ControlUp Test Drive - Part II
Last month we had the opportunity to investigate ControlUp Real-Time DX for a customer. In case you missed it, you can read Part I here. While the customer ultimately decided to proceed in a different direction, we wanted to at least cover two key capabilities, ControlUp triggers and Scoutbees.
ControlUp triggers
ControlUp triggers are used for follow-up actions when assets reach a certain condition. These triggers can record an event, send an email alert, run an action, play a sound, and/or send a RESTful API request.
The latter option can be incredibly valuable for integration with other applications, in this specific project, we integrated it with ServiceNow Event Management to provide better intelligence such as:
Noise reduction, grouping together similar events
The ability to create incidents, with deduplication
Ability to create customized alert flows with the purpose of including the right amount of information for troubleshooting, along with ticket queue routine.
Flexibility to auto resolve events / alerts / incidents based on customizable conditions.
Creating the custom trigger for ServiceNow was easy…in the end, we had to specify the instance URL and create a template in JSON format for the defined incident trigger:
ControlUp provides extensive documentation on which “variables” or ControlUp fields can be used in the templates to translate to actual useful fields in Event Management. Unfortunately, at the time of this test, there were some minor bugs to be addressed. But in theory, it should work perfectly across a list of over 60 variables. We confirmed that ControlUp is aware of this issue and is actively working on the fix. To cut down on the number of screenshots, here is what our incident looked like once the event / alert / incident flow was completed utilizing the variables that worked:
Note that if multiple events get triggered for the same asset, multiple events will exist, but only one incident will be created.
While we currently provide integration services from all EUEM tools that will allow export, ControlUp is the easiest from our perspective for the following reasons:
No need to learn a new language! Only JSON notation knowledge (or even a web converter) is required.
No need for additional infrastructure, environment, or configuration for this kind of integration.
As general RESTful API calls are performed, it can integrate with any custom application or web service capable of ingesting data this way.
In summary, we see huge potential with utilizing ControlUp triggers for Event Management within organizations far enough along in maturity.
Scoutbees
Scoutbees are a mechanism designed to proactively monitor your EUC published resources, network components and general application availability through synthetic testing and notifies in advance about any issue.
There are two main concepts to get familiar with, Scouts and Hives.
Scouts are the proactive tests that you configure to monitor the availability and health of various applications and services. They send data as they test the resource.
Hives are the locations from which the Scouts (tests) are initiated. You can choose from ControlUp managed Cloud Hive locations to test publicly available applications, or you can host your own Custom Hive in any location within your network.
Cloud Hives are hosted and managed by ControlUp and can be used to initiate a test of publicly available applications, services and hosts, such as VPN gateway, public websites and APIs, public DNS servers, and more.
Custom Hives are distributed executables that encapsulate a Hive's capabilities, and can be used to initiate a test of internal applications, services, and hosts, such as internal websites, internal servers and more.
We borrowed the above from https://support.controlup.com/docs/overview-and-architecture.
Currently, cloud Bee Hives are located in two locations globally, each Scout logs into the gateway and connects to the desired published resource. Once logged in, the worker collects the enrichment data, waits, and then makes a graceful logoff.
In case connections need to be tested to and from the internal network, Scoutbees can also be installed on-prem. In this case, you just need to download the executable from the hives section in the Scoutbees portal, copy the hive key, and configure any other setting for your environment.
Types of Scouts:
EUC- VDI/VM - Scouts tests the availability and health of EUC published resources, such as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix Cloud Gateways, VMware Horizon Connection Server among others.
Network - Scouts performs general network tests, such as ping, traceroute, DNS Lookup, http/s tests, and site load.
Applications (beta) - Scouts tests applications. Currently, there are only 3 categories here, MS Exchange, Shell Execution and Azure AD.
Scout Use Cases:
The first scout we created was shell execution. We created a sample PowerShell script just to verify if it ran properly which it did. This was a really simple test, but as any executable can be called directly so there is an expansive number of possibilities and specific user cases. This is how it looks:
The most interesting portion of the scouts, is the alerting capabilities, as it can send automated alert emails, do a RESTful API request (similar to the one explained in the first section of this article) or link to an existing integration:
The second use case evaluated, was the application – MS Exchange scout. It was easy to configure as it just requires the hive that will be used to monitor the availability of the exchange server, along with the scout successful/failed executions. This particular scout, performs a variety of network tests to different MS Exchange namespaces, such as autodiscover, SMTP, IMAP and POP3, including statistics and graphics about response times:
The last use case we had the opportunity to test was the Network – Ping scout for external availability of the AylaConsulting domain. This one has a bit more fine-tuning options based on how sensitive the monitoring needs to be. It was configured to only alert by email and by the MS Teams integration if more than 4 subsequent failures occur:
Finally, the scout alert policy allows you to select 2 types of integrations at the moment: MS Teams and ServiceNow. For MS Teams, you simply have to provide the webhook URL for your Teams channel, and once an alert occurs/resolves, there will be a post on the channel.
The ServiceNow integration creates an incident directly, and requires the instance URL, Username, password, short description, urgency and On Resolve action to be configured. Frankly, this would not be an option we would promote as it is using basic authentication and creating/resolving incidents without intelligence, deduplication, etc.
Scoutbees provides a daily report on all the configured scouts in a digest form. This can be very useful as it’s a quick daily summary of the performance of the monitors defined through the organization. Here is an example monitoring Office 365:
Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to test the HoneyComb API, which allows you to get, create, or update anything in your Scoutbees environment using RESTful APIs. We see this as critical for any large enterprise to avoid complicated management and/or an excessive number of resources to support but assume from the version number it may be a newer offering.
One key differentiator with ControlUp is it includes some synthetic test for small environments, providing very useful monitoring data and statistics right out of the box. While there was no opportunity to test their highly rated VM/VDI monitoring capabilities, we definitely think that Scoutbees has potential. Overall, we had a ton of fun playing around with ControlUp’s capabilities and we look forward to seeing how the overall offering matures in the market!