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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.

November 9th, 2011 | Posted in features, new-features, Release History, releases, terminal services log | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

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.

May 12th, 2011 | Tags: terminal-server-performance
Posted in features, monitoring | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

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!

February 24th, 2011 | Tags: employee-tracking, features, reports
Posted in features | By: bob | No Comments »

Version 3.0 brings Dynamic Excel Reporting

The importance of reports in our Terminal Services Log software can hardly be questioned. I mean, the whole application and usage scenarios we’ve heard about are all about reporting and monitoring. Two most important report categories are:

Alerting & Monitoring – for example: If the system detects intrusions on your system, you will receive an email and be able to react straight away to solve the problem.
Data Reporting – most usage scenarios fit into this category. It is with all cases when your primary goal is to collect and analyze data. The couple of examples monitor server usage, application usage, licenses, employee time tracking…

Naturally, you can analyze the data both in the Terminal Services Log itself, or export it and analyze it using third party applications, mostly Microsoft Office Excel. In this post we will focus on Data Reporting - how to analyze data using third party applications.

What we had before – static datasheet reports

If you wanted to collect and analyze data with earlier Terminal Services Log versions (2.x), you had an option to export every report to CSV or PDF. Obviously, PDFs could serve as the “read and show-only” reports while CSV (Comma Separated Values) files could be opened by Excel or any other software and analyzed your way, put into your calculations, connect with other documents etc.

Once made, those analysis were static, so each time you wanted to “refresh” your custom built reports in Excel, you had to export the data again to CSV file and repeat the complete procedure of building custom Excel (or other) reports. We have received many feature suggestions that claimed dynamic reporting should be implemented within the product, so the data in reports is updated automatically.

Dynamic Worksheets are now available!

To make the reports dynamic in version 3.0 and fulfill customers’ expectations, we have implemented the de facto standard for dynamics reporting – Microsoft Office Excel Dynamic worksheets and Dynamic PivotTables.

Let’s take a look of how it’s done. Choose any report in Terminal Services Log and click on the Excel export button in the main menu. The following window will appear:

Obviously, exporting to both Static and Dynamic Worksheet will look the same in Excel at first glance. The difference lies in the Excel Data menu:

By clicking the Refresh button, when the file is exported as Dynamic Worksheet or Dynamic PivotTable all of your data will be automatically updated with the most current results from the Terminal Services Log. You can also explore the Connection settings which enable you to use dynamic data in Excel as well as in your custom built applications (or third party applications).

Dynamic PivotTables make reports even more flexible

In the Excel export described above, there is also an option export report to Excel Dynamic PivotTable. Dynamic Worksheets enable automatic data updating and PivotTable takes you a step further. The main purpose of PivotTables in general is summarizing and analyzing data in easily readable format. Is there a more obvious need than summarizing tons of data you have about your server into more logical and understandable structure?

Here is the example of Application Usage History Report. It contains a huge amount of data. But if you export it as a Dynamics Pivot Table, just by dragging 2 items into Pivot Table field list, you will get a simple and comprehensive report showing how many minutes each application has been used for:

Click here to download trial version of Terminal Services Log 3.0.

January 13th, 2011 | Tags: dynamic reports, excel, features
Posted in features, new-features | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

Configure Audit Logon Events for Windows Servers and TSL

We are very excited about Terminal Services Log v2.6 release because it delivers some very interesting features for our existing and new customers.

One of the most interesting features is the ability to audit failure logons and file system actions. Audit logon events can be used to detect failure logons to your server, and detect hacker attacks and former employee failure logons. Terminal Services Log will report to you the user that is trying to logon, source IP address of the remote attacker and computer name of the attacker’s PC.

Auditing is a Windows Server feature that is configured via Group Policy. Every audit event is stored in the event log. We use the information provided in the Event Log and combine it with existing data (user activities, applications being used…) to create a central monitoring station for your Terminal Services / Remote Desktop / Citrix farms.

Here is the info on how to turn on the logon failure audit events for your server(s). In order to enable Audit Logs you need to:

Configure a Group Policy
Enable Audit Log collection in the Terminal Services Log

Configuring Group Policy

There are two methods how you can apply group policy. Login to your Domain Controller and check if you have Group Policy Management in the Administrative Tools.

Configuring Group Policy for a domain WITHOUT Group Policy Management feature:

Login to you Domain Controller with an account that has Domain Administrator privileges
Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Active Directory Users and Computers.
On the View menu, click Advanced Features.
Right-click Domain Controllers, and then click Properties.
Click the Group Policy tab, click Default Domain Policy, and then click Edit.
Click Computer Configuration, double-click Windows Settings, double-click Security Settings, double-click Local Policies, and then double-click Audit Policy.
In the right pane, right-click Audit Logon Events, and then click Properties.
Click Define These Policy Settings, and then click to select Failure
Click OK.
The changes you made will only take effect when the policy setting is propagated or applied to your computer. Complete either of the following steps to initiate policy propagation right now:
- Type gpupdate /force at the command prompt of a server and then press ENTER. The policy will be updated.
- Wait for automatic policy propagation that occurs at regular intervals that you can configure. By default, policy propagation occurs every five minutes.

Configuring Group Policy for a domain WITH Group Policy Management feature:

Login to you Domain Controller with an account that has Domain Administrator privileges
Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Group policy management
Click Default Domain Policy, and then click Edit (in case you have special policy only for terminal servers select that policy)
Click Computer Configuration, double-click Windows Settings, double-click Security Settings, double-click Local Policies, and then double-click Audit Policy.
In the right pane, right-click Audit Logon Events, and then click Properties.
Click Define These Policy Settings, and then click to select Failure
Click OK.

The changes you made will only take effect when the policy setting is propagated or applied to your computer. Complete either of the following steps to initiate policy propagation right now:

Type gpupdate /force at the command prompt of a server and then press ENTER. The policy will be updated.

Wait for automatic policy propagation that occurs at regular intervals that you can configure. By default, policy propagation occurs every five minutes.

Configuring Terminal Services Log

You need to enable collection of audit log data in the File > Preferences and you are good to go. Terminal Services Log will start to collect audit information from the event log on regular basis. Click here to check sample audit reports.

January 11th, 2010 | Tags: audit log, auditing
Posted in features, terminal services log | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

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