Explore expert insights, tips, and best practices to optimize your IT operations
Tap into a wealth of knowledge from your peers, industry experts, and the ControlUp team, deepening your understanding of ControlUp products and solutions.
ControlUp helps IT teams address common digital workplace experience challenges, no matter their use cases or existing technologies.
ControlUp offers a rich set of capabilities to improve the digital experience for employees using any desktop, any application, anywhere.
Explore expert insights, tips, and best practices to optimize your IT operations
Tap into a wealth of knowledge from your peers, industry experts, and the ControlUp team, deepening your understanding of ControlUp products and solutions.
A global organization of technology professionals transforming the desktop monitoring marketplace.
“What’s filling up my PVS write cache!?”
“What’s filling up my hard drive!?”
One click — and you’ll know!
We’re excited to unveil ControlUp Disk Monitor, a lightweight utility designed to give IT admins unparalleled insight into disk activity on Windows endpoints and VDI environments. And here’s the best part — it’s the first solution from the ControlUp Innovation Guild, our new initiative focused on rapid innovation and solving specific challenges our customers face.
Learn more about the ControlUp Innovation Guild in this post from our Vice President of Community at ControlUp, Douglas Brown.
Click here to watch the full-length video.
Introducing ControlUp Disk Monitor: Improving Visibility and IT Efficiency
ControlUp Disk Monitor helps you understand what’s taking up space on your machines — and why. It continuously tracks which files are being written to disk, using efficient Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Think of it as a smarter, always-on version of ProcMon, but without the performance hit.
With daily reports that show the top disk-writing processes, file paths, and users, this tool helps IT quickly catch issues that impact performance like:
- Sudden log file growth
- Unintended application caching
- Background processes causing high IOPS
- Disks filling up unexpectedly
All while consuming minimal resources (typically 0–0.2% CPU and up to 100MB RAM).
Why It Matters
Until now, tracking down disk usage problems has been reactive — and often painful. Full disks, slow endpoints, degraded Citrix write cache performance… these are hard problems to pinpoint and troubleshoot in the moment.
ControlUp Disk Monitor helps improve IT efficiency by giving you data to proactively detect and diagnose disk-related issues — whether on a persistent desktop, a non-persistent VDI session, or a laptop in the field.
How Real IT Teams Are Using ControlUp Disk Monitor to Improve Digital Workplace Employee Experience
ControlUp Disk Monitor enables predictive and proactive IT operations that improve workflows, enhance efficiency, and speed troubleshooting. Here are just a few examples of how IT teams are already using ControlUp Disk Monitor:
Identifying What’s Filling Up the Drive
When a helpdesk receives a ticket about a nearly full drive, ControlUp Disk Monitor can be triggered automatically and, within seconds, provide a report of the top offenders — including process names and file paths.
Diagnosing Citrix Write Cache Problems
In Citrix PVS and MCS environments, write caches can silently fill up, leading to performance degradation or session crashes. ControlUp Disk Monitor reveals which processes are overusing write cache and helps you take corrective action before it becomes critical.
Proactive Alerting on Low Free Space
Using our powerful automation features, ControlUp Disk Monitor can trigger analysis scripts when free space drops below a defined threshold and email you the findings — turning a reactive problem into a manageable workflow.
Remote Endpoint Troubleshooting
Remote workers on laptops can experience performance degradation due to disk issues. With ControlUp Disk Monitor installed, admins can investigate remotely — without needing direct user involvement or additional tools.
But more than just stopping the immediate issue, this visibility often uncovers deeper root causes, like:
- Applications silently downloading updates
- Excessively verbose logging turned on by accident
- Users saving large media files or software installers locally
- Background services generating huge temporary files
These insights don’t just solve the disk problem — they help uncover rogue processes or chaotic IT practices that could impact performance, compliance, or stability.
Getting Started
ControlUp Disk Monitor is easy to install — manually or silently via MSI and supports:
- Windows 10/11 and Server 2016–2025
- PowerShell 5
- Persistent and non-persistent environments
You can integrate it with ControlUp’s Script-Based Actions (CU4VDI) and Script Actions (CU4DESKTOP), set up alerts, triggers and analysis, or just use it locally for real-time insights.
Note: All data stays local by default. Privacy-conscious environments can opt to mask usernames and file paths during installation.
How to Get It
The ControlUp Disk Monitor is available now and easy to deploy – and available to every ControlUp customer.
You can get access in one of the following ways:
- Ask your Customer Success Manager (CSM) or Technical Success Manager (TSM)
- Join the conversation and request it via our ControlUp Community
- Download it directly from the Customer Success Hub in your ControlUp environment
Whether you’re managing VDI, physical endpoints, or remote desktops, you’ll be up and running in minutes.
The ControlUp Innovation Guild: A New Way to Build
You may be asking: What is the ControlUp Innovation Guild? The ControlUp Innovation Guild is a dedicated initiative where small, agile teams within ControlUp prototype and release targeted solutions that solve real-world problems — fast.
While our core platform evolves through traditional release cycles, the Innovation Guild operates independently, allowing us to:
- Build and release tools quickly
- Test and iterate based on customer feedback
- Deliver practical, focused solutions that add immediate value
ControlUp Disk Monitor is the first Guild-born tool, and it sets the tone for what’s to come: practical innovation driven by real IT needs.
Looking Ahead
This is just the beginning. The ControlUp Innovation Guild has more in store — tools, scripts, and utilities designed to empower your team and extend what ControlUp can do. Got a challenge you think we should tackle next? Let us know — your feedback drives the Guild forward.
Start monitoring smarter today. Download ControlUp Disk Monitor or check out our documentation to learn more.
