Azure Remote Desktop Traceability in a Cloud Service

Question

If you follow Microsoft's instructions here to enable RDP on instances in a Cloud Service, they tell you to create a user and set a password for remote desktop purposes.

As this can quickly become a "shared account", I am wondering how one goes about linking this to a person. The Azure Operation logs do not seem to keep track of who RDP'ed or not, and the Windows Security Event Log obviously has no idea what user was connecting other than the user you created. This make traceability difficult.

While I understand RDP should only be enabled for troubleshooting purposes, I am hoping I missed something simple that would allow Azure Cloud Service users to enable RDP without losing all traceability on who is accessing what instance.

Short Version: How do I know who connected over RDP using the shared RDP Account? Azure logs, infrastructure logs maybe?

Thanks

Answer 1

There have been a few changes since the link you mentioned is published:

1. You can now enable/disable remote desktop through the portal. You don't have to do it at the time of publishing your cloud service. Using this, you can provision remote desktop connections for individual users in your team instead of relying on one shared RDP connection. To do so, click on CONFIGURE tab for your cloud service and then click on Remote icon and follow the instructions.
2. The thing you do on portal with remote desktop can also be done programmatically using Service Management API. With the latest Service Management API release, RDP functionality is basically an extension which you can enable/disable on the fly. I wrote a blog post not too long ago describing this functionality: http://gauravmantri.com/2013/05/06/windows-azure-cloud-services-extensions-and-service-management-api-fun-with-remote-desktop/

I haven't actually looked at security event logs so I can't say for sure that it would log this activity but I'm assuming it would.