Remote desktop monitoring software

Remote desktop monitoring with ADAudit Plus

What is remote desktop monitoring software?

Remote desktop monitoring software gives IT and security teams visibility into RDP session activity across their Windows environment. Without it, remote access is a blind spot: sessions open and close, and accounts fail to authenticate, all without a consolidated record of what happened.

ADAudit Plus closes that gap. It collects and correlates RDP session data from DCs, member servers, and workstations, and surfaces it through pre-configured reports and real-time alerts.

Track every RDP session with pre-built reports

ADAudit Plus collects RDP session data centrally and surfaces it through dedicated reports. The Remote Desktop Services Activity report covers connections and disconnections across your domain, with user identity, client machine, client IP address, session start, and session end recorded for each event.

• Identify which users connected via RDP, to which servers, and for how long, without logging into individual DCs.
• Trace any remote session back to the originating machine and IP address.
• Report on RDP activity for a specific server or generate a view of all remote sessions across your entire environment.

 

 

Identify who connected remotely, when they logged in, which device they accessed, and where the connection originated from.

Monitor RD Gateway and RADIUS/NPS sessions

ADAudit Plus covers remote access authentication beyond standard RDP, with dedicated reports for both RD Gateway and RADIUS/NPS traffic. The RD Gateway report tracks sessions routed through RD Gateway, capturing connection time, user identity, and client IP for each session. The RADIUS Logon Failures and RADIUS Logon History reports cover NPS authentication, recording the user, client IP, NPS server, event type, and failure reason where applicable.

• Audit RD Gateway sessions separately from direct RDP connections, with full user and connection details per session.
• Identify failed NPS authentication attempts by user and client IP, with the specific failure reason recorded for each.
• Review the full history of NPS authentication events, including both successful and failed attempts, across all NPS servers in your environment.

 

 

Know the logon time, client IP address, client host name, gateway server, and login details for every Remote Desktop Gateway session.

Get real-time alerts on critical events

Visibility after an event is useful for forensics. Real-time alerting is what lets you stop an attack while it's still in progress. ADAudit Plus ships with configurable alert profiles that fire on the RDP events that matter most.

• When an account initiates an RDP session to a DC outside business hours, your team is notified immediately so the session can be verified or terminated before any damage is done.
• When the volume of RDP logon failures on a host exceeds its learned threshold, you receive an alert at the moment the spike occurs, not after the account is locked out or the server is compromised.
• When a user accesses a host remotely for the first time, an alert fires so you can confirm the access was authorized before the session continues.

You control what crosses the threshold for an alert, so high-volume environments surface only the events that actually require a human response. When a threshold is crossed, alerts go out by email or SMS to the responsible team, and a ticket can be created automatically in ServiceNow, Jira, ManageEngine Service Desk Plus, Freshservice, or Zendesk, so nothing sits unreviewed in an inbox.

Extend auditing to cloud environments

ADAudit Plus monitors both on-premises Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID (previously known as Azure AD) from a single console, giving you a unified view of user logon activity.

• Every Entra ID sign-in event is captured with details such as user identity, source IP address, geo-location, device information, and MFA status.
• The Hybrid Logon Activity report correlates on-premises AD and Entra ID events to provide complete visibility into user authentication activity.
• Legacy authentication attempts that use older protocols and bypass MFA are tracked separately in a dedicated report.

Meet compliance requirements

Remote access sessions are a required audit scope for most compliance frameworks. SOX, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FISMA, GDPR, GLBA, and ISO 27001 each require evidence that access to controlled systems was authorized, logged, and reviewable, and that the logs are retained for the period the standard mandates.

ADAudit Plus includes pre-configured compliance report sets for all seven of these standards. Each report set maps audit data to the specific controls those standards require. Custom report profiles let you go further: combine a specific set of users, a defined time range, and the RDP events relevant to your audit scope into a saved view that your compliance team can run on demand.

Why native tools fall short for RDP auditing

Windows Security event logs record RDP session events, but collecting those logs from every DC, member server, and workstation in your environment and turning them into a usable audit trail is a different problem entirely.

Security event logs are stored locally on each system that records them. Without a centralized collection mechanism, answering a question as straightforward as "which users initiated RDP sessions to this server last Tuesday between 9 p.m. and midnight" requires logging into each relevant system individually and filtering raw event data manually. Reporting, alerting, and retention at scale are not capabilities the native tooling provides.

• Local event logs on each system have no built-in correlation across machines. Tracing an RDP session from client to server to DC requires pulling data from three separate log locations.
• PowerShell can query event logs remotely, but constructing the queries, handling access permissions across systems, and formatting output for a compliance review requires significant scripting effort that's difficult to maintain at scale.
• Windows Event Viewer provides no threshold-based alerting capability. There's no native mechanism to notify your team when a threshold of failed RDP logons is crossed or when a privileged account connects outside business hours.

ADAudit Plus collects, correlates, and presents RDP session data centrally, turning event logs from every system in your domain into a searchable, alertable, compliance-ready audit trail that your team can act on without writing a single query.