One Giant Leap For ControlUp – V7.4

ControlUp keeps the new and innovative features coming at a steady pace, and we all love the new and continually improving capabilities. But once in a while there will be a new release which is so profound, it makes a big splash. We believe ControlUp 7.4 is that one giant leap, and we hope you’ll love it too. Without further ado, let’s dive into the details.

ControlUp Automation Platform

This is the headpiece of this remarkable new release. For the longest time our customers have been asking about the ability to create automatic responses and actions when certain scenarios unfold in their environments. ControlUp has picked up the ball…. And started running!

Our real-time engine connects to a variety of data sources to collect real-time performance metrics, logs, and configuration data across the compute, storage, network and service layers of your EUC data center. Our advanced rule evaluator instantly checks and evaluates thousands of state changes in each of the multitudes of logical objects the real-time engine monitors, delivering a granular incident trigger mechanism.  

Combining the granular incident trigger mechanism together with the Script Action module is the basis for ControlUp Automation. A script action can be tied to any incident trigger. Once the trigger condition is met the script action is carried out.

ControlUp’s automation platform is applicable to a multitude of use cases – the sky’s the limit. To get more concrete, let’s explore a few examples:

• User experience dynamic optimization – ControlUp continuously measures your users’ experience and performance in real time and can automatically assign additional resources if they are available to fix a lagging or slow user experience.
• Augmented Troubleshooting – using the trigger mechanism to collect additional contextual information you require for troubleshooting (collecting relevant logs, performance counters and more from the time of the incident and sending all information attached as part of the ticket).
• Automatic Remediation Self Driven EUC Operations – carrying out specific corrective actions in response to logs and events according to your pre-defined scenarios.
• Resource efficiency optimization – proactively optimize the distribution of your data center’s resources to your heavy duty end users and at the same time pull back idle resources from inactive users, allowing for higher density without sacrificing performance.
  

ControlUp automation gives you freedom, flexibility and power to leverage the truly open-ended solution, customizing it and tweaking it to fit your particular needs to meet your organizations’ challenges and pain points, boost your productivity, decrease or eliminate downtime, increase your end users’ satisfaction and make your IT run smoother than ever before. The automation platform is indeed a new way to be proactive and preemptive in caring for your users and your virtual infrastructure.

There is a Script for that…  

Anyone using ControlUp has probably enjoyed the built in script action functionality offered, coupled with a vast script library based on our community as well as expert scripts, offering a script for almost any issue. However, how does one find the relevant script for the occasion? Most scripts are typically not installed in your ControlUp console and would therefore not be visible to you. Sure, you could always search through the script library looking for a script to match your needs, but for the most part, when you’re troubleshooting, you may not be aware of the fact that a script exists to address the very problem you’re dealing with.

With ControlUp 7.4, we’ve taken the script actions to a new level. Now, clicking on any object or cell within the ControlUp console will automatically show you the relevant scripts which may apply to that specific item. What this means, in real life, is that now you have full access to all the scripts that could potentially help you troubleshoot, investigate, tweak, explore and optimize every aspect of your environment without giving it a second thought – the scripts will be there without lifting a finger, and you’ll be able to pick and choose as you please.

What’s more, the scripts shown per each cell will be available for use even if you haven’t downloaded them and used them previously, you’ll see a cloud icon showing that the script is available in our library and all you’ll need to do click on it to download it and proceed to using it.

ControlUp also now allows you to map your own scripts to a particular column or metric within the ControlUp console, which enables you to easily share your scripts  and knowledge within your organization.

New User Experience Metrics

ControlUp has thus far provided some robust user experience monitoring capabilities, making sure you keep your user satisfaction high and their work experience smooth and without any hitches.

ControlUp 7.4 adds to your user experience monitoring capabilities new continuous, dynamic and very informative user experience metrics: User Input Delay, Average User Input Delay and Maximum User Input Delay. These metrics measure the time it takes the user input to reach the application, but instead of being a snapshot type metric, capturing a single moment in time, they are a dynamic, continuously measured type of metric giving you a live feed on how your users are actually experiencing their work environment and how quickly the different applications are responding to them. This provides you with a real-time, finger-on-the-pulse indication of how well your environment is performing and how fast your applications are responding to your users. Keep your user experience top-notch with ControlUp’s new real-time UX metrics – never miss a beat again.

Email Templates For Incident Triggers

Until now, when using incident triggers you could record the event to the event log and send an email (for both scenarios) but your ability to customize the emails sent from ControlUp was limited. Welcome to the new ControlUp 7.4 – we’ve introduced email templates which are completely configurable to fit your needs, so anytime you run a script, record an incident or run one of our new automated actions you can now control the content of the email sent out, making it easier to identify these emails according to email rules, adjusting the content of the emails to fit your helpdesk system, ticketing system, event management system and so on. Using a huge amount of variables you will be able to tightly control the exact content of the outgoing email message so that it will perfectly fit your needs, whatever they may be. You’ll find it under Triggers → Templates.

An Overhaul Of ControlUp Insights’ Back End

ControlUp Insights is our reporting and analytics portal, providing you with a rich set of interactive reports as well as analytics dashboards, configuration recommendations, abnormalities detection and more.

Our newest version includes an overhaul of ControlUp Insights’ back end, significantly improving the performance and responsiveness of the various reports and dashboards, which everyone can appreciate and enjoy, with shorter delay times and faster queries.

What’s more, the historical data in ControlUp Insights is now available within 45 minutes and even less! Stay tuned, we’re working to reduce data upload time even further in the near future.

But the real exciting news here is the greatly increased granularity you can now get within ControlUp insights. When looking at a report, you can now look as far back as a year, select a time period of up to 72 hours and you’ll get a data point granularity of 5 minutes – meaning the intervals between the data points will be five minutes – an amazingly detailed view of everything that’s happened in the past year in your entire environment, down to the smallest details.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re exploring an issue than happened yesterday or ten months ago – you’ll be able to utilize ControlUp Insights to see all the ins and outs of every aspect of every day.

We’re really excited about ControlUp 7.4, as it brings you, our users, a fantastic amount of value, making ControlUp more powerful than ever before. We hope you’ll enjoy all these great features and make the most of ControlUp to manage your environment in the most streamlined way possible.