Partnerships, Virtualization

ControlUp  brings Microsoft  support up to Citrix and VMware level with 162 new metrics for Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop

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The advanced support for Azure Virtual Desktop is part of ControlUp’s deepening of its relationship with Microsoft, which has engineering, sales and marketing components.

San Jose-based IT management and monitoring solution provider ControlUp has announced the latest release of their Real-Time DX 8.8 end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting solution for VDI and DaaS environments. The big news with this release is the addition of a large number of new metrics, including 162 specifically for Azure Virtual Desktop. This brings ControlUp support for Azure to the same level as it does for Citrix and VMware Horizon environments, both of which it began to support earlier. The announcement was made last week at the IGEL Disrupt event in Nashville.

The IT management and monitoring market is a very cluttered one, but ControlUp thinks that clutter is much less significant for a VDI-focused company like themselves.

“It begins with the tools from the vendors themselves,” said Joel Stocker, Director of Product Marketing at ControlUp. “We don’t see them as competition but a Citrix customer who just uses Citrix products, or a VMware customer who uses VMware Horizon, might see using that as sufficient. Then there are specialized vendors such as ourselves, although it’s really less than a handful of names that we see on a regular basis. There are also the new DEX vendors which come from the physical side, and from areas like application performance management.

ControlUp started out in the Citrix market, and in 2020 expanded support to VMware. They expanded support to Microsoft since then, but it was agent level support, and was less robust than the support provided to Citrix and VMware.

“Now we are bringing in Microsoft at the same level ,” Stocker said. “Before, we could do the agent level and now we can do full DaaS. We are also adding additional brokering from troubleshooting and remediation. We also added support for Azure Metric last year, with Azure Monitor Metrics related to cost. Now we are adding 162 Azure Virtual Desktop specific metrics to provide the same monitoring, alerting and remediation capabilities to Azure Virtual Desktop that we do for Citrix and VMware Horizon environments.”

The enhancements include 70 performance metrics and dashboards for FSLogix profile containers that help to identify poor performance contributors and optimize in areas such as storage usage, and logon durations. New Advanced Remote DX metrics, help admins identify . whether issues in remote work environments are with the user’s device or their internet. Multitenancy support for managed service providers (MSPs), simplifies monitoring across multiple environments. Finally, automatic detection, notification, and restart of any Windows service failure, greatly reduces downtime, especially when troubleshooting large deployments.

Stocker emphasized that the strength of  their alliance with Microsoft is much more significant than in the past.

“They joined us onstage when we announced this at the IGEL event he said. “We now do deep engineering with them, as well as joint selling and marketing.” Robin Brandl, ControlUp’s Vice President of Global Strategic Alliances who was with CloudJumper, and then NetApp when they acquired CloudJumper, played a key role in running this alliance.

In the longer term, look for ControlUp to bring the different vendor support together in a single platform.

“Cloud monitoring should be provided as a full cloud service, and to bring these altogether will require that we bring a DEX platform in across all the different technologies,” Stocker said. “This will have some new dashboarding functionality, and  will look at employee personas across all technologies they use to give IT a broader vision. We are transforming as a company. That’s where partners are important – finding these new pesonas. We know all the VDI buyers. But we don’t know all the others who are now involved in these buying decisions like desktop engineers and service desk engineers. We are redefining our messages around these personas.”

Look for ControlUp to have a much higher profile at trade shows, something that has already begun.

“This is because Citrix Synergy used to be our big event, and the new ownership there has really de-emphasized that, viewing this kind of event as a luxury item,” Stocker indicated. “That’s one reason we have stepped up elsewhere at other events.”