What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
The product allows for visibility in the performance of our environment in a way few others can. It allows us to proactively
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
The one thing I mentioned to them a while ago was their interface. The program used to be a .NET-based application. I advised them to go to a cloud-based console, a web console. That's what they're already doing now. Besides going to the cloud console, I can't really think of anything that needs improvement.
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is 100% stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
I've never needed technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What was our ROI?
We have definitely seen an ROI, but to quantify it is not very straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
VMware and ControlUp have some agreements. You can actually buy ControlUp from VMware as a part of the Horizon stack. Since we're a VMware partner already, that combination was somewhat logical.
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.
What other advice do I have?
We use different deployment models. We're aiming to be 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 eight out of ten. It could use some improvements and no solution is perfect, however, we are quite happy with its capabilities.
*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
