windows virtual desktop

How To View Remote Desktop Sessions In 3 Different Ways

April 13, 2021 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

You have likely noticed that viewing Remote Desktop sessions and related details has become increasingly difficult. This is largely a result of some recent developments: There was the overhaul of Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 R2 and later server operating systems. Then, there’s the emergence of Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure.

Microsoft removed the old TSAdmin utility in Windows Server 2012 R2, replacing it with the often cumbersome Remote Desktop Services Manager in the Server Manager utility. It is scarce in detail regarding these sessions, and it does not scale well in larger environments. In addition, attempting to shadow remote desktop sessions with MSTSC often does not work as expected, especially with multiple monitor sessions.

And what about viewing Remote Desktop sessions in Windows Virtual Desktop? Well, you don’t get much of a break there either. Currently, you must use the Windows Virtual Desktop control plane in the Azure Portal, which is even more feature limited than the Remote Desktop Services Manager in Server Manager for classic RDS deployments.

At RDPSoft, we identified these pain points many years ago, and created an assortment of free and commercial solutions to solve these problems. Here are three different ways we’ve made viewing Remote Desktop sessions easier.

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Remote Desktop Canary v2.3 Highlights

September 30, 2020 By admin Leave a Comment

The release of Version 2.3 of Remote Desktop Canary, our synthetic RDP and WVD monitoring and alerting workhorse, offered a whole batch of powerful new features and improvements:

WVD support. Whether you’re still using WVD classic (e.g. Fall 2019 Mode), or you’ve migrated over to WVD in ARM mode (e.g. the Spring 2020 Update), Remote Desktop Canary now supports WVD.
An enhanced workflow cloning wizard. Now, if you want to test each of your session hosts or WVD hosts “all the way to the desktop” using OCR event detection, our new wizard duplicates your test settings across all of your hosts in one easy step.
We’ve improved our OCR alerting engine, so if specific text you are screening for is not seen within a certain number of seconds, Canary’s email alert will include all of the screenshots during the login sequence. As a result, you will immediately see if the login attempt has stalled while loading user profiles/FSLogix, encountered a black screen, or encountered another issue.

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Need Better Windows Virtual Desktop Monitoring and Management? Here Are Some First Steps.

August 24, 2020 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

In our years of experience, we see many teams know that they need better monitoring and management of Windows Virtual Desktop, but they often struggle with getting started. This has been especially true through the recent wave of re-tooling to accommodate so many working from home.

If you are in the process of deploying, or have recently deployed Windows Virtual Desktop, you’re likely struggling with the lack of native WVD monitoring and WVD management tools.

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WVD Features & More: Key Capabilities In Remote Desktop Commander 4.8+

December 11, 2019 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

Expanding on our Windows Virtual Desktop compatibility, Remote Desktop Commander 4.8 introduced a number of robust capabilities. Let’s drill into those features – and some others – in detail . . .

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