ControlUp 7.1 – A minor version number increase, a giant leap for sysadmins

ControlUp provides a unique platform that lets you monitor, troubleshoot and optimize your IT infrastructure. We are continually improving our product to help our community run a reliable and optimized IT operation.

ControlUp 7.1 brings a ton of new capabilities to systems administrators. Along with enhanced host and VM visibility, this release adds NetScaler monitoring and troubleshooting to ensure fast and secure delivery of desktops and apps, and published application support for deep visibility and troubleshooting on published applications’ usage, resource consumption and performance. Version 7.1 also addresses the industry’s rapid adoption of virtual GPUs by providing real-time metrics on GPU usage and end-user experiences. Lastly, the ability to find root cause of issues is what sets ControlUp apart, and we have made the task even more streamlined by providing a contextual, pre-configured route for drill-down, up and sideways from our monitoring tool.

We will publish deep dives into each feature in future blogs, but for now let’s take a high-level look at some of the new 7.1 capabilities.

Netscaler Monitoring

Add your NetScaler appliances to ControlUp to see all their respective resource usage: load balancers, gateways and HDX sessions running through any NetScaler appliance in real time. A variety of performance metrics is available to monitor and manage your NetScaler deployment within ControlUp as well as being able to kill an HDX session, enable or disable any component, get specific alerts and set scripts to run on the various components. All your NetScaler monitoring needs are now achievable within the familiar and intuitive ControlUp console.

Published Applications Metrics

Real-time metrics showing the actual usage of the specific site’s published applications, the number of instances each application runs, who are the users using the application, the number of servers allocated to serving the application, how many are actually available, as well as management actions, alerts and more. See all the details needed about your published applications and make informed decisions based on real-time usage.

NVIDIA vGPU Monitoring

See any vGPU which is assigned to a VM with a full stack of real-time performance metrics, per process vGPU consumption for any process which actively utilizes vGPU resources and more. ControlUp broadens your visibility and management powers to the vGPU realm and incorporates the usage metrics in the easy to use, straightforward ControlUp console.

Assisted Navigation

Powerful and intuitive drill-down capabilities are virtually synonymous with ControlUp. Double clicking on an object drills into the next level, allowing for quick troubleshooting. Now this trademark feature is even better: Using the accumulated knowledge of our experts and crowdsourced data, our new Assisted Navigation feature uses an array of best practices to adjust your drill-down path and optimize your results, together with the appropriate preset view, so that you get to the most relevant information in the shortest possible time. For example, if you’re looking into a memory spike and click on that red cell, the system will take you to the sessions view and show you the RAM preset where all the relevant memory metrics will be displayed automatically, thus skipping numerous steps along the way.

With ControlUp’s new Assisted Navigation our lightning-fast cross-infrastructure navigation capability has just become even faster, bringing you maximum contextual and relevant results in the shortest length of time and effort.

Enhanced Host, Hypervisor and VM Metrics

We have now added to our existing suite of metrics several dozen new host and hypervisor-related metrics, such as server vendor and model, whether the server is in maintenance mode, server uptime, hypervisor platform and version number, BIOS version and release date, NIC usage, and so on.

For VMs you will now see whether a snapshot exists and the snapshot size, which is often a concern for VMware admins. ControlUp’s grid approach makes this information much more actionable through its grid-approach vs. vSphere clients or scripts.

We are extremely proud of what our team has been able to achieve with this release, and we look forward to the ControlUp community benefiting from these new capabilities.

ControlUp 7.1 will be available in a few weeks, so please look for an email from us if you are on our mailing list. Otherwise feel free to reach out to us directly.