Reporting SPLA usage of Remote Desktop user CALs

Question

For our SPLA, we need to report how many unique users were logged in during the month via RDP. (I also need to report how many opened Office, and Office Pro Plus, but not sure that's for this forum). Not sure how I can report on this? I asked in the scripting
forum, and was told there might be some perfmon counters, but I can't find them. Figured I would as this forum, as I can't be the only one looking for this. I found the RDP reports, that show me which CALs will expire when, but it doesn't even tell me when
they were issued (yes, I can put in Spreadsheet and calculate). It does not tell me anything about users logged in, unique or otherwise.
How can I track the CAL usage?
mpleaf

Answer 1

That's interesting TP...not the way our SPLA partner explained it to us. However, that being said...we have our policy set to expire RDP licenses every 60 days, and then we obviously issue new as needed. So, it sounds like, all I need to do then, is say
that as of October 32st (for example), is look at the number of licenses issued for the prior 60 days, and report that number for my monthly report. Does that sound right? Basically, we may have 3000 licenses "available" to be issued, but they are
not issued unless requested by one of the 500 users created in our domain, and only those that are issued a license during the past 60 days, are those who are authorized to login. To me, if the license was not issued in the past 60 days, it can't be used.
mpleaf
No.  You need to report the number of users that were authorized to access the system, regardless of whether or not they actually accessed it.  For example, say you configure your permissions so that the ONLY group that can access your RDS deployment
is a domain group named "RDS Users".  Over the course of the month (say, daily) you could export the user accounts that are members of the group.  On the first of the following month you could de-dupe the list of all the daily exports
and come up with a total number of unique users that had access.  This assumes that each user account maps to a unique human, which is not always the case.
The above is a very basic example.  In reality you want to have much more than that to be prepared to answer the auditor's questions.  You want each fact that you provide to be backed up by policies and procedures, documentation, etc.
The CAL Usage report can be one element of your system, but it only gives an idea of usage--not of how many users were authorized, which is what is stipulated under SPLA.  You might want to use the CAL Usage as one of your cross-check methods. 
For example, if you had 450 users that were authorized during the month, but the CAL Usage shows 500 users, you need to be able to explain (and document) the reason for the difference.
-TP