Terminal Services Log

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.

March 28th, 2011 | Tags: news, Release History, releases
Posted in news, Release History, releases | 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 »

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

February 1st, 2011 | Tags: news, remote desktop gateway
Posted in news, Press releases | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.1.0

We’ve shipped Terminal Services Log 3.1.0. It’s one of the “minor releases” with exciting new features, improvements and bug fixes . Click here to download new release.

Product version: 3.1.0.31230
Build number: 31230
Database version: 3.1.0.31230
Release date: January 25th 2011.

Features

New Report: Total Applications instances report grouped by day
New Report: Total Applications instances report grouped by hour
New Report: Concurrent Application Usage report grouped by day
New Report: Concurrent Application Usage report grouped by hour
New Report: Concurrent Apps Usage by User report grouped by day
New Report: Concurrent Apps Usage by User report grouped by hour
New Report: Session log summary report (first log on, last log off and total time for the user)
Added the ability to drill into each new report and see details
We now show License reports with more details (list with users/devices that consumed licenses)

Enhancements

Report layouts are now saved when changed from TSL Console
You can now define a report layout that will be sent via email
Special alert email is sent if something is wrong with TSL Service
You can now migrate data from the embedded database to SQL server database
Drill-down ability added to a number of reports
Updated license management UI
IP Addresses Subnets are resolved via Internal IP addresses

Bug fixes

Client name column was not visible on the XLS export
Total values were not being exported correctly to PDF and Excel formats
Application did not collect data while in config mode
Data retention jobs could cause timeouts
Data aggregation jobs could cause timeouts
Concurrent aggregation jobs could cause timeouts
Access denied on remote memory detection while service was used with Local System account
Values on Chart and Grid for Number of users per day report were not equal
Organizational Units were not synced with Active Directory
You could not configure a service account that had dot (.) in the username
System could show false alert that emails were not sent
Network traffic reports show incorrect values when a user reconnects with same session name
When aggregation was enabled the aggregation job could “skip” days and miscalculate values

Click here to download new release.

January 25th, 2011 | Tags: news, Release History, releases
Posted in news, Release History, releases | By: Frane Borozan | 2 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 »

We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.0.9

We’ve shipped Terminal Services Log 3.0.9. It’s one of the “service releases” with bug fixes and minor improvements. Click here to download new release.

Product version: 3.0.9
Build number: 31217
Database version: 3.0.8.31217
Release date: January 10th 2011.

Features

None

Enhancements

None

Bug fixes

Fixed issue with AD integration when reports would not display user’s OU membership
Fixed issue with memory leak caused by sending scheduled emails
Fixed issue with disconnected sessions that continued into next day

Click here to download new release.

January 10th, 2011 | Tags: release, Release History
Posted in Release History | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

License Compliance Monitoring with Terminal Services Log

It’s always good to know whether your investment in software licenses has been optimized, and with tight budgets nowadays this issue is more relevant than ever.

For all Terminal Services Log users, the process of checking if you are over-licensed or under-licensed for a specific software product takes only two very simple steps:

Tell us what licenses you own (this is usually “offline data”, so we cannot know this unless you tell us)
Check your license compliance in several available reports

Step 1: Tell us what licenses you own

In Terminal Services Log click on Tools > Manage Licenses and a new window showing licenses you have will appear:

Naturally, you can edit or delete all individual items. We’ll show you how to add a new one – just click “New License”, choose application name and enter type and number of licenses.

A huge number of most used applications can be selected from the drop down menu in the Application Name field. You can also add your own if you like.

After you have edited the existing license information and entered new products, you have done everything required for Terminal Services Log to give you reports on License Compliance.

Step 2: Check your License Compliance

Terminal Service Log provides you with 4 reports regarding software licenses you use:

Used Application Licenses – number of licensed used per each application
Application License Compliance – shows if you are under-licensed or over-licensed for a certain application
Application License Details – reports on each single license and user / device that consumed it during a selected period of time
Client License Compliance – Remote Desktop licensing and Citrix licensing reports

All of those reports are accessed through the “License Reports” section on the left of the Terminal Services Log software. Each report can be exported to Excel (including Dynamic PivotTable and Dynamic Worksheet), PDF, HTML and CSV file. Number of filtering options is also available.

