I was taking care of a Citrix infrastructure, and as ControlUp is the best monitoring tool for those environments, I was also using ControlUp to monitor those environments.
ControlUp is known for its powerful administration tools, real-time insights, and automation capabilities, enabling efficient VDI and infrastructure management. It integrates seamlessly with solutions like Netscaler, offering historical analytics and endpoint monitoring for proactive issue detection.


| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| ControlUp | 8.1% |
| Nexthink | 14.8% |
| ThousandEyes | 11.6% |
| Other | 65.5% |
| Type | Title | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Product | Reviews, tips, and advice from real users | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Comparison | ControlUp vs Nexthink | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Comparison | ControlUp vs ThousandEyes | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Comparison | ControlUp vs Splunk Observability Cloud | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datadog | 4.3 | N/A | 97% | 211 interviewsAdd to research |
| Zabbix | 4.2 | N/A | 95% | 109 interviewsAdd to research |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 3 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 7 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 156 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 84 |
| Large Enterprise | 328 |
ControlUp provides an advanced platform for monitoring Citrix VDIs and user sessions, allowing administrators to perform in-depth infrastructure analysis and troubleshooting. It supports virtualization platforms like VMware and Hyper-V, delivering real-time data capabilities and capacity management. ControlUp also facilitates script-based actions and easy deployment, offering AI-enhanced VDI administration. Users can centralize resources for efficient management, benefiting from granular resource visibility and capacity planning. The tool integrates with Scoutbees for end-to-end analysis and supports historical reporting to detect potential issues before they arise.
What are the key features of ControlUp?Organizations rely on ControlUp for effective infrastructure monitoring and management across industries. Within the tech sector, it supports Citrix VDI environments and enhances digital experience evaluations. Healthcare providers utilize its real-time monitoring for seamless administration of virtual platforms, ensuring efficient patient data management. In finance, ControlUp aids in secure and responsive virtualization, key for transactional systems and customer interactions.
B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC | 4.0 | I used ControlUp to monitor Citrix environments and found its automation, stability, and proactive monitoring highly effective, though setup was complex and costly; overall, it's the best solution I’ve tested and I rate it an eight. |
| Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees | 4.5 | I manage servers and user sessions using ControlUp, which offers customizable features like scripts and triggers for capacity management and planning. It outshines other tools by suggesting actionable solutions, though reporting needs improvement. It's like having a smart 24/7 junior admin. |
| Solutions Developer at HCL Technologies | 3.5 | I use ControlUp to monitor 200,000 devices, checking their hardware and software health. While I appreciate the remote script-pushing feature, I face limitations with reporting and information on ISPs. I've previously used Nexthink and SysTrack. |
| System Admin at Stefanini Group | 4.0 | I find ControlUp very beneficial for accessing and managing all infrastructure components through a unified dashboard, aiding in troubleshooting and resource management. Its user-friendly interface, analytics, and AI features significantly enhance real-time monitoring and decision-making. |
| Systems Configuration & Health Engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees | 4.0 | I highly value ControlUp for granular user session monitoring and resource visibility. Reporting and alerting could improve. Though initial setup was complex, it's a stable, scalable solution I recommend for detailed user-level insights. |
| Cyber Security Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees | 5.0 | I find ControlUp a stable, scalable monitoring solution, providing excellent visibility and ROI through optimized cloud workloads. Though integration could improve, its features and easy setup are valuable, and I rate it 10/10. |
| Technical Architect at PQR | 4.0 | We primarily use ControlUp for troubleshooting and user experience monitoring due to its real-time insights and stability. Its easy setup and effective features significantly enhance problem identification, though improvements like a cloud-based console and multi-tenancy would be beneficial. |
| System Administrator at Confidential | 4.5 | I find ControlUp excellent for virtual infrastructure monitoring, featuring automated scripting and capacity planning. Installation was straightforward. However, the lack of network infrastructure monitoring is its main weakness, preventing it from being a single, comprehensive solution for me. |
| Infrastructure Lead at Mr Cooper | 4.0 | I use ControlUp for user monitoring and troubleshooting, appreciating its UI and easy deployment. It's stable, though I wish it offered load throttling. I recommend this straightforward solution, rating it 8/10. |
| VP Virtualisation and Citrix Engineer at BlackRock | 5.0 | I use ControlUp to monitor and automate remediations across over 40,000 endpoints, valuing its single pane of glass and script-based actions. Solve scales well, and customer service is responsive. My main improvement request is enhanced sharing capabilities for Solve views. |

I was taking care of a Citrix infrastructure, and as ControlUp is the best monitoring tool for those environments, I was also using ControlUp to monitor those environments.
