ControlUp Reviews

ControlUp is used by us specifically to monitor user sessions, drilling down to that user-specific level to look at metrics on that level.

There are numerous useful features.

We were missing that component. We have another tool for infrastructure monitoring at the physical hardware level.

The most valuable feature is the granularity of visibility into the resources that are in use by our applications. 

What we were looking for was something that could drill down into that granular view to look at things like what applications a specific user is running, what kind of resources those applications are using, and login times. Really, you name it, anything you'd want to see at the user level.

The most common complaint that I have heard, at least within our organization, is about reporting. 

They have their own reporting. It's just that it doesn't yet include everything that you can look at within the application. You can only report on specific metrics or collections.

I would like to see more on setting up alerts. As an example, as previously stated, there is reporting, but there are also alerts, such as if this specific user is using this much CPU or RAM, send an email to this person informing them. Something along those lines, that alerting portion, I believe they need to improve on, but we would like to see at the very least.

I have been using ControlUp for two years.

We didn't have any major issues in terms of stability.

I would say that, as expected, getting everything configured and working properly took some time when we first got it set up. But, aside from that, I wouldn't say we have had any major outages or problems.

Overall, the product is quite stable.

It is used in five different data centers where we have deployments. In each data center, we have what is known as a monitor server. In that sense, it's flexible and scalable in that you can continue to add monitor servers in different locations to add more load and data. ControlUp is considered to be scalable.

You do it in such a way that the licensing is based on the number of machines that you're monitoring, rather than per monitor server.

The cost is determined by the number of machines being monitored. When you add more machines to monitor, the pricing increases.

I would say it wasn't as responsive as we had hoped at first.

We did have that consultant come out and help us with the initial setup, as I mentioned, but it did take a little time to get responses from the support team when we first started. 

I think a lot of that was just because it was a new product at the time, and they seemed to be scaling the company to help with that growth.

In terms of turnaround time, it's recently improved significantly.

I would rate the technical support a four out of five.

When it comes to monitoring Windows systems, it is definitely more user-friendly.

I understand that Nagios XI was initially designed to focus on Linux systems, with Windows appearing to be an afterthought. It appears that the primary focus of this product is Windows systems rather than Linux. It can still monitor Linux systems, but that is not its primary focus.

The initial setup was complex. However, they did send someone out as a point of contact to walk us through everything. They even collaborated with us to create a diagram and an overall plan. They had a lot of assistance in that regard.

It was done in-house, with ControlUp supervision. There were there to guide us through any difficulties, or any obstacles that we may have found during the process

Personally, I would say that the only thing I could compare it to is another monitoring tool that we use, Nagios. And, in comparison, it is more expensive, but it has a much newer user interface. It has more contemporary features.

I would definitely recommend it. As I previously stated, a lot of it, in my opinion, comes down to what your use case is, or what you hope to gain from the product. 

I can't speak on the subject of physical monitoring because, as I previously stated, we don't use it for that. I am not sure how well it performs in that regard, but if you're looking for something that gets really granular and goes beyond the physical layer into the virtual, into the user sessions, we weren't able to find anything that gave us that same view.

It is suitable for both an SMB and also enterprise because it's based on the number of machines you're licensing. If you are a small business with only 30, 50 machines to monitor, your costs will be much lower than if you're monitoring 5,000. It appears to be able to accommodate both sides of that.

I would rate ControlUp an eight out of ten.

We have nearly 10000 Citrix VDIs on our estate and native tooling cannot provide the high and low level monitoring that we require. We wanted a tool that could not only provide a granular view of our infrastructure but also assist with its administration. We looked at other competitors, however, the power, usability and value of ControlUp made it the obvious choice. 

Having a central console with granular security makes administration simple and yet powerful. We are able to delegate control to the teams that need access to specific areas and can also create read-only views for non-admins.

With ControUp, we got the monitoring we needed and more. For one thing, we love the automatic remediation which enables us to free up resources that aren't used. This saves us from having to constantly get involved and make manual changes. 

