Zoom Into the Past and Foresee the Future with ControlUp Insights

ControlUp Insights

ControlUp Insights is a super useful interactive reporting and analytics platform, allowing you to get detailed accounts of what happened in your environment and analyze incidents post-mortem, as well as receive useful insights, analysis, recommendations and anomalies as to the state of your current infrastructure, regardless of whether you’re a Citrix shop, a VMWare shop or using Nutanix or Microsoft as your go-to EUC virtual infrastructure.

 

A recent overhaul of ControlUp Insights’ back end has improved the responsiveness, load times and overall performance of the platform, and we now show you the data within 45 minutes with further shortening of the upload times coming in the near future. While these are positive and welcome improvements, I’d like to point your attention to two newly released and very useful features.

 

Zoom into the past – 5 minute data point granularity

 

First, you can now look back at any point within the past year, zooming in on time periods of up to 72 hours, and get detailed reports with 5 minute intervals between each data point. This means you’ll be getting a much higher-detail, fine grained report which effectively allows you to look back and analyze anything that’s happened in your environment in the past twelve months, with details at a high level of granularity unlike ever before.

 

Now you can investigate an issue that happened last week or six months ago and get the same high level of granularity in your data, so you never skip a beat – it’s all there with the full breakdown of what exactly happened. This also means you can drill down by clicking on data points to see the underlying data – leading you the pre-configured relevant report, pre-sorted according to your defined criteria – without needing to define this or do anything other than click on a data point to investigate.

 

See this quick video to get a better idea of what this looks like:


So we’ve seen how to zoom back into the past with great detail and granularity. But how can ControlUp Insights possibly foresee the future? This brings me to the second feature on the agenda – forecasting.

 

Foresee the Future – Forecasting

 

Forecasting is a new feature, currently debuting in the Host Trends report, which you can expect to expand to other reports in the future. By selecting a timeframe of over 14 days (the end point being today) you’ll be able to activate forecasting to predict your expected future performance over a period of weeks, a month or more – depending on the length and depth of the sampled dataset used to make the prediction.

 

The algorithm used to create these forecasts takes into account factors such as trend fluctuations (such as a steady increase in the number of users), seasonality (such as holidays or summer vacations), baseline shifts (such as adding more hardware to your infrastructure), outliers and gaps. It creates a reliable prediction based on the provided data. Needless to say, the more comprehensive picture can be gleaned from the provided data, the more accurate the prediction will be.

 

Why would you need this? Instead of simply looking at your existing usage to extrapolate and build some sort of educated guess as to your future needs, usage and requirements, you can let the algorithm do the grunt work for you, crunch the numbers and show you a more credible estimate of your future needs and usage – this is valuable for budgeting and capacity planning, so that you could plan ahead and have a better idea of your future expenses, hardware needs, and whether it is really necessary to add more CPU/RAM/VMs to your current infrastructure to support your current level of performance in the future, and guarantee the satisfaction of your users.

 

 

Forecasting is a great addition to an already powerful reporting and analytics platform. We believe it will help you determine your course of action and make better purchasing decisions based on your actual needs over time, rather than succumbing to the pressures of the imminent hardware shortage leading to diminishing performance and frustrated users. Having ControlUp Insights at your fingertips will help you make wiser, data based decisions on how and when to spend your budgets.

 

See the full, in depth documentation of the forecasting feature here.

 

ControlUp Insights keeps ramping up its utility and functionalities, as our ongoing efforts to deliver the best and most innovative analytics and reporting platform continue. It’s unique features such as anomalies detection, environment assessment and sizing recommendations give it the edge over run of the mill reporting solutions. With the addition of increased data granularity in the past, and predicted behaviour in the future, we hope that you’ll try ControlUp Insights for yourself and see how powerful it can be in your daily routine.