ControlUp has a lot of automation in it. It detects problems and failures very well. It's not only monitoring, but it's also detecting, and it could even fix problems with a lot of automation that you can put in place to fix problems automatically before you even detect them.
That's one of the strong points of ControlUp. All the automations, and there's a large customer-written automation. You can pick up those automations and use them on your environment, and it helps a lot. This is very good. It's not third-party, but it's external routines and automations that you can download from their website and implement on your side. That's one of the strong points of ControlUp.
ControlUp, the way we implemented it, and the goal of ControlUp, is to be proactive instead of starting to work on a problem when it already happens. There are a lot of counters and monitors you can implement that will help you detect problems before they happen.
I don't see any.
I used it a bit more. It was around four years.
ControlUp was very good at stability. That's the main reason that product is good.
It takes a couple of days. As soon as everything is prepared and all the reservations are done, it's quite fast.
ControlUp has very good support. I was quite happy to work with ControlUp because the support is excellent. That makes it a nice product to work with.
Positive
I had worked with different companies' solutions.
I don't think it's straightforward. It takes a lot of planning and quite a lot of preparation work. You have to have several virtual machines. You have to have your network right, your firewall right, and all the preparation work is quite important.
We were a team working closely with the network guys. I was working on VMware, but there was a VMware specialist that provided the virtual machines for me.
There are so many benefits that I can't give you just one right now. Basically, what we were targeting is the response time of the virtual environment. There are plenty of counters that you can check in order to have this response time as low as possible. There are plenty of opportunities for improvement.
It is expensive. It is very expensive. I was working in a bank, and even in the bank, which was quite healthy, the ControlUp budget was something we had to defend very harshly.
ControlUp is probably an eight. It's very good.
I'm not working with ControlUp anymore because I'm on leave. I'm a pensioner on pension, so I'm not working anymore. I stopped working this year.
I worked all my working life in computers, in IT, and that was principally on Microsoft Exchange. Then I moved to Citrix and VMware. That's where I finished, with mostly Citrix and VMware projects.
I don't see any third-party tool that we integrated ControlUp with. I don't see any.
I would give ControlUp an eight because I've tested quite a few other products, and this one was definitely the best. My overall rating for this review is 8.
My use cases include everything, and I don't mean that facetiously. I mean everything. We manage the servers, manage user sessions, manage everything. We monitor monitoring and take actual actions, everything.
The platform provides valuable capacity management and planning features, and it lets you know what needs to be done to increase performance. For instance, if you have a server experiencing performance issues and people are complaining, you get historical data, and you can see that the load on that server has increased. You can take action; it can take automated actions, but I'm not comfortable with trusting anything to automatically take actions. That's why they pay me.
The best features I have found are that it is very customizable, which would be number one, and very extensible through the use of scripts and triggers. The visual look of the interface is very easy to understand what is happening and somewhat why it's happening. It may sound facetious, but it really is everything about it. Everything works exactly the way it's meant to, a dream come true for anyone who's administering systems because it gives you all the information that you want and all the actions you want to take, all in one place.
The benefits I have seen from using it so far include the ability to know in advance and take actions based on the information the tool gives you.
There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting. It could use some work in reporting.
I have been using it for about 3 years.
It is very stable. I don't have any issues.
It scales very well; you just have to tell it what you're doing and size it for what you're asking. It scales.
