This is a guest blog post by Trentent Tye, Technical Specialist at ControlUp.

Citrix Cloud? Heck yeah, Citrix Cloud! What an exciting product! With minimal effort, you can stand up a full-fledged Citrix environment anywhere in the world.

On-premises? Check.

In a cloud provider? Check.

On both at the same time? Check check.

Citrix Ready partner ControlUp is focused on working with Citrix and Citrix Solution Advisors to help deliver the best possible user experience on Citrix products and solutions while cutting costs and decreasing downtime.

ControlUp has seen customers at every stage of their cloud journey, supporting them every step along the way.

We’ve seen customers whose first steps toward virtualization were straight to Citrix Cloud with no prior solution. These were customers new to the cloud who fully embraced Citrix Cloud.

We’ve seen customers migrate from their locally installed Citrix control plane to Citrix Cloud.

We’ve seen customers move whole-hog — including all machine resources — from legacy, on-premises deployments to Citrix Cloud.

We’ve seen customers move just some machine resources to the cloud, keeping some on-premises, but have all resources managed by Citrix Cloud.

We’ve seen customers keep their on-premises resources, but decommission their local Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as they moved to the Citrix Cloud.

You could say we’ve seen it all.

There are many roads to Citrix Cloud; here are just some of the journeys:

  • New to Citrix Cloud
  • Migrating to Citrix Cloud
  • Previously tried Citrix Cloud

But as easy as it can be, with full-blown integration into Citrix Cloud, ControlUp has just made everyone’s journey easier.

ControlUp v8.2 Adds Full Citrix Cloud Integration

ControlUp v8.2 will be here soon, and with it, there will be loads of resources to help monitor Citrix Cloud environments.

With ControlUp offering monitoring and management capabilities for Citrix Cloud resources — Cloud Connectors, Delivery Groups, Machines and Sessions — we can help ensure your cloud journey is a smooth one. ControlUp’s intuitive interface makes it ideal for single-pane-of-glass management and monitoring.

For those new to Citrix Cloud, ControlUp’s one-stop shop means being able to quickly understand issues and mitigate them faster. With built-in shadowing, contextually sensitive management actions, full-fledged file system and registry capabilities, as well as a built-in RDP manager and fine-grained security configuration, ControlUp can ensure your journey is a success.

The KISS Principle: Keep It Simple

Migrating to Citrix Cloud can be a complex process; with multiple environments it usually is. But with ControlUp, strongly positioned to help with v8.2, managing Citrix Cloud is simple.

The first integration ControlUp ever offered was for the on-prem version of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. With our new Citrix Cloud integration, ControlUp enables you to manage and monitor both environments during your migration.

Executing a migration of resources, say from machines in a on-prem delivery group to a Citrix Cloud Delivery Group can all be managed from right within the ControlUp Console.

And, just like that? Your migration is a go! Need to fall back? Just right-click and do the reverse. It’s just that simple and quick.

If you previously tried Citrix Cloud and shied away due to the lack of monitoring of the platform, now’s the time to try again; ControlUp can help! With built-in enumeration of objects and resources and monitoring, ControlUp gives you the ability to take control with our native Windows application. With the help of an “in-RAM Database,” the ControlUp Real-Time Console can track thousands of objects and update their metrics every three seconds. ControlUp gives you the peace of mind of knowing that what you see is the up-to-the second state of your environment.

ControlUp has long offered comprehensive monitoring for Citrix Cloud machine resources with custom and native Windows metrics, but now we’re able to take that a big step further.

Starting with ControlUp v8.2, ControlUp now offers Citrix Cloud-specific management actions and Citrix Cloud specific real-time metrics. Enable or disable your Citrix Cloud Delivery Groups from the ControlUp Real Time Console, configure maintenance mode, and see the configuration changes occur right in real-time on our metric grid.

The ControlUp Console was built with end-user computing (EUC) in mind. With that mindset, a treasure trove of killer features are available in addition to Citrix Cloud support.

💡 Make sure to sign up for the public beta of ControlUp v8.2. (It’s coming soon!)

Resource Availability Monitoring

 

People are the most important part of a business. And those people use apps. When those apps aren’t available, people can’t be productive, costs go up, and no one is happy. Scoutbees by ControlUp can help you minimize downtime by testing your resource’s availability — and proactively alert you if there’s an issue. With native integration into Citrix Cloud and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environments, Scoutbees is the industry’s premier resource availability tool.

You can try Scoutbees for free for 14 days to see how it can help you keep your apps up and running, and your people happy.

Script Actions

Using Script Actions in a way to infinitely extend and enhance the ControlUp Console, like it was tailor-made for your environment.

Not a scripter? Not a worry! We source scripts from our community of users for use in any environment. To date, we have over 300 scripts in our Script Library, which extend ControlUp in myriad ways. Need AppV support? We have scripts for that. Need to manage IGEL endpoints? We have scripts for that. Need to reconfigure the hardware of your virtual machines? We have scripts for that.

Automation

While it’s great to have scripts to do things, wouldn’t it be great if they could run automagically when needed? With ControlUp’s advanced trigger system, you can set Script Actions to execute when you hit a set of metric conditions or against Windows Error or Warning events. This is the ControlUp automation platform, and its power — being paired with the real-time nature of the product — lies in taking care of things for you instantly so you can get to the work you really want to be doing. Has a user gone idle? Reduce their resource consumption. Have an idle user go active? Remove their resource reductions. Did the last user logoff a cloud machine at the end of the day? Stop and deallocate the machine immediately.

Controllers

Powered by our advanced differentiating engine, Controllers is a group of advanced and powerful features in ControlUp that allow you to compare file/registry/programs/services across multiple machines, execute actions on multiple machines simultaneously, and lots more.

Compare the directory structure of two (or more!) machines to identify differences quickly. Quickly deploy a configuration file to thousands of machines. Pull process memory dumps from hundreds or thousands of users to send to a vendor for analysis!

Or compare the registry across hundreds of machines or user hives! See who is missing a registry value and fix it by applying registry values to machines or users instantly.

You can compare the installed programs of your infrastructure servers against each other, quickly identifying why there is inconsistent performance or behaviors.

Finally, with the Services controller, you can quickly and immediately see the configuration of services. Are they set to Auto-Start? Manual? Any outliers can be changed immediately, and changes can be applied to hundreds or thousands of machines at once. Want to restart, start or stop a service across a swath of machines? With ControlUp you can do it in just two clicks.

Native Actions

ControlUp comes with native actions built right in. That is, within each object in the ControlUp Console, a simple right-click brings up a native actions menu that you can execute against that object.

For example, right clicking a user session will bring all the classic administrative tasks you’d expect: log a user off, shadow, and so on. But Controlup does so much more. You can refresh group policy, start a chat, send a super message with a poll and get responses back, start a process in that session, and loads more! Native actions alone would make ControlUp beyond unbeatable, but they are built-in and available by default.

There’s More!

There are still tons more features we have not covered here. ControlUp has built-in RDP management, events aggregation, incidents tracking, historical analysis and reporting, and more! Not using it yet? Download ControlUp NOW to see for yourself!