RES Baseline Desktop Analyzer (BDA) is a free and easy to use RES product which was released well over a month ago during Citrix Synergy. It will run in the background of a user session and collects data like application usage, printers, hardware, location etc etc. For more information click here.

Use Case

For a large retailer in the Netherlands we are working on a Citrix XenDesktop based VDI solution where we are also implementing RES Workspace Manager.

When we started on this project we received an application inventory but during the project nobody was really sure if this was a complete list. We also needed a printer inventory.

We needed a quick solution that wouldn’t just scan for executables on old FAT clients, we needed to know which applications are actually in use, how many times they are used and by which user group. This is why we ended up with RES BDA.

Like I said before, this tool is absolutely free to use there is no limit on amount of users, desktops, and entries there really isn’t any catch except for a RES logo on top of your reports!

Let’s get started

Go to RES BDA website and register an account.

Installation

You would expect that this software needs to be installed on each workstation however, and this is where it gets really interesting, you don’t have to do an installation!

Just copy a couple of files to a file share and add one line to the logon script pointing to the executable.

Sample – And now we wait!

The software is quietly running and it will create data files in the configured data location. Just sit back and relax for a couple of days or weeks until you think you have all the data.

Are your colleagues already happy with all the time you have to get them coffee?

Analyze

Now that we have some results we can start creating reports. You can do this per computer, per group of computers and users or just do them all at once.

Each desktop creates its own dts file which can be uploaded per file or you can create a compressed zip file with all of the selected dts files and upload the zip file.

When all the files or a single zip file holding the dts files are uploaded you just click on Analyze your samples.

Reports

After a short time of running the analysis the reports are ready to download in a fantastic easy to read pdf document.

Because a pictures says more than a thousand words just have a look at the following screenshots (Customer details are blurred).

First I’d like to thank my colleague Rene van der Linden for actually doing the analysis and creating the screenshots.