If you're asking about support, I would say their support is decent. It's not perfect, but it's decent. They are going through some changes, and sometimes support can be not as good as you'd like it to be, but it's good enough. Once you have the product in place, there's really not much need for support. Basically, if I could take everything that you do, put it in a tool, and hand you that tool so you don't have to repeat your efforts, then you would be able to make good use of it.
Neutral
The initial setup is best handled by ControlUp; I always suggest having them do the implementation because you're paying them for their service. It's a licensed product, so you have to get some benefit out of it. It seems silly to take it on yourself, especially if you end up calling them to complain about how bad your setup is.
I always suggest having them do the implementation because you're paying them for their service.
It's worth the money to have as a tool. This is having a 24/7 junior admin who's really smart, always there, always doing work, but you have to consume his work. You can't just let him do everything; you've got to consume what he's doing.
There is nothing comparable to ControlUp. There are other monitoring tools, but in my opinion, a monitoring tool is worthless for this setting. A monitoring tool says 'here's what's wrong,' and then you have to figure out what you're going to do to fix it. ControlUp says 'here's what's wrong. Let me give you 100 tools you can use. You determine which tool you'll use to resolve this problem. We can resolve it right now and for however many servers you want.'
Overall, it is easy to use, but you need to be a server admin. I have shown many people how it works. They may not know what to look for. A tool can be simple, a shovel. You give it to someone and say 'dig', but they may struggle if they're not familiar with the work at all. Someone who understands the concept of digging will do a much better job. It's easy for those who understand what it's doing, but it could be hard for others. I could show you how to use it in about 20 minutes, but you might not understand why you should use it or what the system is actually telling you. That's where understanding and experience come into play.
I don't use AI at all for troubleshooting. You might be thinking about the cloud offering, but we don't have that, so I'm not using it. AI is still in its infancy, and turning over your environment to an automated system is risky. AI could work if you were a web service provider wanting automated processes in the background, but in our case, that's not how it is because we have people doing things.
For newcomers, I would advise that both you and they understand the mission when deploying any tool. On a scale of 1-10, I rate ControlUp a 9.

We use the tool to monitor approximately 2,00,000 devices for a client. We check how the devices are doing in terms of hardware and software. We also check their health and alerts every day. If something needs our attention, we inform the other stakeholders to work on it.
ControlUp has some good functionalities, such as remotely pushing scripts in the device through the tool.
We have approximately 10 to 20 feature requests pending on the vendor side. Most reports give information about the top 100 devices, but not all of the devices. In our case, we are monitoring 200000 devices. So, we need details for all those devices, but that is limited to 100, which they have improved to an extent in some reports.
I'm thinking of one feature request for ISPs because the dashboard does not provide a detailed list of ISPs, and it provides the wrong list. I feel some firewall issues are blocking that, and the team cannot send that detail. That may be the case.
One feature request pending on the vendor side is the data format change. Once you see a detail in the report, it is mentioned in some other format, which is hard to analyze sometimes.
I have been working with ControlUp as an admin for five to six months.
Sometimes, when there is some load on the report, the data will not load. It will just give you an error saying that you need to log in or log off again, and it just keeps on loading.
I rate the solution’s stability a six to seven out of ten.
In our current project, we have two accounts working with ControlUp.
I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.
There are 10 to 20 feature requests pending on the vendor or support sides. Continuous emails, calls, and cadences are being used to resolve them. ControlUp's support team is pretty supportive. Whenever we ask about a particular information, they never deny it. They try their best to provide that.
Positive
I have previously used Nexthink and SysTrack.
Based on my experience, ControlUp is not that expensive. It is a cheap tool because it is deployed to many devices where I work.
There are already available reports there. If needed for a certain task, you can create a customized report, which you can fetch from PowerShell and SQL queries. If it is already available in a dashboard, you can fetch it from SQL, but if it is not already available, we can write a PowerShell script and fetch it from the devices. This is about fetching the details, but vendors provide hundreds of already available reports without customization.
