Reports | Terminal Services Log

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 »

How you can use Terminal Services Log to optimize licensing costs

In a Terminal Services (Remote Desktop Services) or Citrix Environments users can use a number of different applications. In a heavily used system there could be hundreds of applications running on the servers in a farm. Administrators in charge of such farms need to ensure all applications are properly licensed. But how are you going to monitor all these licenses and their usage across server farms?

This is where Terminal Services Log comes to rescue! Our comprehensive reporting infrastructure allows you to both define the number of licenses purchased and automatically track how these licenses are being used across your farm.

Tracking application licenses

Let’s say you want to track the number of used Office Licenses.

Here is what you need to do:

Go to File > Preferences > Licenses [tab]
Click Add License
From the License Type Dropdown choose Application per Device License (We support tracking of per User and per Device licenses. )
From the Process Dropdown choose Microsoft Office Word
Enter the number of licenses you have purchased

I have entered 4x Word, 10x Excel and 20x Access licenses. Sample usage report is displayed on the figure below.

This report gives me important information about the current licensing state of my farm. As the sample report shows: I am only license compliant with Word, there are too many Excel licenses and too few Access licenses.

Benefits

There is a number of benefits from having reports like this one:

You can optimize costs for licenses you do not really need. (e.g. I could cut the number of Excel licenses in the above given example as I have 5 more than I really need)
I can detect if I need to purchase more licenses on my annual renewal date
I can change between different licensing schemas to detect if I could save more money with different licensing schema (per user/device)

Different licensing schemas we can track

Terminal Services Log allows you to track five different licensing schemas:

For applications

Applications per User License
This license schema is being used for applications that are licensed per user i.e. you have to purchase a license for each user that uses the application
Applications per Device License
This license schema is being used for applications that are licensed on a per device basis i.e. you have to purchase a license for each device this application is being used from. (e.g. So in case you are remoting from two different laptops you need 2 licenses.)

For farms or servers
The following license schemas allow you to track licenses for a farm or single server. This typically includes Terminal Services (Remote Desktop Services) CALs or Citrix Licenses. There are 3 different schemas:

Farm per User License
This license schema allows you to track the number of unique users that connected to a remote server.
Farm per Device License
This license schema allows you to track the number of unique devices (e.g. laptops, workstations…) used to connect to a remote server.
Farm Concurrent User License
This license schema allows you to track the maximal number of concurrent users that connected in the given period. This license type is typically used to track Citrix Access Licenses.

March 25th, 2010 | Tags: how to, licensing, reports
Posted in how to | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

Terminal Services Log

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