When VDI hasn't been used for x number of days we can simply shut them down - something that an on-prem deployment would normally require manual intervention for.

We can also see issues often before our users complain. Log-on times, for example, are a great barometer of customer satisfaction. When these go up we know there are issues, and, using ControlUp, we are only ever a couple of clicks away from determining the root cause.

We also like the scores that it gives our estate (which can be tailored) so we can instantly see where we have issues. 

The high-level view of the estate coupled with powerful administration tools has been great. We can see real-time performance and trends and can create triggers for common issues with associated scripts that can automate a lot of the previous manual remediation steps. 

Integration with Netscaler and Scoutbees can provide a proper end-to-end analysis of the user's experience and give us a real ROI.

Historical reporting is also really useful. Being able to go back in time to see exactly what was happening at the time of an outage or even just to analyse which applications are being used or to get capacity suggestions straight from the Insights console it very useful.

The support from ControlUp is also very responsive and professional. 

We'd like to see the mobile app working again so that we can get alerts 24/7. This is especially useful for the person on call.

I particularly like the monthly Advisory Teams meeting that have been arranged recently. They offer valuable insights into the direction of the company and give us users a chance to express our thoughts and provide real direction to the company. 

One area that I do think would be of benefit would be a monthly email from Insights offering a summary of trends and potentially where we can afford to cut back on CPU and RAM.

I've used the solution for four years.

I find it to be very stable. If there are issues with the retention or collection of emails I am often alerted by ControlUp before noticing it myself.

Scaling up is as simple as adding an additional monitor server. 

We have used their support and professional services. Both have been responsive and very knowledgeable. 

Positive

We only had SCOM and Director previously.

The initial setup requires nothing more than a single EXE and a spare workstation with sufficient RAM/CPU for the trial.  

Automation of common tasks has seen a measurable drop in manual actions and has saved enough time to release perhaps 1 FTE. They can now focus on more engineering work.

I'd advise running a trial. This is quick and simple to get running. 

If you opt to buy then it's essential to ensure you include the Automated Actions license - this is where the real power is.

We evaluated Lakeside and Nexthink

As mentioned, opt for the Trial. You'll have 30 days to really see how beneficial ControlUp is.

We primarily use the solution for troubleshooting, user experience monitoring, analysis and automation.

It's one of the very few consoles that gives you near real-time data. Most consoles I know of are at least ten or 15 or maybe even 30 minutes behind real-time. For live troubleshooting, that's worthless. However, this is one of the few products that can grant you real end-to-end visibility when looking at remote sessions. Therefore, we can use it for both troubleshooting and digital end-user experience monitoring.

The product allows for visibility in the performance of our environment in a way few others can. It allows us to proactively wrangle issues that would otherwise have caused a user to log a ticket with the helpdesk.

It provides real-time insights, by performing a baseline analysis. This way, when something is over a threshold, you can be sure it is something out of the ordinary.

There are very many scripts to be used within the product, either triggered or used manually. The analyze log-on duration script has saved many companies so many times already. It's awesome.

It has endpoint monitoring, it has local network information. It even has monitoring of graphical processing power within VDI sessions.

It shows you so many details of what's going on in that log-on that, if there's a problem, you can identify it in five minutes.

The initial setup is dead simple. 

The solution is extremely stable. 

Something I would love to see from a partner perspective would be a way to provide it as a service hosting provider. Then, it would need some multi-tenancy in technical and licensing.

The first time I came to contact with it was at least a couple of years ago. However, we've really started using it more frequently for a year now.

The solution is 100% stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. 

Now, with the cloud option, it's pretty much limitless in terms of scalability. 

There are some design considerations if you take an on-premises version in an air gapped environment, for instance, then it becomes enormous very quickly since you need a place to store all that data. That database that's behind it all gets very large very quickly. It takes storage and takes storage performance. However, when you're on the cloud version, that, of course, is no issue whatsoever.

