ControlUp's new Pulse AI Canvas enables IT teams to rapidly assess, prioritize, and remediate the impact of critical vulnerabilities by leveraging real-time data, AI-driven insights, and customizable dashboards.
Pulse AI Canvas is an intelligent, flexible workspace utilizing Generative UI to create interactive, AI-powered custom dashboards, integrating data from ControlUp and external sources for deep investigations.
It significantly streamlines major incident management, as demonstrated by a customer case where a critical vulnerability was identified, prioritized, and remediation verified within two days.
The solution delivers enhanced speed, actionability, and closed-loop assurance, substantially reducing manual effort and providing a clear return on investment in IT security operations.
When the PHP2Shell vulnerability was disclosed recently, many organizations were worried about how they might be affected. PHP is a common scripting language powering 70% of all websites. This vulnerability, which could be exploited remotely with little difficulty, created wide-spread risk for organizations around the world.
On October 21, PHP released the patch to fix multiple memory-safety vulnerabilities in the core engine. But that still left many unanswered questions for IT teams: Is my organization at risk? How widespread is the issues? Which devices should I remediate first?
ControlUp’s Expertise: Real-Time Data, AI-Driven Insights, and Powerful Remediation
ControlUp is already well known for delivering real-time data, intelligent insights, and autonomous remediations across physical laptops and VDI environments. Many of our customers rely on ControlUp to help them understand and address critical issues across their IT estates.
However, we have heard from our customers that they need more flexibility in how they interact with their data. They want to be able to work together with their data and external sources to dive deeper, get to the root cause faster, and see instant recommendations.
They want a highly customizable workspace where they can get creative and build to suit specific use cases.
Enter our latest solution for IT: Pulse AI Canvas.
What is Pulse AI Canvas?
You likely haven’t heard of it yet; we’ve only just released it to select design partners. This latest innovation brings together real-time data, real world insights, and AI-powered analysis.
Pulse AI Canvas is an intelligent and flexible workspace inside the ControlUp ONE platform that allows IT to automatically create interactive, AI-powered custom dashboards. Pulse Canvas queries data from across your IT environment, including but not limited to your ControlUp data. It also uses external sources to enable deep investigations, faster root cause analysis, and instant recommendations.
It’s built with a Generative UI (GenUI) framework with benefits including:
- Dynamic Adaptation: The AI decides which components to render, resize, or rearrange depending on the query
- More Than a Wall of Text: Instead of text-based responses, the AI delivers a highly visual UI with charts, maps, and more
- Outcome-Oriented Design: Guardrails, design systems, and components are predefined, allowing the AI to orchestrate how everything comes together to achieve a user’s goal
While it’s not generally available yet, many of our existing customers have been using it for major incident management. In many cases, the new Canvas capabilities have reduced the amount of work and interactions commonly seen when creating dashboards and using traditional LLM chat bots.
So below is how one customer used Canvas to determine whether any devices in our environment were affected, prioritize them, and hand an actionable list to Security Operations for remediation.
The Challenge: Understanding the Impact of the PHP2Shell Vulnerability
Newly disclosed vulnerabilities, like the PHP2Shell, create an immediate question: is our environment exposed? Answering it usually means pulling data from multiple tools, cross-referencing installed software versions, and working out which devices matter most. The process is slow and manual, and it delays remediation.
The Approach: Working with Your Data for Major Incident Management
The customer followed a five-step workflow in Canvas, moving from a single well-formed question to a verified fix without stitching together data from multiple tools.
- Question formulation: Draft a precise query, including the relevant CVEs and context on how the vulnerability could affect an endpoint such as a laptop
- Investigation in Canvas: The query was run in Canvas, which returned a group of potentially affected devices
- Prioritization: Canvas helped rank the devices using installed software versions and how recently each device had been used
- Handover: The Canvas was exported as a PDF and passed to the Security Operations team to begin remediation
- Verification. After remediation, the Canvas is re-run to confirm the vulnerability is no longer detected
Timeline: From Investigation to Resolution in Two Days
When it comes to patching critical vulnerabilities, time if of the essence. However, it can be a challenge to remediate vulnerabilities quickly due to operational complexity, patch testing requirements, and a lack of alignment between security teams and IT operations. Canvas addresses that challenge and dramatically speeds time to remediation.
| Date | Activity |
| 22 October | Investigation run in Canvas; affected devices identified |
| 23 October | Security Operations engaged; remediation started |
| 24 October | Canvas re-run; vulnerability no longer detected |
Outcome: From Raw Data to Remediation-Ready
By the end of the investigation, the team had a clear, prioritized view of exposure and a handoff Security Operations could act on right away.
- Affected devices were identified and prioritized from a single investigation.
- Security Operations received an actionable, prioritised list without needing to translate raw data.
- A repeatable verification step (re-running the Canvas) confirms remediation.
The Value: What Pulse AI Canvas Delivered at Every Stage of the Response
Beyond the speed of the response, Canvas gave the team a repeatable way to show that each stage, from detection to confirmation, was handled and verified.
- Speed to answer: Teams moved from vulnerability disclosure to a prioritized list of affected devices in a single Canvas session.
- Actionability: Findings were ready to hand to Security Operations without rework.
- Closed-loop assurance: Re-running the same Canvas gives a clear before and after view of the environment.
- Demonstrable ROI: The sequence of detection, action and confirmation shows stakeholders the tangible role ControlUp played at each stage.
Try it in your environment
Current customer can get early access and provide feedback to help shape Pulse AI Canvas. Simply contact your sales rep or join us in the group on the ControlUp Community.
