Checking usage of RDS Server

[fiza]

Is there an easy way of getting a report of how used an RDS server is? We want to find out how popular the RDS server is but I cant find an easy way of getting this info of who logged in and when other than going into the Event Viewer and looking at TS local session manager details.

[jthompson]

I don't know which version of RDS you have, but in RDS2012 you can see a list of the current connections in Server Manager\Remote Desktop Services\Collections\Remote Apps

 

On ours, we use a custom check in Nagios to graph the number of connections, but that's not a simple thing to set up.

 

We also log logons and logoffs to a file, with separate files for every computer and user, to make it easy to see the activity history for each. That's just a simple pair of scripts: one at logon, one at logoff.

 

The logon script looks like:

The logoff is exactly the same but says "LOGOFF" in the line instead.

 

The log files end up like this:

There'd be a file for every computer, and every user.

 

The log files are on a network share, so not especially secure, but quick and dirty.

[fiza]

I don't know which version of RDS you have

Server 2016 hence why I posted in the Windows Server 2016 forum

[Steve21]

Is there an easy way of getting a report of how used an RDS server is? We want to find out how popular the RDS server is but I cant find an easy way of getting this info of who logged in and when other than going into the Event Viewer and looking at TS local session manager details.

 

You can look at your license manager for a list of who's got licenses assigned etc but it won't show things like they logged on yesterday at 6pm etc

 

How much detail did you need?

 

Steve

[jthompson]

Server 2016 hence why I posted in the Windows Server 2016 forum

 

Doh. Yeah I missed that.

[fiza]

You can look at your license manager for a list of who's got licenses assigned etc but it won't show things like they logged on yesterday at 6pm etc

 

How much detail did you need?

 

Steve

 

As its a new service (we only publish RemoteApps) we want to know how popular it is with staff. I would like to report back to SLT to say things like, 10 Staff logged in yesterday or the following RemoteApps are the most used.

 

Thanks for the pointer to the licence manager. That's useful.

[atr]

Would be very useful for us here too. We have one that we don't really want but before we can get rid we need to prove it isn't used much.