And so now I want to demonstrate the Remote Access Management console,
and again, as I'd said previously, if you're a direct access administrator,
you'll be familiar with this.
So, to search for that, we'll just type in remote access,
and literally, it's the Remote Access Management console.
And again, this is kind of the same thing, only different.
It's it's basically just a more modern version of the
Routing and Remote Access Management console.
You'll find right off the bat that it's obviously much more attractive,
it's prettier.
If you select the Dashboard node here,
you'll see that there's a graphical representation of system health,
which is really helpful.
And also in this section here,
you'll get an overview of DirectAccess and VPN Client Status.
Obviously, we're only using this for VPN, so this would all be VPN connections.
It will show you the total number of active clients.
This is the total number of concurrent users on the system now.
It also shows you the total cumulative connections,
and it's important to understand that cumulative connections just is a
running count of how many sessions have been made.
So this will run up into perpetuity until the server is
restarted or the Remote Access Service is restarted.
And the same goes for the Total transferred data.
And by the way, Maximum client connections again, that does reset.
That is basically a high watermark for the number of
concurrent sessions seen on the server.
This is really helpful for capacity planning,
if you see that you're getting close to the number of IP
addresses or ports that you've assigned,
you may want to bump those up based on this information here.
And again, critically important, when you restart the service,
the Remote Access Service, or you restart the server,
these numbers will reset back to 0.
Next, we'll go to the Operations Status,
and again, this is more of a detailed view of the individual system health.
So if there's a problem with the service,
there would be an error or a warning here,
and there would be some verbose information as well.
I like this because if we go to the Remote Client Status,
I do get the same information that I got from the Routing
and Remote Access Management console, but there's much more here,
as you can see.
Right off the bat, if I highlight a connection,
you'll see that there are access details here,
so we didn't see that in the older console,
and it also if you double‑click on a connection,
it will again give you plenty of detailed information,
things like the ISP address, duration, activity,
transfer rate, IP addresses, and so forth.
There's lots of great information here.
Now, much like the Routing and Remote Access Management console,
this is once again customizable.
So what you see here is useful, but there's much more data that we could surface.
So if you right‑click on one of the column headings,
you'll see that it brings up a menu with additional information.
So, one of the things you'll notice is that the Host Name is never populated.
So the first thing I'll do is I'll uncheck that so that I can,
you know,
reclaim some of that real estate and use it for
something more useful and meaningful.
So I'm going to right‑click here again, and some of the things that I
like to see are, again, my client IPv4 or IPv6 address.
This is really helpful if you're trying to do event log
correlation. You'll know that this connection is using these IP
addresses. Total Bytes In, Total Bytes Out might be helpful just to
see who's using the most the most data.
And, of course, that you can sort by columns and so we can,
you know, surface who's transferring the most data here quite easily.
Connection Start Time might be another helpful one, and also, I think
Authentication Method is good, and of course, you'll see that you'll
quickly start to run out of real estate, so you'll have to really choose
carefully on the columns that you want.
Activity Status and Rate might be good to see as well, and
let me clear a few of these other ones just so that we can
get a good look at those.
So if you look at those, activity means these connections are active,
none of them are idle, and then, of course, the Transfer Rate. This is
the current transfer rate at this particular sampling,
it's not a steady state, so this number will fluctuate.
And of course, you can refresh the console at any time, and you'll see
that there's a Configure Refresh Interval here as well.
So if you want the console to update more rapidly,
you can certainly do that as well.
Now,
the one drawback that the Remote Access Management console has
is that it only works really for one server.
So if I wanted to configure additional servers,
I would have to go back to the Configuration node here and then choose Manage
a Remote Server, and then enter in the other server name,
click OK, and then I could look at the statistics for this
particular server, so now I'm on another server.
So if you have multiple servers, this is somewhat limiting.
If we go back to the Routing and Remote Access Management console, here,
it actually works with multiple servers a little easier
because I can right‑click on the server here,
choose Add Server, and then add my second server.
And then I can view statistical data here, or even
make configuration changes as well.
This is really helpful, again, if you have multiple VPN servers in your
environment. Also if you're using Server Core, this is a good way to manage and monitor those systems as well.