Let’s take a look at the mostly used one, “Application License Compliance” report:

It’s easy – now you have information on which licenses to purchases, the ones you have too many of or find out which products are perfectly licensed.

January 4th, 2011 | Tags: licensing
Posted in how to, new-features | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.0.8

We’ve shipped Terminal Services Log 3.0.8. It’s one of the “service releases” with bug fixes and minor improvements. Click here to download new release.

Product version: 3.0.8
Build number: 31217
Database version: 3.0.8.31217
Release date: December 17th 2010.

Features

None

Enhancements

Bug fixes

Fixed issues with grouping of reports with Min, Max and Average series
Fixed issue when SQL Compact was used as database backend, emails could not be sent
Fixed issue with Application Usage Summary Report, it would not show chart if ApplicationName was equal to empty string
Fixed issue with default sorting for Application Usage History, the report was sorted as string not as date values

Click here to download new release.

December 17th, 2010 | Tags: Release History
Posted in news, Release History, releases | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

We’ve just released Terminal Services Log 3.0

After long long period of development we are excited to announce we’ve just released Terminal Services Log 3.0! This is the 3rd major release of Terminal Services Log with a number of new features and enhancements. This is just an intro post about Terminal Services Log so stay tuned!

Download Terminal Services Log 3.0 now !

In case you have valid software assurance our sales department will e-mail you the keys for Terminal Services Log 3.0, if not we will be offering upgrade options from Terminal Services Log 2.x to 3.x.

Product version: 3.0.6.31215
Build number: 31215
Database version: 3.0.5.31130
Release date: November 30th 2010.

New features

Improved User Experience
In version 3.0 we have completely overhauled user interface, all the reports, grids and overall navigation. You will find the new UI easier to use and new reports and charts easier to adapt to your needs. We have also invested a lot into existing forms making them more user friendly with numerous new options and features.
Network Traffic Reports
Terminal Services Log now tracks information about inbound and outbound network traffic. Administrators can use these reports to monitor overall traffic per users and servers.
Performance Reports
The set of new Performance Reports helps administrators track CPU and Memory for users connected to remote farm and to analyze total resource load grouped by remote sessions, applications, users and servers.
Custom Reports and Alerts
Using built-in custom report wizard you can now create your own reports with custom filtering, grouping, sorting and summaries.
Export data to Excel Pivots
With more 59 built-in reports and built-in custom reports, Terminal Services Log displays data in various formats and groupings. We know business users like to play with Excel to make custom state-of-the-art reports. With the new version Excel Pivots are just one click away and come with a dynamic-data flavor allowing you to save your custom Excel but also populate reports with fresh data.
System Jobs
All data collection and maintenance jobs are now united under System Jobs features. Administrators can execute these jobs on demand or configure them to run on a given schedule. It’s much easier to track the overall data collection progress with the newly designed System Jobs dialog.

November 30th, 2010 | Tags: Release History, releases
Posted in news, Release History | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

Terminal Services Log Documentation

Terminal Services Log documentation is available on the documentation pages available at: www.terminalserviceslog.com/documentation

On the following pages you will be able to find:

November 1st, 2010 | Tags: documentation
Posted in terminal services log | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.2.0

Features

Enhancements

Bug fixes

Terminal Services Log can tell how efficient your employees are

Daily Activity (Gantt) – activity breakdown per user

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

Remote Desktop Gateway Monitor

We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.1.0

Features

Enhancements

Bug fixes

Version 3.0 brings Dynamic Excel Reporting

What we had before – static datasheet reports

Dynamic Worksheets are now available!

Dynamic PivotTables make reports even more flexible

We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.0.9

Features

Enhancements

Bug fixes

License Compliance Monitoring with Terminal Services Log

Step 1: Tell us what licenses you own

Step 2: Check your License Compliance

We’ve just shipped Terminal Services Log 3.0.8

Features

Enhancements

Bug fixes

We’ve just released Terminal Services Log 3.0

New features

Terminal Services Log Documentation

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