ControlUp is deployed on the cloud in our organization. Some of the monitoring tools I have used personally, like Nexthink and SysTrack, have a health score feature that tells you about the health of devices. It even takes the largest unit to the smallest unit. SysTrack had 13 KPIs or key parameter indicators that monitored all the details of devices and gave an overall score of the devices' health. The health score functionality wasn't already in ControlUp, but we added it after discussing it with the vendor.
Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

ControlUp is beneficial as it provides a web interface through which you can access all your infrastructure—servers, devices, and VDI infrastructure—all on the same platform. It supports gathering all infrastructure components in a single, unified dashboard. This helps you identify performance issues or high resource utilization, allowing quick troubleshooting. I appreciate the solid interface that ControlUp offers.
The tool's analytics capabilities help us because we actively use the tool for monitoring. If user activity increases in specific zones, the analytics notify us through alarm monitoring. This tells us that we need to add resources in those areas or that a part of the enterprise is experiencing a resource crunch. The analytics keep us updated in real-time, pointing out where we need to focus our attention.
ControlUp has also started using AI capabilities and automation features, which are beneficial. The platform recently introduced new capabilities and features, so I think its analytics will become even more powerful for VDI administrators in the future.
The product is very easy to use. I would say a new user can get hands-on experience in just a couple of hours of learning. They provide all the training materials through their platform, the ControlUp Academy, which is free to use.
I have been using the tool for three to four years.
We haven't had any outages while using the product.
The support team is available if needed. They help us resolve issues within thirty minutes and even join us on Teams calls if necessary.
Positive
I started actively using it a couple of years ago because I had little exposure to the tool. It has helped me understand its advantages and benefits for infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting endpoints, so I have been actively using it for the past few years.
For upgrade issues or if we need support from the tool, we have to look at the on-premises ControlUp server side, which is located in our local data center.
I'm also part of the ControlUp community, so I participate in events and workshops they organize for users like me. Recently, I attended multiple workshops they organized for the platform and kept participating in surveys. I enjoyed learning with the tool.
The solution keeps improving its platform, which has enhanced multiple aspects. We can access various infrastructure features with a single URL, and monitoring solutions and alarms are already in place. Overall, I'm quite satisfied with ControlUp.
Since implementing ControlUp, the main improvement I've noticed is in the information's refresh rate. There was some lag earlier, and reports pulled from the dashboard would sometimes be half an hour old. But now, the information provides real-time status, which is greatly appreciated. Overall, I've seen improvement in the product.
I would recommend the product to other administrators who need to monitor their end-user devices or any other infrastructure. It's a much better solution than what's currently available on the market.
I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

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 are using ControlUp as a monitoring solution.
ControlUp has improved our organization by giving us full visibility into our systems. We know what's running, where it's running, what it's doing, and the load on the system.
The most valuable features in ControlUp are endpoint monitoring and the many features that are available.
ControlUp could improve the integration. Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop monitoring has better integration.
I have been using ControlUp for approximately two years.
ControlUp is a stable solution.
The scalability of ControlUp is good.
My operation team of approximately 10 people is monitoring using ControlUp.
ControlUp is being used for monitoring, we are not abandoning the solution. It does well and we are using it often, but for the future, I'm not sure. For now, everything is up to date, we like it, and it does what we want.
I have used other solutions previously.
The initial setup of ControlUp was not complex. If you know what you are doing it is easy.
We did the implementation of ControlUp in steps. We had a smaller deployment to see what it was doing, and then we had a proper deployment, but it was not complex.
We do not need a lot of people to maintain and update ControlUp. My team is doing this during their regular duties.
We have seen a return on investment with ControlUp because we were able to monitor our workloads in the Cloud and size them accordingly. We could downsize, and turn off VMs that we don't need, and that allowed us to save money.
I rate the price of ControlUp a five out of five.
We are satisfied with the price compared to other solutions.
We evaluated other solutions before choosing ControlUp.
