Laboral Kutxa

Are Visibility and proactiveness compelling enough reasons to purchase a tool like ControlUp?

Laboral Kutxa – Spanish Credit Union / Banking Company

Laboral Kutxa is the first credit union in the Basque Country and the third largest in Spain. It is also the third largest financial institution in the Basque Country. It has approximately 1,300,000 clients, and employs currently 2,500 workers and manages 24.564 million euros in assets.

VDI Rollout Created A Need For Monitoring And Management

Laboral’s IT Infrastructure consists of Citrix XenDesktop on top of VMWare hosts to deliver desktops and applications. Back in November 2017, Daniel Ugarte, System Engineer & IT Administrator at Laboral, attended the Nutanix .Next show in Nice, France. At the time Laboral was at the beginning of its journey to virtualize its End User Computing stack (transitioning from physical desktops to VDI infrastructure) – and therefore there was no specific compelling problem or need related to VDI. But Daniel knew his team would need to have better visibility, especially to their User Experience, once VDI rollout would scale. Daniel also wanted to be proactive about problems and get notified when issues start to form. After a period of POC with ControlUp Daniel decided this is the tool for Laboral.

From Blind To Proactive

A Year past the Controlup deployment in Laboral,  the team uses ControlUp on a daily basis – for instance, they use the ability to execute scripts from within the console, being able to execute a command (on sessions, or printers for example) to multiple entities at the same time, thus saving time for the core VDI team. The team also import their own powershell scripts and launch these on their VDAs. For example, a script to launch the VNC client to a VDA session is used extensively by the team. All this is made easy by the intuitive centralized platform provided by ControlUp. Laboral’s team uses the fine grained triggers and alerts capability to get notifications regarding high CPU and memory usage, and they monitor when a Specific Event ID happens – they are notified about it and know the machine is having a problem.

And last but not least Daniel’s team use ControlUp to monitor and optimize their user experience: When user logon duration in their sessions and VDI desktops takes too long, the team tries to figure if this is due to group policies , Citrix UPM being affected by network or storage. With ControlUp they are able to clearly identify the group policies which were causing the delay and some settings in a policy they had added without understanding the impact. Without ControlUp it would have been virtually impossible to discern this.

Daily Proactive Management And Monitoring

Laboral’s use of the solution takes advantage of many of ControlUp’s capabilities, but going back to Daniel’s initial reasoning, the greatest benefits they get from using Controlup are these three: Visibility to the EUC stack, Proactivity, and the fact that ControlUp is simple and is used every day. The brilliant combination of fast and effective troubleshooting, full visibility into every aspect of the IT Infrastructure stack, proactive action and machine learning based analytics make ControlUp a great choice for any IT team.

How VIsibility And Proactiveness Play A Role In Business Decisions

With more than a thousand organizations worldwide, one would think ControlUp’s customers would have a clear reasoning pattern which lead them to purchase ControlUp. However our research shows that the answer actually varies, as some organizations had specific performance or user experience issues they could not resolve before using Controlup, while others needed a reliable troubleshooting tool for their ITOPs and helpdesk teams, and yet a third group found their existing tools too complex for their daily operations and hence providing them little value. Of the many reasons that lead organizations to choose ControlUp there is almost always a common thread or reason –  it all boils down to visibility and proactiveness.