ControlUp Reviews

First, I need to explain our environment and its composition. We mainly use virtualization platforms, such as Hyper-V hypervisor and VMware vSphere, and recently we purchased the Nutanix platform. We are still in the deployment phase, so we have not yet integrated ControlUp with our Nutanix platform, but we have already configured it to monitor the other visualization platforms, Hyper-V and VMware vSphere. We don't have VDI environments, so we don't use this part of ControlUp. Instead, we are monitoring the hypervisors, the virtual machines and the critical ones. Because the licensing used by ControlUp is per IP address, we have a limited number of IP addresses to monitor.

We monitor critical platforms such as Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint alongside storage. Unfortunately, ControlUp cannot monitor the networking infrastructure. Other solutions, such as SolarWinds NPM, give you many modules where you can purchase their license and add more features. ControlUp is a very good solution, but when we monitor an environment, it is very difficult. It's not appropriate to have multiple monitoring solutions, and the administrator needs only one console to see the global network and infrastructure being supervised. That's the only thing ControlUp lacks to become the best solution ever.

A valuable feature is the ability to run scripts when an event happens. For example, if the system partition starts to lack space, we have a script that deletes temporary files and other unwanted files. We like this feature the most. It also gives us an insight into the direction of our infrastructure. Another feature we like is the capacity to plan our infrastructure. We can know if our infrastructure can handle more workloads or if we need to add more computing resources.

The only thing we need to be available in ControlUp is the ability to monitor network infrastructure. Currently, I am both the system administrator and in charge of administrating the network. Unfortunately, we don't have a solution for monitoring the network infrastructure. ControlUp doesn't allow us to monitor the network infrastructure, so we are obliged to acquire another solution that allows us to monitor the network. But we are faced with two different and heterogeneous solutions, which is the only downside with ControlUp.

In addition, the graphical user interface needs to be improved from version to version. When a new version is introduced, there must be changes in the user interface. Sometimes it is crowded with a lot of information and graphs, which disturbs and does not allow us to focus on an object.

The solution lacks network monitoring and should be improved in the next version. If it isn't improved and takes too much time to implement, we can't stay without a network monitoring solution, and we will be obliged to acquire another one. We may acquire the SolarWinds NPM module to monitor the network infrastructure. When working with government institutions, we must justify our purchases and can't purchase two solutions simultaneously.

We have been using this solution for 18 months. For some context, I work with a government institution here in Morocco, and we have many contracts with different companies. Sometimes they come to us and present a solution that fits our needs, and then we buy it. So a company approached us and presented ControlUp, and we were very interested in it. One of their engineers came, and we installed it together and had an opportunity to test it. It was good, so we deployed it in a production environment.

Once you install and configure a monitoring solution, it works independently. The majority of work is done during the installation and deployment process. If there is an incident and something is wrong, then we can connect and see what is happening. 

It is deployed on-premises and on four servers, one for the database, one for the insights, one for the application and one for the monitor. We are using version 7.4.

It is a stable solution. It is reliable, and its performance is good.

It is scalable in a way. It has multiple instances of the same component, and we are using four servers for each component. We allocate enough resources, memory, and CPU for each visual machine to allow the solution to work properly. We don't have many virtual machines, and if we count the server nodes with virtual machines and storage volumes, we have less than 200.

Only two people are using this solution. The main roles used are the administrator. However, we have other roles, and the IT department comprises many divisions. For example, we have a development division, system, and network administration. Sometimes we give users access to ControlUp to monitor their servers, but not the administrator role.

Maintenance is done only once, and when a client is a ministry or government institution, we rely on other companies to do the maintenance. Sometimes they come and install updates and check if everything is working fine. They come when there is a ticket problem, or something occurs with the solution. However, we have not had any tickets since we deployed, so it is very reliable.

We have not had any interactions with the support team of Control Up. When we purchase a solution from a company, the company supports everything.

In the past, another division used SolarWinds, and they used it for about eight years. Unfortunately, they didn't use or configure it properly, so we didn't exploit the full capacity and capabilities of SolarWinds. After this, it was cancelled, and we stayed without a monitoring solution for a long time. In addition, the team in charge of using and administering SolarWinds wasn't fully trained to use and configure the solution. As a result, we started to have problems in our environment, servers crashed, there was a power failure, and we weren't notified. We were only notified when users called to say that their email service was not working and some servers were not joinable. We then decided to look for another monitoring solution, and another company presented us with ControlUp.

The initial setup was straightforward and not complex. Deployment was done with the assistance of the company that presented the solution to us. They installed it first, and we were available to assist them regarding prerequisites, active directory accounts and servers. We only required one person, an engineer, to deploy. I worked together with the engineer to deploy the ControlUp environments.

Deployment was very fast, and we completed it on the same day. It took just a day to set up the environments' prerequisites, virtual machines, database and accounts. The installation process and the linking between components of ControlUp, apps, monitor, insight, and license activation were also on the same day. As a result, ControlUp has an easy installation process.

We have seen an ROI. For example, the solution prevents us from falling into bad scenarios. It allows us to have good RPO and RTO values. It prevents us from losing data and having a lot of downtime and prevents crashed servers. We had many electricity and power outages and lost hardware in the past. So when we installed ControlUp, it took measures before any catastrophe happened.

I don't have any information about pricing because it's another area that manages the financial part. One well-known thing is that the reseller always adds a small amount, especially if that reseller is the only one who sells this solution. However, despite this, the price is still good. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

We compared ControlUp to other solutions, but some of their benefits were not aligned with ours. For example, a company approached us to present the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure. We were considering purchasing HyperFlex, but when we started to compare all HTI hyper-converged infrastructure available, we found that Nutanix was one of the best solutions. It is even number one in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I then advised my manager to go with Nutanix instead of HyperFlex. At the time, only one company in Morocco used HyperFlex, and they cancelled their purchase of the HyperFlex platform and went with Nutanix.

Every time we compared a solution proposed by a company with an available solution on the internet, we found that ControlUp was missing the feature of monitoring network infrastructure, but my manager decided that we could not wait any longer, and the price of ControlUp was reasonable and cheaper than SolarWinds licenses, so we proceeded with ControlUp. When you are using or purchasing SolarWinds licenses, it's composed of a pack of X licenses. I believe it starts with 250 licenses, the next one is 2,000, and the third one is unlimited. It was too much for what we needed, so we went with ControlUp.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten because it is one of the best. Regarding advice, if the need is to monitor the virtual infrastructure and virtual infrastructure composed with VMware, Hyper-V or Nutanix, especially with Nutanix, then ControlUp is a good solution because it offers many features. For example, with automatic action and execution, when events happen, you can schedule actions to be executed on a schedule. It gives you the ability to write your scripts using batch PowerShell. It also allows you to write other batch scripts and Linux bash scripts. It has great insight results and allows you to describe it. Also, it gives you an overview of the capacity of your environment so that you know if you need to add more resources or compute nodes or storage. If you want an all-in-one solution, ControlUp is the best.

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 

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. 

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.

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. 

I've never needed technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

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.

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

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.

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. 

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.