Remote Desktop Statistics Package
Legacy project: This article records the history of the Remote Desktop Statistics Package. Downloads and installation instructions have been retired; the description and screenshots remain as a record of the project.
A brief history
A while back I wanted a way to show our users how many people were logged in to each host in our Remote Desktop cluster. After many hours of research and a few of development, I came up with ‘RDStat’ – a simple program that ran quser.exe on a regular interval and pulled the data into a text file. The text file was then displayed as a series of bar charts when users logged in.
This proved to be popular – users could now see when they were accessing the servers at busy times and would logoff and do their work another time. Requests began coming in for this to be accessible before they logged into the server.
I modified the script that was polling quser to produce an html file instead – and served this up via IIS. Again, hugely popular but as always, users want more!
The project grew through several rewrites into a collection of tools for showing the load on our Remote Desktop infrastructure.
What the package did
Remote Desktop Statistics had several components, including views that could be embedded into a public-facing website.
StatDesktop was a small program that ran on startup and displayed the current load on the Remote Desktop infrastructure.
RDPGenerator was a web application that generated custom RDP files for users, providing an alternative to configuring a connection directly in mstsc.exe.
HostHistory logged access to the servers and produced graphs covering the previous 24 hours.
CurrentUsers was a webpage that reproduced the user-session information available through quser.exe.
RDPAutoSign was a service that watched a folder for RDP files meeting specified criteria and signed them using a designated certificate.
Historical context
The package was tested on a Windows Server 2012 R2 configuration at the time of the original release. This page preserves that work as a legacy project, rather than presenting it as a current installation guide.