Mic Drop Moment at Ignite - ControlUp & Intune
I’ve written at length about monitoring and the end user experience - even dedicating a whole month of sequential posts to the topic. Fair warning… this isn’t an ad or a paid post, but it may read like that because it’s a glowing review on a piece of monitoring-specicific news in the AVD & Windows 365 landscape.
For as long as most customers and admins can remember, ControlUp has been “the 800 lbs. gorilla”, or the king of the jungle, in the EUC monitoring space. This has historically largely been driven by their existence in most Horizon stacks, as well as many Citrix environments as well.
Light bulb moment…
At Ignite this year, ControlUp revealed an integration with the Intune console that raised my eyebrows for multiple reasons. Here we go…
Monitoring has always been one of Intune’s weaker points for Windows 365. AVD has the same issue - the native service, Azure Monitor, is just too slow in reporting data back and alerting admins. Users experience issues in real time, so you should get real time feedback from your tools if you want to keep them satisfied. ControlUp now fills that gap, in a very Microsoft-friendly way because…
It’s an in-browser integration. Often, integrations are based on one UI activating services (or similar) in another ecosystem. That’s not the case here, where ControlUp’s console pops out from the side of the screen when hovering over a device that’s managed by ControlUp in the Intune portal. Then, the real-time context pops up (and presumably, the ability to connect/shadow/communicate, etc. as well).
Tell me more, and then let me do something about it! A common theme in community program calls is ‘I have enough to do - don’t make me figure something else out or point me to a KB; either do what needs done for me or tell me how to do it.’ ControlUp can leverage triggers and scripts - many of whieh are effectively free and included - to automatically tackle issues, or present you with advanced data that gives you important context before you connect to a machine, shadow the user session to resolve an issue.
A separate but similar press release announces a similar integration with ServiceNow. This is a “1+1=3” scenario, where performance issues can raise tickets to be worked. In either the Intune or ServiceNow portals, you can see the same monitoring intel in real-time.
This just works, right out of the box. It works for customers with VDI on prem, in the cloud or those with both. It works whether you have VMware, Citrix or AVD/Windows 365 - or a mix of any of the above. AVD and Windows 365 are enough to pick up and build a practice around, and even moreso if you have to think through any of the combinations above. Faster access to info (now right where you expect to manage it in Windows 365 scenarios, Intune) and unity across hybrid clouds and multiple vendors is a big win.
Customers can always learn more by talking to sales, but techs typically don’t want to do that. In order to learn more about ControlUp, I’d suggest a few things:
Scope out the extensive library of scripts & tools generated by the community, for the community
Join the ControlUp community on Slack, starting here, for a chance to ask PMs and other community experts questions about how they use it and what their expeiences have been.