ControlUp ONE Platform

I was taking care of a Citrix infrastructure, and as ControlUp is the best monitoring tool for those environments, I was also using ControlUp to monitor those environments.

ControlUp has a lot of automation in it. It detects problems and failures very well. It's not only monitoring, but it's also detecting, and it could even fix problems with a lot of automation that you can put in place to fix problems automatically before you even detect them.

That's one of the strong points of ControlUp. All the automations, and there's a large customer-written automation. You can pick up those automations and use them on your environment, and it helps a lot. This is very good. It's not third-party, but it's external routines and automations that you can download from their website and implement on your side. That's one of the strong points of ControlUp.

ControlUp, the way we implemented it, and the goal of ControlUp, is to be proactive instead of starting to work on a problem when it already happens. There are a lot of counters and monitors you can implement that will help you detect problems before they happen.

I don't see any.

I used it a bit more. It was around four years.

ControlUp was very good at stability. That's the main reason that product is good.

It takes a couple of days. As soon as everything is prepared and all the reservations are done, it's quite fast.

ControlUp has very good support. I was quite happy to work with ControlUp because the support is excellent. That makes it a nice product to work with.

I had worked with different companies' solutions.

I don't think it's straightforward. It takes a lot of planning and quite a lot of preparation work. You have to have several virtual machines. You have to have your network right, your firewall right, and all the preparation work is quite important.

We were a team working closely with the network guys. I was working on VMware, but there was a VMware specialist that provided the virtual machines for me.

There are so many benefits that I can't give you just one right now. Basically, what we were targeting is the response time of the virtual environment. There are plenty of counters that you can check in order to have this response time as low as possible. There are plenty of opportunities for improvement.

It is expensive. It is very expensive. I was working in a bank, and even in the bank, which was quite healthy, the ControlUp budget was something we had to defend very harshly.

ControlUp is probably an eight. It's very good.

I'm not working with ControlUp anymore because I'm on leave. I'm a pensioner on pension, so I'm not working anymore. I stopped working this year.

I worked all my working life in computers, in IT, and that was principally on Microsoft Exchange. Then I moved to Citrix and VMware. That's where I finished, with mostly Citrix and VMware projects.

I don't see any third-party tool that we integrated ControlUp with. I don't see any.

I would give ControlUp an eight because I've tested quite a few other products, and this one was definitely the best. My overall rating for this review is 8.

My use cases include everything, and I don't mean that facetiously. I mean everything. We manage the servers, manage user sessions, manage everything. We monitor monitoring and take actual actions, everything.

The platform provides valuable capacity management and planning features, and it lets you know what needs to be done to increase performance. For instance, if you have a server experiencing performance issues and people are complaining, you get historical data, and you can see that the load on that server has increased. You can take action; it can take automated actions, but I'm not comfortable with trusting anything to automatically take actions. That's why they pay me.

The best features I have found are that it is very customizable, which would be number one, and very extensible through the use of scripts and triggers. The visual look of the interface is very easy to understand what is happening and somewhat why it's happening. It may sound facetious, but it really is everything about it. Everything works exactly the way it's meant to, a dream come true for anyone who's administering systems because it gives you all the information that you want and all the actions you want to take, all in one place.

The benefits I have seen from using it so far include the ability to know in advance and take actions based on the information the tool gives you.

There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting. It could use some work in reporting.

I have been using it for about 3 years.

It is very stable. I don't have any issues.

It scales very well; you just have to tell it what you're doing and size it for what you're asking. It scales.

If you're asking about support, I would say their support is decent. It's not perfect, but it's decent. They are going through some changes, and sometimes support can be not as good as you'd like it to be, but it's good enough. Once you have the product in place, there's really not much need for support. Basically, if I could take everything that you do, put it in a tool, and hand you that tool so you don't have to repeat your efforts, then you would be able to make good use of it.

The initial setup is best handled by ControlUp; I always suggest having them do the implementation because you're paying them for their service. It's a licensed product, so you have to get some benefit out of it. It seems silly to take it on yourself, especially if you end up calling them to complain about how bad your setup is.

I always suggest having them do the implementation because you're paying them for their service.

It's worth the money to have as a tool. This is having a 24/7 junior admin who's really smart, always there, always doing work, but you have to consume his work. You can't just let him do everything; you've got to consume what he's doing.

There is nothing comparable to ControlUp. There are other monitoring tools, but in my opinion, a monitoring tool is worthless for this setting. A monitoring tool says 'here's what's wrong,' and then you have to figure out what you're going to do to fix it. ControlUp says 'here's what's wrong. Let me give you 100 tools you can use. You determine which tool you'll use to resolve this problem. We can resolve it right now and for however many servers you want.'

