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Terminal Services Log 3.5 is out with major new features

It has been almost a year since we first launched the completely redesigned, almost built from scratch, version 3.0. There have been numerous enhancements and new features since the launch, but today we are happy to present the biggest upgrade among 3.X versions – Terminal Services Log 3.5.

Split reports on published applications and server desktops

All users connecting to Remote Desktop Services can be divided into two main groups – ones that use applications directly on the server (published apps in XenApp or RemoteApps in Remote Desktop Services) and others who have their full server desktops.

When one analyzed users and application activity with the previous version of Terminal Services Log, one could see the overall stats filter by certain criteria, but was not able to split the ones that use published apps or server desktops.

Not only that the newest Terminal Services Log  can split and filter the results, but it can also automatically detect all published applications and server desktops. That makes the new feature easy to use allowing you to filter only the sessions that use published apps.

Split report per Server desktop and Published apps only

Private and Global report views

Our customers wanted to create a predefined set of filters that would define servers as a logical farm, users as a logical organization et cetera. Such views could be save but every time you had to choose particular servers or users  yourself.

Any combination of users and servers can now be saved and deployed as Private or Global view. Global view is available for all reports while private view is available only for the selected reports.

 New Session count report and Private/Global views allow you to create personalized views

User management like Remote Desktop Manager and Citrix AppCenter

Your are familiar with the Remote Desktop Manager or Citrix AppCenter. They enable you to manage users and applications, and we decided to implement some of their functionalities and enhance them in Terminal Services Log, making TSL more than a reporting software only.


Session management implemented in Terminal Service Log 3.5. lets you assist end users, help them use remote desktop and terminate applications on a single and group level. It provides much more flexibility than RD Manager or Citrix AppCenter by enabling you to filter only a few users, applications or servers and perform session log off on the server/group level or, for example, kill all Internet Explorers in your farm.

Session management allows you to manage al users and application across almonitored servers

Click here to download new release.

Product version:  3.5.9.41105
Build number: 41101
Database version: 3.5.4.41101
Release date: Monday, November 7, 2011

Other new features

  • Session count report provides the same data as the Dashboard, counting all users across all servers displaying load per sessions in your farm.
  • Performance report that allows you to monitor hard disk utilization.
  • Merged report that combines user activities and applications in one place.
  • Ability to configure a real-time alert when servers go offline.
  • Option to select one e-mail to be sent daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly with a single schedule.
  • Choose which day of the week will be your starting day for receiving weekly reports.
  • Configurable empty e-mail, sent if there was no activity on the servers.
  • Check all server statuses at once with the server tab.
  • Warning about exceeding the database limit on Microsoft SQL Express.

Bug fixes

  • XLSX formatting was in a number format.
  • Adding users from the domain was slow, now there is a progress bar with import status.
  • Sometimes user activity would be zero.
  • You couldn’t import users that had special characters in the name.
  • You couldn’t search in OUs that had special characters in the name.
  • Anonymous sessions wouldn’t work correctly in the Professional Edition.
  • Export to Excel pivot in custom reports with time spent had issues.
  • CPU utilization sometimes was over 100% because of the bug in Windows performance counters.
  • Huge SQL database would sometimes timeout  on upgrade.
  • When you disabled a  job, the  job would actually .
  • Session type filter was not working on the Dashboard.

Click here to download new release.


We have just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.4.2

We have shipped Terminal Services Log 3.4.2. It’s one of the “minor releases”. The most important fix is better and faster Active Directory Integration.

Product version: 3.4.2.40923
Build number: 40923
Database version: 3.4.1.40909
Release date: September 23rd 2011

Bug fixes

  • Active Directory import would take a long time and it would not finish for some domains
  • Servers would go offline sometimes if AD import was enabled

Click here to download new release.


We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.4

We’ve shipped Terminal Services Log 3.4.0. It’s one of the “major releases”. The most important new feature is better filtering and ability to combine multiple filters with multiple selections in custom reports.

Click here to download new release.