My advice to others is if you are deploying a brand new system or doing a migration, you better install ControlUp as soon as possible at the earliest stage possible because it will give you visibility into your old system. You will know how it's doing, and what you need to migrate. You might not need to migrate everything because maybe not everything is being used to the full extent.
As you deploy a new system, you start monitoring and you know what exactly it's doing, how exactly it's doing, and you can adjust on the go.
I rate ControlUp ten out of ten.

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.
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 use this solution to monitor and collect users' data, group policies, manage user sessions and to troubleshoot user login duration and failures. Currently, we also use ControlUp for admissions, to add plans and plain objects and for upgrades.
When using ControlUp, the core feature that we have found valuable is its UI.
It is a valuable tool to view the analysis reactions of a base core Level 2 or Level 1 team so that they can complete the necessary troubleshooting.
The hassle-free deployment of ControlUp tool has also been useful. We don't need to worry about internal maintenance on big infrastructures or needing a lot of hard resources to deploy it.
This solution be improved by including load throttling tools. For example, I can identify a service where we spend a lot of CPU but I cannot restrict the service from ControlUp. I have to use another tool like AppSense.
I have been using this solution for five years.
This is a stable solution.
We have also used New Relic for security and monitoring.
The initial setup is straightforward but is quite detailed.
They have standard and platinum licensing. We have a platinum license.
I would recommend this product because it is straightforward to use and stable. It supports AWS WorkSpaces.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Our primary use case was for our 17,000 Citrix 1912 LTSR and VMWare ESXi stateful VDIs. We're leveraging ControlUp to monitor, report, and carry out basic automated remediations at every level of the stack - from the edge through the Citrix Gateways down to OS level.
Ultimately, we needed a tool that had insights into the data and could present it in a way that was easy to digest and allowed us to make it available to all levels of support within our organization. We have since extended this to all 40,000+ Windows devices we operate.
The Solve interface has provided us the ability to view our entire estate including physical devices in a single pane of glass. This has transformed the way we approach the troubleshooting and reporting of our estate.
The ControlUP console allows us to delegated tasks "to the left" - i.e. democratize the data to members of the support organisation that wouldn't normally have access to all of the data required to correlate all of the information.
We have enabled the triggers linked to script-based actions to resolve a handful of our repeat tasks, specifically our start-of-week checks making sure all the VDIs are registered and ready to be used.
Solve is quickly becoming one of the most-used features. Its interface allows us to connect to all 54,000 monitored endpoints in real-time.
The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities. Combined with the triggers, we have been growing their usage to fix things before they become an issue.
Lastly, the controller view allows us to compare the configurations of settings side-by-side which is extremely helpful when tracking down the RCA of an issue.
Solve is a quick and intuitive tool for quickly mapping data together, however, once you have the view of the data that you like, it is difficult to share this with colleagues. Being able to send a deep link of the view that you have created or, even better, being able to export the results to a .CSV to be shared offline would be a fantastic addition to the tool.
A concept like metadata that can be appended to objects in the ControlUP database would allow for more flexibility in grouping that data together
I've used the solution for two and a half years.
We have had a good level of service in regard to stability. Like all tools in this space, they do have issues with the volumes of data at times. However, with proactive monitoring, we are made aware of issues in a timely manner.
With Solve, the product is easily able to scale to our 40,000+ endpoints. However, the original console is limited to around 3,000 devices being monitored at a time. As they migrate more functionality into the web console (Solve) most of my concerns with scalability will fall away.
Customer service and support have been responsive and are a real asset to the experience. It has improved during our usage of the product.
Positive
We did use a different product. The previous solution wasn't intuitive, and, as a result, adoption by the support teams was stunted.
From the end of the PoC to fully deployed in production we took just six months. For decent adoption, it required a further six months.
The product is very straightforward especially if you have a clear idea how you want to structure the machines you will be monitoring and who will be given access.
We handled the solution's setup in-house
I have found ControlUP to be more than competitive in terms of value.
The company has been responsive to our requests for features and seems to be very agile in developing new features and content. They have been very transparent with their development processes.