.

This issue of its absence first came to light with the release of Windows Server 2012, as the former TSAdmin (Remote Desktop Services Manager) utility was orphaned by Microsoft. Terminal Server session management tasks were, in the opinion of many, very poorly integrated into the Remote Desktop Services Manager (RDSM) in the Server Manager program. Moreover, if your RDS collections are more than a few dozen session hosts in size, the Remote Desktop Services Manager can hang and simply will not scale properly.

Remote Desktop Commander replaces TSAdmin on Server 2012
Managing Server 2012 User Sessions with Remote Desktop Commander

With many admins still not comfortable using PowerShell scripting to do Remote Desktop Services and Windows Virtual Desktop management tasks, the situation has become untenable.

As a result, some admins turned to our free Remote Desktop Admin Toolkit, which was a collection of basic tools that could do limited user session and process management tasks. However, none of these tools were integrated with each other, and their feature set was rather limited.

A Free TSAdmin Replacement for Remote Desktop Services Deployments

As a result, we built an integrated, easy-to-use, and powerful terminal server management utility: Remote Desktop Commander Lite.

Viewing Process Memory Consumption By User on Server 2012
Viewing Process Memory Consumption by User on Server 2012

The Remote Desktop Services Manager features for Windows Server 2012/2016/2019 that ship with RDPSoft’s Remote Desktop Commander are too numerous to list. Therefore, rather than us “bullet point” you to death, take a look at our video introduction to Remote Desktop Commander on YouTube demonstrating the intuitiveness and power of this utility.

One of the most interesting things you will see in this video is how Remote Desktop Commander can intelligently group related fields, in order to show you things like total memory consumed by user, by server, or RDP bandwidth, for instance. There are also features we provide that were never present in TSAdmin, such as the ability to review RDP latency and connection quality for multiple user sessions at once.

Running Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure?  No problem.  All of our solutions, including Remote Desktop Commander, also work well inside Windows Virtual Desktop environments.  In fact, you can publish our tools as a WVD RemoteApp and use it to manage your WVD host pools from anywhere!

Which Edition of Remote Desktop Commander Do You Need?

Because we know that all of our customers may not need a comprehensive monitoring and reporting solution for their RDS, WVD, and Citrix farms at this time, we now offer several different classes of license:

Viewing Server 2012 session process memory consumption, grouped by heaviest memory consumers.
Viewing Server 2012 session process memory consumption, grouped by heaviest memory consumers.

Remote Desktop Commander Lite – completely free for all RDS, WVD and Citrix farm admins – and it provides you with the ‘TSAdmin like’ session management features you need for day-to-day administration of your Remote Desktop Services, WVD, and Citrix server farms.

Premium Management Features for Remote Desktop Commander Lite – adds a powerful feature superset to Remote Desktop Commander, and overcomes some of the shortcomings in Microsoft’s shadowing technology, giving you a very powerful RMM tool designed specifically for support Remote Desktop user sessions and Remote App sessions. Additionally, it allows you to delegate specific RDS and WVD management tasks to help desk staff across your RDS collections and WVD hostpools without making them admins, which is not available in Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services Manager.  It also solves shadowing issues in Citrix, such as the requirement to obtain consent before shadowing, and Citrix Director’s dependence on Remote Assistance.  Best of all, it only costs $99.99 per help desk technician or admin per year, which is much less expensive than typical RMM tools.

Remote Desktop Commander Suite – which only costs $9.99 per monitored RDS, WVD, or Citrix host per month – gives you TSAdmin replacement management capabilities outlined above, but also includes:

  • Our Remote Desktop Reporter utility for historical session user activity, RDS, WVD, and Citrix performance monitoring and reporting, license reporting, connection quality/RDP latency reporting, RDP security (login and login failure) tracking, and session recording
  • SPL Tracker, which helps MSPs and others automate the chore of Microsoft SPLA and Citrix CSP license reporting

Free Remote Desktop Commander Software

What makes the most sense for you? Remote Desktop Commander Lite, our Premium Management Features overlay, the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, or Remote Desktop Canary?  Visit our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle page to learn more about each product as well as licensing options.

Filed Under: Server 2012 TSAdmin Replacement Tagged With: Managing Remote Desktop Services, Managing Windows Virtual Desktop, RDS Manager, Remote Desktop Services Manager, Server 2012, Server 2016, Server 2019, TSAdmin, TSAdmin Replacement, Windows Server 2012, wvd management, WVD Manager, wvd monitoring

User Session Shadowing in Remote Desktop Commander v4.7+

June 12, 2019 By admin Leave a Comment

Until the release of our Remote Desktop Commander v4.7, one of the continuous laments that we used to hear from our customer base for years centered on the user session shadowing in Remote Desktop Services.  This is a shame, because the internal architecture for shadowing from Windows Server 2012 R2 onwards is pretty amazing!  Using MSTSC to shadow proved however less than smooth.  The litany of complaints has always included problems like:

  • lack of proper shadowing support (zoom out) for multiple monitor sessions;
  • dreaded permissions errors;
  • the unfortunate requirement for help desk users to be administrators (!) on the terminal servers they want to shadow;
  • the inability for Windows 7 systems to initiate shadowing on Server 2012/2016/2019 systems and Windows 8 and 10 workstations.

There was also the small issue that there were no tools for shadowing/remote assistance inside Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure.

By the way: Check out this twisted history of shadowing RDP users.