Product version: 3.4.0.40715
Build number: 40715
Database version: 3.3.7.40615
Release date: September 1st 2011

Features

  • New custom reports conditions for better filtering of the reports. New filters include weekdays and organization units
  • Ability to use multiple conditions under same filter

Bug fixes

  • AD import for some domains was not working
  • Servers would go offline if AD import was enabled

Click here to download new release.


Virtual Desktop Monitor launched, enabling monitoring of VDI environment

The first application designed for monitoring the virtualized desktop environment, Virtual Desktop Monitor 1.0, has just been launched. It supports all major desktop virtualization technologies and provides detailed monitoring and reporting on all users and software activity.

Acceleratio Ltd, the manufacturer of Virtual Desktop Monitor, is the company specialized in software products for monitoring remote desktop activities. Their products include Terminal Services Log and Remote Desktop Gateway Monitor. Virtual Desktop Monitor completes the product line by covering the fast growing VDI market.

Virtual Desktop Monitor consists of three main reporting categories: user activity, application usage and license compliance. User activity reports help in recognizing how efficient employees are and give deep analysis of the behaviour for each team or team member. Application usage reports show how much each application is used and emphasize application usage patterns. License compliance reports indicate if you are over-licensed or under-licensed for a certain software product being used in the virtual desktop environment and therefore enable organizations to optimize licensing costs.

All reports can be scheduled to be received by email. Custom reports are also supported and can be created using a simple wizard.

Virtual Desktop Monitor runs on Windows Server 2008 R2 and supports all major desktop virtualization technologies including Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft Desktop Virtualization, Quest vWorkspace and VMware View. Customers using any of these technologies have the same, complete set of features available.

The product is licensed per number of monitored virtualized desktops. The price starts at $999 for a 25- desktop license.

Additional information and trial version download are available at www.virtualdesktopmonitor.com.

“I am very happy that Virtual Desktop Monitor has finally been launched since we had many inquiries from our existing customers asking for that type of product. The product will be an important enhancement of our existing suite of server monitoring products. Even before the official announcement, many people found the website and asked if they can try the beta because there are no similar offers on the market. That makes us believe we are on the right track!”, said Frane Borozan, head of SBC/VDI product group in Acceleratio Ltd.


We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.3

We’ve shipped Terminal Services Log 3.3.6. It’s one of the “major releases”. The most important new feature is Performance Counters management User Interface.

Click here to download new release.

Product version: 3.3.6.40607
Build number: 40607
Database version: 3.3.2.40506
Release date: June 7th 2011

Features

  • New performance counters management that allows you to easily manage performance counters across entire farm, allows you to recreate performance counters, start, stop and check status
  • Organization unit filter is now hierarchical and reflects Active Directory tree structure

Enhancements

  • You can now select up to 365 day range for most reports
  • Session log ignores disconnected states showing more precise data
  • The system checks server name against Active Directory when adding the server manually
  • Users can cancel loading of huge reports
  • Export to Excel now has the same column order as on the screen

Bug fixes

  • Changing user permissions was not propagated to the underlying database
  • Users could not edit username of a user
  • Pivot table issues when resizing reports grid
  • SQL date/time conversion to Spanish SQL server was not working correctly
  • Some reports would show multiple values on daily memory performance reports when the user selected multiple days
  • Only Administrators could launch Configuration Wizard and change SMTP settings
  • If “Check now” command was executed some servers could be disabled
  • There was an additional entry when the user changed states from Active to Disconnected
  • PDF export was not formatted correctly
  • Excel export was missing footer on User Activity reports
  • Pivot table horizontal scroll was not working
  • One could enable Anonymous  sessions and Role based security at the same time
  • The system could not delete performance counters when console was running on Windows 2003
  • Sorting fixed for multiple reports

Click here to download new release.


Terminal Server Capacity Planning and Monitoring Terminal Server Performance

The key parameter to consider when planning your Terminal Server Capacity (Remote Desktop Session Host server capacity) is how many users it will be able to host. Terminal Server Capacity Planning is necessary to ensure optimal server performance and to reduce help desk calls.

