ControlUp Launches DEXe Program with Ferroque Inaugural Awardees
A few years ago, Ferroque Systems engaged in a partnership with ControlUp, widely recognized as one of the EUC industry’s top monitoring solutions. As an organization, ControlUp is comprised of smart, experienced people who have a passion for EUC and many of whom have relevant field experience to understand the features and metrics an EUC monitoring solution should provide to be valuable in the real world.
In March 2024, ControlUp announced its new DEXe program. DEX focuses on the digital employee experience, and DEXe is ControlUp’s new industry designation that acknowledges the finest minds in the EUC and DEX space, to engage the EUC community of administrators who understand the importance of creating the best experience for users so they can do their jobs at the highest level, and have a passion for solving problems and making EUC solutions shine.
DEXe is an initiative designed to cultivate ideas, encourage insightful conversations, and establish leading practices. ControlUp’s goal with the DEXe program is to significantly enhance user experiences across platforms, transcending the limitations of any single vendor. The DEXe program is designed to build upon its participants’ collective wisdom and shared passion for exceptional user interactions.
“Ferroque is excited to have multiple of our Professional Services consultants and Managed Services technicians be a part of ControlUp’s new DEXe program.” – Michael Shuster, CEO
Ferroque’s Managed Services organization leverages ControlUp as its primary EUC monitoring solution, due to its ability to effectively monitor the core components that comprise a typical EUC solution, including direct integration with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD), Citrix Cloud / DaaS, NetScaler (formerly ADC), XenServer, VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft Azure, and AWS, as well as supporting technologies such as Citrix Provisioning (PVS) and FSLogix (for profile monitoring). ControlUp includes countless objects/counters and metrics that can be configured to monitor the EUC infrastructure and the end-user experience (aka DEX), including synthetic transactions, providing a comprehensive view of an organization’s EUC solution. Its lightweight agent provides superior capability and data collection over competitors that rely on WMI in Windows. ControlUp also promotes mindshare across its extensive scripting community to facilitate idea exchange that helps maximize automated responses to various monitoring alerts, which helps EUC administrators across organizations learn from the experience of like-minded individuals to solve problems and figure out new solutions.
In providing Managed Services, Ferroque understands that the purpose of monitoring is not just to capture and report metrics, but is to enable organizations to maximize their ability to deliver customer-facing products and services by providing advanced warning for potential issues, helping to spot risks and areas in need of optimization, assisting in real-time troubleshooting, and several other benefits. Ferroque recognizes that effective monitoring and event management is not about reporting data, it’s about providing information that is relevant, timely, and actionable. ControlUp facilitates this via its ability to directly monitor the availability and responsiveness of a solution from the end-user’s perspective (not just monitor back-end infrastructure metrics).
For example, ControlUp provides the ability to monitor up/down status of Citrix Gateways, NetScaler LB VIPs, and NetScaler HA node health. In the real world, this holistic view is imperative; for example, Ferroque has had customers wherein ControlUp detected and alerted that a NetScaler failover event occurred – in isolation, this data could trigger a potential Sev1 reaction; however, ControlUp also showed that all Gateway sites and LB VIPs were still up/online and there was no end-user disruption, which is super important information and avoided us from having to instantly mobilize a Sev1 response. As well, ControlUp can generate synthetic transactions to verify the availability of key components, via Scoutbees. Scoutbees is a cloud-based solution that uses continuous synthetic transaction testing to proactively alert administrators if/when the availability of applications, desktops/VDI, and network resources are impacted, no matter if these are virtually delivered via Citrix, VMware Horizon, Microsoft AVD, or other critical network resources that support an organization’s EUC environment (such as a point-of-sale transaction website). Scoutbees can also assist with change management to help verify that key services, websites, etc. are back online and functioning properly after a change is completed.
As part of providing a complete picture, ControlUp also provides physical endpoint monitoring, which is a key piece of the EUC puzzle that is often overlooked in monitoring solutions. For example, in our Professional Services organization, Ferroque has worked with many customers who have experienced notable bouts of disconnected sessions and struggled to determine why this was happening. In these situations, the EUC platform (ex. Citrix) will typically notify of a disconnected session but often does not provide insights regarding the cause. This is because the cause of such events often occurs on the client endpoint device (e.g. due to a poor WiFi connection or other client device issue) and in the absence of endpoint monitoring no data (metrics) is available to provide insights into probable or root cause (e.g. if WiFi connectivity is unreliable, the client device OS will typically report event codes that indicate a dropped WiFi connection).
These are just a few real-world examples that demonstrate the real-world value of a comprehensive monitoring solution – such as ControlUp – that provides a complete picture of the availability and health of an EUC solution. Many other practical solutions and use cases can be enabled by Control Up, possibly in ways not originally considered, and the ControlUp DEXe program is designed to facilitate the mindshare that exploits this creativity.
Ferroque is excited to participate in the ControlUp DEXe program, and to partner with ControlUp to deliver Monitoring & Event Management services and full-on Managed Services operations. We would be happy to talk through any questions, concerns, etc. regarding any of the services discussed herein, and are available at hello@ferroquesystems.com or via phone at (416) 607-7165.