In the resulting confusion, admins and IT staff have been paying an arm and a leg for remote assistance tools to bridge this gap for years. These tools require heavy install footprints, hundreds or even thousands of dollars per technician per year, and tedious invitation URLs, etc. are required to start helping users.

Which Reminds Us: Delegation of Administration Options for Remote Desktop Services Has Been Nonexistent For W a y  T o o  L o n g

The other need that we heard frequently from our customers: To have the ability to precisely delegate Remote Desktop Services management permissions to their help desk and front line support staff.  For a while, the only real option had been to give help desk staff admin rights on session hosts and connection brokers.  Not an ideal situation from a security, or a “whoops I just rebooted a terminal server with 30 user sessions running line of business apps” perspective.

We tried to resolve some of these issues with our RDSConfig utility, that allowed permissions reassignment for users and groups on session hosts.  However, in larger RDS collections, you need a way to apply those permissions to a huge swath of session hosts all at once – especially as new session hosts are brought online.  Also, to do their jobs, help desk staff need rights to query the Connection Broker to dynamically list RDS collections and the servers that are members of each, plus they should have the ability to read RDS-related performance counters on those session hosts, so they can troubleshoot things like network latency from the client to the server.

So, We Figured Out How To Make User Session Shadowing Much Better AND Created a Wizard To Let You Delegate RDS Management Tasks To Your Help Desk Staff

View and Monitor Multiple User Sessions At Once With the MiniView Dock
Bring a Shadowed Session Into Full View to Manage / Observe All Activity.
Shadow Multiple WVD Sessions At Once With the MiniView Dock

We call these tools in the Remote Desktop Commander Client Premium Management Features.  Want to shadow Server 2012+ systems from Windows 7?  No problem.  Want to monitor multiple user sessions at once in live view in one window?  We do that.  Do you have RDS users with multiple monitors that you haven’t been able to shadow before?  Again, we’ve got you covered.

Where To Go Next To Find Out More . . . 

Request a web demo with an RDPSoft solutions expert to see all our solutions’ features in depth.

Updated: November 2020.

Filed Under: Software Releases Tagged With: Delegating RDS Management, Live Monitor RDS Sessions, Managing Remote Desktop Services, Managing Windows Virtual Desktop, Monitoring Remote Desktop Services, Monitoring Windows Virtual Desktop, Monitoring WVD, MSTSC Shadow, Remote Desktop Commander Core, Remote Desktop Commander Suite, windows virtual desktop

  • Email
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Not Sure Where To Start?

In just a few moments, you can find the right fit of solutions and even services for your needs.

> Get Going Now.

Help Documents

Remote Desktop Commander
Help and Users Guide (ver 4.x)
Release Notes (ver 4.x)

Sign Up for Remote Desktop Tips and RDPSoft Updates

Blog Topic Categories

  • Azure RemoteApp
  • citrix edgesight
  • Citrix Edgesight Replacement
  • Citrix Shadowing
  • Cloud RDP Monitoring
  • Performance
  • RDP Latency
  • RDP Login Time
  • RDP Login Tracking
  • RDP Logon Failure Tracking
  • RDP Logs
  • RDP Loss Rate
  • RDP Security
  • RDP Transmission Rate
  • RDS License Metering
  • RDS Licensing
  • Remote Desktop Bandwidth
  • Remote Desktop CPU
  • Remote Desktop Management
  • Remote Desktop Memory
  • Remote Desktop Memory Usage
  • Remote Desktop Performance
  • Remote Desktop Protocol
  • Remote Desktop Reporting
  • Remote Desktop Security
  • Remote Desktop Services
  • Remote Desktop Services Free Tools
  • Remote Desktop Services Hotfix
  • Sensitive Data
  • Server 2012 TSAdmin Replacement
  • Shadow User
  • Software Releases
  • SPLA Reporting
  • Synthetic RDP
  • Telecommuting/Teleworking
  • Terminal Server Logging
  • Terminal Server Monitoring
  • Uncategorized
  • User Activity Monitoring
  • User Productivity
  • Windows 2008 Terminal Server
  • Windows Virtual Desktop
  • WVD Login Time
  • XenApp Monitoring
  • XenApp Reporting

Recent Posts

  • Remote Desktop Canary v2.3 Now Available!
  • WVD Monitoring – Step By Step
  • Need Better Windows Virtual Desktop Monitoring and Management? Take Advantage Of This Special Offer!
  • TSAdmin Replacement For Server 2012, 2016, and 2019
  • Citrix Shadowing Without Notification

From the RDPSoft Blog

  • Remote Desktop Canary v2.3 Now Available!
  • WVD Monitoring – Step By Step
  • Need Better Windows Virtual Desktop Monitoring and Management? Take Advantage Of This Special Offer!
  • TSAdmin Replacement For Server 2012, 2016, and 2019
  • Citrix Shadowing Without Notification
  • Email
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

SPLA Reporting Made Easy

Service Provider Licensing Tracker Software

RDPSoft’s Service Provider Licensing Tracker (SPL Tracker) keeps track of SPLA licensing on various shared … Learn more about SPL Tracker >

Reach Out

For fastest response, reach out via our sales and support contact forms.

Sales
US: 1-855-738-8457 x1
Outside the US: 1-702-749-4325 x1

Support
for Evaluators and Priority Support Customers
US: 1-855-738-8457 x2
Outside the US: 1-702-749-4325 x2

Copyright © 2013 - 2020 RDPSoft. All rights reserved. · RDPSoft is the sole authorized publisher and distributor of the following software titles: Remote Desktop Commander, Premium Management Features, Remote Desktop Canary · Sitemap