One server hosting lightweight applications (low CPU/Memory consumption) might support a huge number of users, but a server with similar hardware configuration hosting heavyweight might only support a few users on the server. Before you design your environment you need to know what kind of applications will be running and the easiest approach is to monitor how many CPU/memory resources are being used.

Terminal Services Log allows you to easily monitor resource consumption on a remote server, not just overall server performance, but application and user performance as well. We offer following report groups:

  • Farm Performance (overall performance across all Terminal Server / Remote Desktop Session Hosts or Citrix XenApp servers)
  • Server Performance (individual server performance)
  • Application Performance (single application performance or aggregated for multiple applications)
  • User Performance (individual user performance, overall CPU/memory consumed, across entire farm or single server)

The following table shows which reports in each of those groups are available.

Report group Helps you size Memory CPU
Farm Performance
  • Physical Memory Usage Report
  • Committed Bytes in User Performance
  • Processor Time Performance Report
  • User Time Performance
Server Performance
  • Physical Memory Usage Report
  • Committed Bytes in User Performance
  • Processor Time Performance Report
  • User Time Performance
Application Performance
  • Overall Working Set Performance by Application
  • Overall Process Performance by Application
User Performance
  • Overall Working Set Performance by User
  • Overall Process Performance by User

Reports allow you to easily group data into: monthly, weekly, daily or hourly views.

Sample report: Processor Time Performance

Conclusion

Terminal Server Monitoring and capacity planning is a continuous process that needs to be performed on a regular basis, examine reports and adjust your infrastructure to changing needs of your users connecting to the Remote Desktop Session Host server or Citrix XenApp server. Start Monitoring performance of Remote Desktop Session Host/Citrix XenApp server now. Download a free trial of Terminal Services Log and identify users and applications consuming resources in your farms.


We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.2.3

We’ve shipped Terminal Services Log 3.2.3. It’s one of the “minor releases”, with small improvements and bug fixes. Click here to download new release.

Product version: 3.2.3.40430
Build number: 40430
Database version: 3.2.0.40228
Release date: April 20th 2011.

Bug fixes

  • Network traffic for Remote Desktop Gateway was not calculated correctly if a user disconnected the session
  • In certain situations the information about disabled users was not propagated from AD to Terminal Services Log
  • On Chinese simplified Windows operating system you could not use Custom Reports wizard
  • When importing data from Active Directory, organizational units were marked as security groups
  • A user could be assigned to an unknown OU
  • The collector service could get stuck while gathering data

Click here to download new release.


We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.2.0

We’ve shipped Terminal Services Log 3.2.0. It’s one of the “minor releases”, yet it brings some very exciting new features, improvements and bug fixes. Click here to download new release.

Product version: 3.2.1.40401
Build number: 40401
Database version: 3.2.0.40228
Release date: March 28th 2011.

Features

  • You can now track licenses for application suites like Microsoft Office
  • Administrators can define custom security for users in Viewer role, allowing them to view only data (user activities) for their OU or OUs defined by Administrator (Enterprise Edition Only)
  • Custom Reports now support Charts and Pivots (Enterprise Edition Only)
  • New Filter! Custom Group – create your own custom groups and use this filter to filter data regarding group members
  • New Drill-Down Reports! Application Processor Performance Details and Application Working Set Performance Details

Enhancements

  • You can now search values that are being displayed in filters
  • Organizational Unit filter now displays organizational units as hierarchy
  • Improved overall UI responsiveness
  • Improved performance of System Jobs (Concurrent Usage, Aggregation)
  • You can now start the Configuration Wizard from the Start Menu
  • Improved performance of Simple  Session Log chart with large amounts of data
  • You can add new servers by typing the name directly instead of usingwizard
  • Custom Reports can be saved to different categories

