The Environment Assessment Dashboard – Your Virtual Professional Services Review

Assessing the state of your IT environment has multiple use cases; One popular use case is to get a baseline of your current status and use it before embarking on migration projects. Another use case is performing an health check, measuring and assessing your IT resource performance and your user experience is up to par. ControlUp’s Environment Assessment report is the quick fix to gauge your stance. And it has definite advantages, such as:

1. Ease of use (simple to deploy – agent and ControlUp backend cloud)
2. The report works out of the box
3. The report allows to drill down from the summary to the data
4. The report highlights any deviations from benchmarks, shows abnormalities (using our Virtual Expert™) and displays the extreme values (top consumers)

In order for an assessment to be successful (whether it is done as a one time project or an ongoing process) it needs to be a simple or a continuous assessment. ControlUp continuously monitors your IT infrastructure and utilizes that information to create the ControlUp Insights reports and analytics portal. Gathering the data and making it accessible is powerful on its own, but using our Virtual Expert™ we can take that data and boost it to a new level, giving you a great new report like the Environment Assessment report – a big picture overview of your environment which would prove handy for both the sysadmin and the CIO.

The Environment Assessment report takes all the performance data collected over the past month and compiles it into a dashboard-like report, giving you an overview of your overall IT performance over the past month with various highlights and interesting data points.

As in most cases in ControlUp Insights, the report isn’t static, but rather dynamic. Clicking on most widgets or tiles will take you the respective report showing that specific data, all pre-sorted and customized to show the relevant part of the data, so that you could have easy access in case you want to drill down into more specific details about anything you see in the Environment Assessment report.

But that’s not all folks! Our Virtual Expert™ lurks in the corners of the report – keep an eye out for the little face – and clicking on it brings you Virtual Expert recommendations and tips, telling you how you’re doing against the industry benchmark and when appropriate, will give you a link to the relevant report so you could see the full break down. The Virtual expert tips are like having a professional services team review your environment and give you some pointers.

If you’re interested in understanding how you’re doing in terms of overall IT performance, and whether you’ve made any progress over the last 30 days, this report is just the right place to look.

The report will conveniently aggregate all the information for you so you could easily answer questions like:

• What are my top twenty most popular applications? Who’s using them?
• How much CPU or RAM was assigned to my hypervisors vs. how much was actually utilized?
• Who are my top resource-consuming users, apps, VMs and hosts?
• How much CPU or RAM was assigned to my VMs vs. how much was actually utilized?

The report is a must have tool for migrations, giving you a snapshot of your environment (pre, mid and post migration). Comparing true metrics before and after.

Try it out – but remember, in order to deliver meaningful results, you’ll need to run ControlUp in your environment for a month (preferably adding as many different managed resources and workloads to the ControlUp console) in order for the report to be effective – keep in mind that it analyzes the data collected over the last 30 days.

You can use the free trial to get your bearings. Find the latest version in our website.