When we are talking with customers about concurrent usage reports, we  usually discuss one of these two scenarios:

• Tracking concurrent usage (CCU) to ensure Citrix XenApp license compliance
• Tracking concurrent usage to ensure our servers are not under/over utilized

In January 2010 we released a new version with Concurrent Usage Reports, let’s take a look at some of these features.

Concurrent Usage Reports are available under User Reports. Let’s take a look at Concurrent Users per Month. It shows the maximum number of users that were connected in each month. It also shows the average number of concurrent users.

Concurrent usage reports have the „drill-down“ ability. So let’s click on October and see what happens:

Concurrent Users per Day shows the maximum and average number of concurrent users in a day. On the chart above we can see a regular pattern: System is heavily utilized over weekdays and slightly utilized over the weekends. Let’s drill-down.

Concurrent Users per Day report shows system utilization in one day per hour. System is most heavily used from 11AM – 4PM, a normal day in a typical office.
By clicking on a desired hour you will see log of all sessions that occurred in this time period.

Conclusion

These new concurrent usage reports will allow you to gain valuable insights into how your server or server farm is being utilized. You can use these reports to make sure you are license compliant but also to check which servers are heavily utilized and in which periods.

The first thing you need to do is to configure a new license type.

1. Go to File > Preferences
2. Switch to Licenses tab
3. In the Application Name column select the application you want to monitor (e.g. Microsoft Office Word)
4. In the License Type column choose Device License
5. Enter the Number of licenses you have

Add other Microsoft Office Applications if you want to monitor these. Let’s say I have 5 Office Standard licenses. Standard includes Word, Excel and Outlook but it does not include Access, so I have added 5 licenses for Word, Excel and Outlook and 0 licenses for Access.

How does license compliance work for per device licenses? Our application will calculate the number of unique devices that were used to run these applications in a given time period and selected server.

Finally, let’s check if I am license compliant with Microsoft Office.

Okey, looks good… my users are only using applications we have licensed. (They cannot even use Access since it is not installed.)

Let’s consider another situation. Let’s say I purchased Office Professional licenses, and I do have 5 Access licenses at hand. The report would then look like this:

So as you can see, my users are not using Access, and we are over licensed for Access. Next time I might want to reconsider the optimal Microsoft Office suite for my needs.

Conclusion

Our license compliance reports help you to determine the ideal number of licenses you need to purchase for your users on a Terminal Services / Citrix server. If you are over licensed, we help you save  money when renewing licenses for business applications, and when you are under licensed… well we are also saving money for you, as you might need to purchase some licenses to resolve the problem before you are fined.

Our application allows you to monitor Per User / Per Devices licenses and we will be adding more types in the future versions of our application. For more details about licensing of your business application you should check with your vendor.

Here is an example how to configure our application to use Google Mail as SMTP provider:

• Check “Enable e-mail sending”
• Check “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”
• Check “Use encrypted connection (SSL)”

Type the following:

• Server (:Port): smtp.gmail.com:587
• Sender (email): your_email_address@gmail.com
• Username: your_username (or your_email_address@gmail.com)
• Password: your_password

Check this guide for more details on how to use GMail services from 3rd party tools.

[...]
I would like to determine optimal time for backing-up our databases.

The problem the client was facing was that his users were connecting from different continents and different time zones. So the usual “best practice” of backing-up databases during night could not be applied in this case.

The solution for this problem was really simple. Terminal Services Log was already installed, so we analyzed the gathered data and here are the results. The first step was to analyze weekl activities and to determine weekdays when the server was least used.

As shown in the picture above, the server is least used on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (due to the nature of  business this company does on weekends). Daily activity report revealed that the optimal time for backup is 1AM – 6AM (GMT).

Our reports clearly show that the best time for performing backups, so in case this customer needed to plan a day or two for weekly backups he should probably choose Tuesday or Wednesday night when this farm is least used.

Although most modern backup programs are able to backup an open file, our customer  backups is a very old database format, and even a modern backup program cannot handle it.

This is the error we were receiving: Backup could not be performed due to inability to lock the database.

Performing Backup jobs on a Terminal Sever can be complicated. An automated script is going to log-off all users at midnight. Users cannot login 12:00AM – 3:00AM. to prevent them from accessing the server and opening a databases that is being backuped.To ensure everything works smoothly we used our product Terminal Services Log to analyze user activities on the server and checked if there were any no active sessions (if a user was not included in the log off script).

By using Users and Sessions report we were able to locate what the users that were still active in backup time. For these ‘problematic users’ we change idle logoff timeout and included them in the midnight auto log off script.

After correct configuration backup is running normally .

TSL 2.0 provides information about application usage. Data collected is displayed in forms of charts and grids that can be exported to PDF and Excel.

By using our product you can have detailed usage reports of all terminal servers in your organization. Here are some business problems you might be facing in your own company.

Example of all users summary report (summary for total time, active/idle/disconnected)

Users and sessions

Let’s say you want to see all the users that connected to your server in a particular time frame:

Our application comes with a built in report that lists all the sessions on your TS/Citrix server, including the information about the time they started-ended and information about total time an user spent in active / idle /disconnected state during that session.

What are my users doing on the server?

Now you want to check summary for all user activity on the terminal server. This way you will have insight into how much of the time users are really working something on the server. TSL will allow you to have precise time in how much of the particular user was active, idle or disconnected from the server.

If only desktop for the end user is remote desktop connection, and for 7 hours of the 8 working hours some of the users were idle or disconnected then you will know that something is not good with employee, maybe he is not satisfied, maybe he just don’t like to work.

Summary of all applications usage (note on the screenshot there is a summary for applications for Microsoft Office)

I would like to know if an employee is always late…

This won’t be a problem any more, TSL will allow you to capture the exact time when a user logged on to your server. TSL will also capture the time the user logged off.

If suspected that someone is connecting to your TS/Citrix server outside regular working hours you can use a built in report to see which users connected to your terminal server and processes they ran during that session.

Conclusion

With TSL application logging you have powerful insight into all activities on your Terminal Server/Citrix. If you suspect that there is something fishy going on, TSL is the proper tool for you. It controls users and their sessions but also processes. With just one application you can monitor and analyze the productivity of your employees.