Overall, it is easy to use, but you need to be a server admin. I have shown many people how it works. They may not know what to look for. A tool can be simple, a shovel. You give it to someone and say 'dig', but they may struggle if they're not familiar with the work at all. Someone who understands the concept of digging will do a much better job. It's easy for those who understand what it's doing, but it could be hard for others. I could show you how to use it in about 20 minutes, but you might not understand why you should use it or what the system is actually telling you. That's where understanding and experience come into play.

I don't use AI at all for troubleshooting. You might be thinking about the cloud offering, but we don't have that, so I'm not using it. AI is still in its infancy, and turning over your environment to an automated system is risky. AI could work if you were a web service provider wanting automated processes in the background, but in our case, that's not how it is because we have people doing things.

For newcomers, I would advise that both you and they understand the mission when deploying any tool. On a scale of 1-10, I rate ControlUp a 9.

We use the tool to monitor approximately 2,00,000 devices for a client. We check how the devices are doing in terms of hardware and software. We also check their health and alerts every day. If something needs our attention, we inform the other stakeholders to work on it.

ControlUp has some good functionalities, such as remotely pushing scripts in the device through the tool.

We have approximately 10 to 20 feature requests pending on the vendor side. Most reports give information about the top 100 devices, but not all of the devices. In our case, we are monitoring 200000 devices. So, we need details for all those devices, but that is limited to 100, which they have improved to an extent in some reports.

I'm thinking of one feature request for ISPs because the dashboard does not provide a detailed list of ISPs, and it provides the wrong list. I feel some firewall issues are blocking that, and the team cannot send that detail. That may be the case.

One feature request pending on the vendor side is the data format change. Once you see a detail in the report, it is mentioned in some other format, which is hard to analyze sometimes.

I have been working with ControlUp as an admin for five to six months.

Sometimes, when there is some load on the report, the data will not load. It will just give you an error saying that you need to log in or log off again, and it just keeps on loading.

I rate the solution’s stability a six to seven out of ten.

In our current project, we have two accounts working with ControlUp.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

There are 10 to 20 feature requests pending on the vendor or support sides. Continuous emails, calls, and cadences are being used to resolve them. ControlUp's support team is pretty supportive. Whenever we ask about a particular information, they never deny it. They try their best to provide that.

I have previously used Nexthink and SysTrack.

Based on my experience, ControlUp is not that expensive. It is a cheap tool because it is deployed to many devices where I work.

There are already available reports there. If needed for a certain task, you can create a customized report, which you can fetch from PowerShell and SQL queries. If it is already available in a dashboard, you can fetch it from SQL, but if it is not already available, we can write a PowerShell script and fetch it from the devices. This is about fetching the details, but vendors provide hundreds of already available reports without customization.

ControlUp is deployed on the cloud in our organization. Some of the monitoring tools I have used personally, like Nexthink and SysTrack, have a health score feature that tells you about the health of devices. It even takes the largest unit to the smallest unit. SysTrack had 13 KPIs or key parameter indicators that monitored all the details of devices and gave an overall score of the devices' health. The health score functionality wasn't already in ControlUp, but we added it after discussing it with the vendor.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

ControlUp is beneficial as it provides a web interface through which you can access all your infrastructure—servers, devices, and VDI infrastructure—all on the same platform. It supports gathering all infrastructure components in a single, unified dashboard. This helps you identify performance issues or high resource utilization, allowing quick troubleshooting. I appreciate the solid interface that ControlUp offers.
The tool's analytics capabilities help us because we actively use the tool for monitoring. If user activity increases in specific zones, the analytics notify us through alarm monitoring. This tells us that we need to add resources in those areas or that a part of the enterprise is experiencing a resource crunch. The analytics keep us updated in real-time, pointing out where we need to focus our attention.

ControlUp has also started using AI capabilities and automation features, which are beneficial. The platform recently introduced new capabilities and features, so I think its analytics will become even more powerful for VDI administrators in the future.

The product is very easy to use. I would say a new user can get hands-on experience in just a couple of hours of learning. They provide all the training materials through their platform, the ControlUp Academy, which is free to use.

I have been using the tool for three to four years.

We haven't had any outages while using the product.

The support team is available if needed. They help us resolve issues within thirty minutes and even join us on Teams calls if necessary.

