Parentix & ControlUp
Customer Case Study

About Parentix

Parentix—a cloud solution provider for SMEs—specializes in Exact and Microsoft. As part of the Exact Group, Parentix provides customers the safest and most reliable cloud experience while working with Exact Software. We do this by creating the ultimate workplace for the end user, whether it’s software- or hardware-based. We make sure that everything runs smoothly, so our customers can focus on their core business.

Every day, thousands of people use the Parentix platform to conduct millions of transactions. Our “cloud heroes” in support, operations, and delivery make sure everything is up and running, so end users can access the tools they need when they need them.

We are the only cloud provider that offers a guarantee concerning the operation and availability of applications. This profile has helped us develop a rock-solid network of clients, partners, and suppliers. But we’re not stopping there; the internet’s potential is limitless.

Our daily challenges

Our Service Desk, Operations, and Delivery divisions maintain about 1400 Windows-operated servers, ranging from Windows 2012 to Windows 2019, and manage several thousand VDI user sessions a day.

Because of the many different operating servers running, it’s critically important for us to be able to manage and proactively monitor them. This way, we can predict whether certain servers might experience an outage and prevent those from happening.

Why we chose ControlUp

For some time, we had been looking for a tool that could not only help us maintain these systems, but also help us to proactively monitor issues that could impact our customers’ user sessions. For many years, we used Microsoft SCOM, which helped a great deal, but did not give us the flexibility we needed. SCOM is a complex program that requires skilled engineers to maintain.

Finally, in 2018 at a conference in Athens, we talked to some luminaries in the EUC industry who told us about ControlUp. As it happened, ControlUp was also at the event. They gave us an in-depth demo of the product, and, right away, we knew we had found the tool we had been looking for. The power and ease of use with ControlUp were an unbeatable combination. And when we discovered that a module for automation would be released in mid-2019, we knew we had found our answer.

Our experience with ControlUp

The onboarding within our organisation was surprisingly easy. The ControlUp interface is user-friendly and doesn’t require years of training to learn. It was finally possible to set clear parameters to prevent problems from happening. We were able to easily set up roles and rights, so our Service Desk could start using ControlUp, as well.

We are now using ControlUp across all our environments to quickly detect and mitigate issues. We solved long login duration for users with the analysis and scripts that ControlUp provides. Our Service Desk can now easily detect problems simply by looking at the ControlUp Console.

ControlUp is a program that is up to date and follows the latest trends and techniques. We implemented the Automations Module to handle processes that, in the past, would have been performed manually, costing us valuable time and resources. With ControlUp, we are able to prevent certain problems from happening even when there is no one working within the dashboard or our admins have gone home for the day.

ControlUp Insights—the companion tool to the ControlUp Console— gives us historical data on the performance of the servers. These insights are vitally important in helping us spot trends, so we can anticipate and plan for problems before they occur.

The benefits of ControlUp

One of the benefits we realized right from the beginning was that ControlUp could reduce memory and CPUs with the Insights’ “Sizing Recommendations,” which instantly saved us 750 GB of RAM assigned— but not used—by servers.

Beyond that, ControlUp saves us time. Where SCOM was difficult to maintain, ControlUp provides a user-friendly interface. With ControlUp, we don’t need extra full-time employees just to maintain it. We no longer need to log on to every server, but can select them all together and perform certain jobs. Before, where it would have taken about 10 minutes for every server, it now costs only 10-15 seconds to access 50 or more servers and perform a single task (e.g. edit registry or start services).

ControlUp gives us more control over admins’ rights and roles from within the console. With SCOM, every user had full rights, keeping the door wide open for mistakes and carelessness. ControlUp gives us a more stable and secure platform.

What are the benefits for Parentix as an MSP?

As Part of the Exact Group, we need a truly flexible environment to maintain; we need to on-board new customers, and off-board customers in a controlled way.

As we have a multiple-domain environment—each with similar challenges—ControlUp helps us to perform all maintenance from a single pane of glass.

With ControlUp, it’s easy to compare registry keys, software versions, and so forth on several servers across multiple domains to find anomalies and and correct them in a matter of seconds.

There is no need to log on to servers and we are able to delegate specific tasks or functions via Security Policies. ControlUp’s ease of use makes it possible for us to assign tasks—that, before, would require the skill of a senior engineer—to junior or medior engineers for remediation.

With ControlUp, we can manage all our virtual apps and desktops from just one console. We manage more than 300 delivery groups across multiple environments; ControlUp dramatically simplifies the process and allows us to manage everything directly from the console.

Benefits of automation

We have been using automation for a couple of months. We started slowly, with logoffs for admin users, and moved forward to log off user sessions instead of using group policy objects.

We went from having forty disk space-related incidents per week to just four. This has lessened the pressure on our service desk and operations dramatically.

Time, man-hours, and stress: these are just three of the things that ControlUp has saved for Parentix; that’s value that you simply can’t put a price on.