ControlUp Test Drive

Recently we had an opportunity to investigate ControlUp Real-Time DX for a customer and were pleasantly surprised with it’s capabilities. While there are a few outstanding maturity items before it is “large enterprise ready,” there are a few areas where we were especially impressed.

While we did not go into the specific differences, it is important to note that ControlUp can be installed in on-prem only, hybrid, and cloud configurations and connected agents report in every three seconds into the Management Console, with a variety of metrics for hosts, machines, sessions, processes, accounts, applications and storage.

Discovering and adding agents to your devices is as simple as supplying domain credentials and the tool will do everything for you. This is how the console looked in our initial test lab.

Scripting is an area where ControlUp really shines …and where it would be an instant favorite if PowerShell scripters got to decide which DEX tool a company chooses to procure. Outputs can be customized and displayed exactly as needed. While the level of customization is excellent, the amount of work that would be required would expand the PowerShell scripters time required for each script, putting ControlUp as the leader for the level of customization vs other DEX tools. In addition to this, it has a helpful versioning feature that helps managing and controlling changes to the organizational scripts. Mandating signed scripts and some features currently in preview mode would be areas where maturity would be required for most large enterprises. The lack of ability to script new field creation is another must have for most mature DEX organizations.

Manually running a script, is a very simple process, just right click any element, select script actions and click on the desired script:

This is what the output looks; it can be easily exported to Excel as well!

Before using the Triggers or Insights section, a Monitor needs to be installed for the environment. You just need a Windows server and credentials to it with the right access level and you are all set.

Triggers section is where you want to go for getting ahead of the potential issues the company may suffer in the very near future, the powerful argument ControlUp has here, is that you can easily select from the community created triggers something that suits business needs, or you can create your own advanced one:

With this, a state change, or a specific state can be identified and actioned with a follow up action:

Virtual Expert was actually pretty cool as it offers suggestions on an individual PC basis, offering logical troubleshooting steps and then offering scripts from the community to resolve based on some script action and contextual navigation rules. It can be configured and turned off easily if desired in the settings panel.

On the IT support side, it is extremely easy to know exactly what the user is seeing, which can save a lot of phone time and frustrating customer interactions as most customers don’t know how to explain the root of their problem with clarity ControlUp provides.

Another key feature that the product offers is the ability to dynamically compare services or registry key entries between one or more machines, making it very easy to spot differences in seconds!

Solve is your customizable dashboard and is most similar to what ControlUp competitors offer, except it is super intuitive to use out of the box (and in dark mode!) that we didn’t spent much time here…super easy!

The first time we launched Insights we were impressed with the level of detail we got instantly out of the box. It takes most new DEX leaders months to even think about the dashboards they need, and then months more of dedicated time from a team to implement them. You get an impressive dashboard of your environment instantly out of the box (not in dark mode).

The DEX market is changing fast and tools will undoubtably be crowding the market. Assuming ControlUp are addressing enterprise security requirements, while the industry might not consider them a top three tool to consider for your enteprise, we think they should be.

For part II, please click here…