I started actively using it a couple of years ago because I had little exposure to the tool. It has helped me understand its advantages and benefits for infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting endpoints, so I have been actively using it for the past few years.

For upgrade issues or if we need support from the tool, we have to look at the on-premises ControlUp server side, which is located in our local data center.

I'm also part of the ControlUp community, so I participate in events and workshops they organize for users like me. Recently, I attended multiple workshops they organized for the platform and kept participating in surveys. I enjoyed learning with the tool.

The solution keeps improving its platform, which has enhanced multiple aspects. We can access various infrastructure features with a single URL, and monitoring solutions and alarms are already in place. Overall, I'm quite satisfied with ControlUp.

Since implementing ControlUp, the main improvement I've noticed is in the information's refresh rate. There was some lag earlier, and reports pulled from the dashboard would sometimes be half an hour old. But now, the information provides real-time status, which is greatly appreciated. Overall, I've seen improvement in the product.

I would recommend the product to other administrators who need to monitor their end-user devices or any other infrastructure. It's a much better solution than what's currently available on the market.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for troubleshooting, user experience monitoring, analysis and automation.

It's one of the very few consoles that gives you near real-time data. Most consoles I know of are at least ten or 15 or maybe even 30 minutes behind real-time. For live troubleshooting, that's worthless. However, this is one of the few products that can grant you real end-to-end visibility when looking at remote sessions. Therefore, we can use it for both troubleshooting and digital end-user experience monitoring.

The product allows for visibility in the performance of our environment in a way few others can. It allows us to proactively wrangle issues that would otherwise have caused a user to log a ticket with the helpdesk.

It provides real-time insights, by performing a baseline analysis. This way, when something is over a threshold, you can be sure it is something out of the ordinary.

There are very many scripts to be used within the product, either triggered or used manually. The analyze log-on duration script has saved many companies so many times already. It's awesome.

It has endpoint monitoring, it has local network information. It even has monitoring of graphical processing power within VDI sessions.

It shows you so many details of what's going on in that log-on that, if there's a problem, you can identify it in five minutes.

The initial setup is dead simple.

The solution is extremely stable.

Something I would love to see from a partner perspective would be a way to provide it as a service hosting provider. Then, it would need some multi-tenancy in technical and licensing.

The first time I came to contact with it was at least a couple of years ago. However, we've really started using it more frequently for a year now.

The solution is 100% stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable.

Now, with the cloud option, it's pretty much limitless in terms of scalability.

There are some design considerations if you take an on-premises version in an air gapped environment, for instance, then it becomes enormous very quickly since you need a place to store all that data. That database that's behind it all gets very large very quickly. It takes storage and takes storage performance. However, when you're on the cloud version, that, of course, is no issue whatsoever.

Very few people actually use it in our company. However, we have many customers on the solution. We have ten or so clients that are sizable companies using it. That includes a hospital, a large municipality, and some sizeable organizations. We're talking about a few thousand users for sure.

Technical support is fast and accurate.

I chose the solution for the company.

A good friend of mine works for the company. He showed me a couple of really awesome things and that really correlated with some trouble and some issues we had with a few customers. The company I work for is actually one of the larger end-user computing VMware partners in the Netherlands. ControlUp, for troubleshooting for instance, is just awesome. It's saved so much time in finding problems and it is also excellent in helping with tweaking and tuning your environment.

It is very easy to set up the solution. It's not complex or difficult.

Basically, I clicked the link on the website, and I downloaded the configuration console, and I was up and running in 30 minutes. While it depends on how far you scale out, the initial setup is so, so easy.

Whenever the vendor was involved, the expertise is awesome.

We have definitely seen an ROI at customers, but to quantify it is not very straightforward.

In terms of exact pricing, I'm more of a technical person than a salesperson, to be honest, and therefore don't have visibility on pricing.

We use different deployment models. We're are a partner of ControlUp.

I've seen in practice that it saves so much time for companies that are really really in trouble and have customers complaining. Once you install that tool you can say okay, there's your problem. And it's not just troubleshooting.

You can basically forgo your remote server management tooling since ControlUp does that too. You can remove your dashboards because ControlUp has dashboards. You can even send scheduled reports to managers about the overall performance of the environment. The list goes on. Once a company sees that it's really worth the money. It may not even be that expensive, to be honest.

I'd advise potential users to do the trial. There's a really simple link on the ControlUp website they can just click the link and go from there. It's so simple. Once you see what you get, you'll have to buy it. Your admins will love you for it.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It could use some improvements and no solution is perfect, however, we are very happy with its capabilities.