Very few people actually use it in our company. However, we have many customers on the solution. We have ten or so clients that are sizable companies using it. That includes a hospital, a large municipality, and some sizeable organizations. We're talking about a few thousand users for sure. 

Technical support is fast and accurate.

Positive

I chose the solution for the company. 

A good friend of mine works for the company. He showed me a couple of really awesome things and that really correlated with some trouble and some issues we had with a few customers. The company I work for is actually one of the larger end-user computing VMware partners in the Netherlands. ControlUp, for troubleshooting for instance, is just awesome. It's saved so much time in finding problems and it is also excellent in helping with tweaking and tuning your environment.

It is very easy to set up the solution. It's not complex or difficult.

Basically, I clicked the link on the website, and I downloaded the configuration console, and I was up and running in 30 minutes. While it depends on how far you scale out, the initial setup is so, so easy.

Whenever the vendor was involved, the expertise is awesome.

We have definitely seen an ROI at customers, but to quantify it is not very straightforward.

In terms of exact pricing,  I'm more of a technical person than a salesperson, to be honest, and therefore don't have visibility on pricing.

We use different deployment models. We're are a partner of ControlUp.

I've seen in practice that it saves so much time for companies that are really really in trouble and have customers complaining. Once you install that tool you can say okay, there's your problem. And it's not just troubleshooting. 

You can basically forgo your remote server management tooling since ControlUp does that too. You can remove your dashboards because ControlUp has dashboards. You can even send scheduled reports to managers about the overall performance of the environment. The list goes on. Once a company sees that it's really worth the money. It may not even be that expensive, to be honest.

I'd advise potential users to do the trial. There's a really simple link on the ControlUp website they can just click the link and go from there. It's so simple. Once you see what you get, you'll have to buy it. Your admins will love you for it.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It could use some improvements and no solution is perfect, however, we are very happy with its capabilities. 

This product's most valuable feature is that it allows you to consume many resources from a centralized tool. For example, it has a great career time monitoring tool. There was also a tool that allowed us to view what was occurring in the environment by enabling us to look into every processor running in a machine without even logging into it.

An area of the product that can be improved is creating a script action in the product to power on the machine at a certain time. This runs a particular script at a particular time each week in a specific frequency. This feature was not initially available when I used the product, but I am unaware it is available now.

We previously used this solution for approximately nine months.

The stability of this product depends on the workload. Our company had a large environment, so we faced intermittent issues daily. However, the pros of the product were more significant than the cons. The primary con we had in our environment was how a previous employee deployed it because it led to a challenge adding resources to a text file. Additionally, we had some issues with some active directory connections related to specific parts and license issues. However, the support team was helpful whenever we sent an email to them. They always responded with detailed steps, and if you could resolve the issue, they set up a meeting to assist you.

The on-premises version has limited scalability as challenges occur because the console takes a lot of computer power. However, with the cloud environment, it is a scalable product because you don't have to perform any upgrades as everything is taken care of by ControlUp. I was the only user using this product in my company.

We had a good experience with customer service and support. Our organization was very large and had a premium license, so we got special treatment as loyal customers. In addition, we had a dedicated CRM customer relationship manager assigned to us. I rate customer service and support an eight and a half out of ten because when the support people get changed, it takes time for others to be familiar with the product.

Positive

The initial setup was very easy. The product helps in the process of onboarding and deployment, and the user is only required to complete the minimum requirement assigned by computing details for their infrastructure, the resources they want to introduce, and the server's complete specifications. Additionally, they assist in setting up the configuration section. I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten because a person who doesn't know about the product will face challenges with the setup, but someone who has experience with the tool and its infrastructures can easily set it up.

I was using the best license ControlUp had available. I don't remember the license name, but it was in the premium category and the best license they provided. Unfortunately, I cannot comment on the cost as I do not remember the exact number. The price is higher when compared to other monitoring tools, but it provides you with more features.

I did not use any other monitoring tools apart from ControlUp.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten because I haven't used any other products. The product is very good, but it can be improved by including script-based scheduling and an insight tool that allows historical viewing reports according to your requirements.