Bug fixes

  • You could not  import a custom report if there was already a report with the same name.
  • When importing servers from large Active Directory application freezes while importing.
  • If TSL service started while SQL Server was offline the service would not start collecting data when SQL awoke.
  • The service could timeout while trying to send scheduled emails.
  • Filter values were not being refreshed while the application was running.
  • If you unchecked all series on dashboard the error message was shown.
  • Working Hour preferences were not adjusted to regional settings hour format..
  • If server being monitored and SQL Server were in different time zones the application might have produced inaccurate reports.
  • Logon Audit report showed additional filters that were not being used.
  • Dashboard was not being displayed correctly if user reversed Y-Axis.
  • When user was not authorized to connect to the SQL Server application displayed SQL Offline warning instead.
  • Fixed display issues with the dialog being displayed when user did not have permissions to run the application.
  • Data in Session Log Summary Report chart was not being ordered by time.
  • Could not save Farm Performance Reports as bar or pie charts.
  • Right-click in File Path management dialog caused Exception.
  • You could not close Dashboard properties without choosing an option from the context menu.
  • In case of service failure sessions could overflow to the following day.
  • Reports with multiple series allowed you to display data as pie chart.
  • During AD imports, Organizational Units are imported as Security Groups.
  • Organizational Unit filter does not work on User Performance Reports (User Processor Performance by Hour, User Working Set Performance by Hour).

Click here to download new release.


Terminal Services Log can tell how efficient your employees are

The title of this post may sound too promising and too powerful, since employee efficiency tracking is a huge issue for all organizations. But for the companies whose employees are using Terminal Services to connect to their workspace, Terminal Services Log can be of  great help. We’ll show you how.

Naturally, there is no such thing as unique measurement of employees’ efficiency and therefore Terminal Service Log can not produce the magical number that would represent the overall rating for each and every employee. Instead, it delivers series of reports you can use as high-quality input for your management team when evaluating team members.

All reports related to the efficiency tracking are placed i dedicated reports group named “User Reports”:

User reports are available on the left menu

If you already have Terminal Services Log installed (download the trial and install if you don’t), you can browse the available reports in this group and find all sorts of information about the activity of your employees.

I would like to highlight two reports among them which we found the most useful for this purpose.

Daily Activity (Gantt) – activity breakdown per user

Gantt chart shows user activities during one day

This reports shows Active, Idle and Disconnected intervals of each user during the day (Remote Control Time is also available, but irrelevant for efficiency tracking). According to the standards of your organizations and the nature of each job position, you require certain amount of Active state for specific user – working hours (for example 9am – 5pm) can be defined as well. You can easily check Active time in this report:

User Activity by State – total activity per user(s)

Ideal for a monthly, weekly or any custom date range report, User Activity by State shows how much users  have been Active , Idle or Disconnected during the selected period of time. Companies tend to use it mostly as part of monthly evaluation when calculating payments and actual working hours.

User Activity by State Reports - Shows user activities summarized by different states (Active, Idle, Disconnected)

Hope this helped – let us know if you would like to have additional reports and we will do our best!


Remote Desktop Gateway Monitor

After a very successful launch of our Terminal Services Log 3.0 last month, we are proud to introduce a brand new product – Remote Desktop Gateway Monitor!

Remote Desktop Gateway Monitor is the first application designed for monitoring Remote Desktop Gateway role service in the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R1 and R2. Built-in reports and alerts enable you to be notified easily and quickly about security and efficiency issues, help you meet compliance standards and optimize IT infrastructure investments.

The typical usage scenario for this product goes something like this: you have a TS/RDS farm which end users access through RD Gateway that is running on top of the Remote Desktop Services. It would be great to know users’ activity history – what was the destination server of each user, connection time information, network traffic, monthly or daily activity overview. That type of information is not available in RD Gateway by default.

This is where Remote Desktop Gateway Monitor fits in. It includes all the information above, which can be delivered to you in 4 different ways: through reports, real time alerts, email notifications or on a live dashboard.

It helps you meet compliance standards by recording all users’ activities and enforcing compliance with legal and regulatory policies.

Try it yourself at www.rdgatewaymonitor.com. For all questions feel free to contact us at sales@terminalserviceslog.com