Our ControlUp Alternative Was the Goliath Enterprise Solution

How a large enterprise traded out ControlUp for Goliath to get the metric detail and reporting it needed to fix end-user experience issues, at a lower cost.

This is how their EUC team found a ControlUp alternative that went deeper into end-user experience, reported on it properly, and cost less.

The Challenge: A Big Bill for Answers That Stopped Short

The company supports 5,000 users across 10 locations on Citrix. Session slowness was chronic. Published apps hung, and users called the help desk to say “Citrix is down” when it wasn’t.

The EUC team could see that something was wrong. What they couldn’t see was why. Their metrics stopped at the summary level. Session latency showed up without the protocol-level detail needed to separate a network problem from a host problem from an endpoint problem, and there was little correlation to the end user.

Without that detail, every escalation was a guess. Tickets bounced between the network, server, desktop, and application teams. Each team checked its own tools and passed the ticket on. Mean time to resolution was measured in days, not hours.

Reporting made it worse. Leadership asked fair questions. How many users were affected last quarter? Which sites are worst? Did the fix we paid for actually work? Answering them meant exporting data and building spreadsheets by hand.

What They Tried: Citrix Tools and ControlUp

The team ran their Citrix tools side by side with ControlUp. The Citrix tools showed the health of the Citrix layer, as designed. ControlUp added a real-time view of the virtual desktops and flexibility for engineers willing to script. But for solving end-user experience issues, the gaps added up.

• Not enough granular detail. Some of the detailed values needed to isolate end-user performance issues weren’t tracked. The team could see that a logon or session was slow, but not always which stage or which layer caused it.
• No detail, no early warning. If a value isn’t tracked, you can’t alert on it. Too many issues surfaced when users called, not before.
• Limited reporting. Out-of-the-box reporting didn’t answer leadership’s questions about trends, locations, and impact over time. Anything beyond the basics meant exports, scripts, and hours of engineer time.
• A premium price. ControlUp was one of the largest line items in the EUC budget, and the renewal kept climbing.

They needed a tool that went deeper and cost less. That’s when they started looking for a ControlUp alternative.

The Solution: Goliath, With the Detail to Find Root Cause

The team found Goliath through a Citrix Master Class webinar series where Citrix CTP George Speirs was doing a presentation on detailed troubleshooting. They decided to do a ControlUp alternative proof of concept on one delivery group and run it side by side with ControlUp.

The first difference was depth. Goliath monitors 350+ failure points across infrastructure, hypervisors, servers, operating systems, and applications. It also conducts automatic Citrix optimization health checks. It captures end-user experience metrics for ICA/HDX, so the team can tell whether latency lives in the network, the host, or the endpoint.

Because the values are tracked, they can be alerted on. Goliath flags problems before users are impacted. Self-healing remediation restarts hung apps and servers or runs PowerShell scripts automatically. Screenshot evidence shows exactly what the user saw, so root cause is a fact, not an argument. And it all lives in one console.

The second difference was reporting. Goliath ships with out-of-the-box reports, keeps historical data for trend analysis, and integrates with Power BI and Tableau. The questions that used to take days of spreadsheet work now take a few clicks.

Going Forward

Today the company uses Goliath to proactively manage end-user experience across its Citrix environment and the delivery infrastructure behind it: endpoints, network, hypervisors, and servers. Issues get caught and fixed before users feel them, and leadership gets its reports without waiting on a spreadsheet.

Learn more about Goliath as a ControlUp alternative. Get results like these—start here.

Our ControlUp Alternative Was the Goliath Epic Healthcare Solution

How one health system traded out ControlUp for Goliath to enable proactive management of clinician experience when accessing and using Epic Hyperdrive.

This is how a large health system using Epic Hyperdrive found a ControlUp alternative built for healthcare, and why the switch cost them less.

The Challenge: Clinicians Were Struggling in Epic, and IT Couldn’t See How Far It Went

The complaints were familiar. Epic was slow to launch. Logons dragged at shift change. Sessions froze mid-charting. Clinicians rarely called the help desk anymore; more often, they just worked
around it.

A recent survey indicated broad displeasure with the speed and reliability when accessing and using Epic. Of course the survey only captured a subset of the users and little actionable data for IT to understand or troubleshoot the issues.

The IT team had ControlUp in place to monitor Citrix, but what they didn’t have was the full picture. They could not correlate IT element performance with Epic System Pulse data to see how many clinicians were affected and root cause. Without integration to Epic System Pulse, user experience data on 100% of clinicians is impossible.

That gap had real costs. Clinicians lost minutes meant for patients. The help desk escalated on a hunch. Network, server, Citrix, and Epic teams each checked their own dashboards, found nothing wrong, and handed the problem off. Clinical and IT leadership heard “Epic is slow” but had no data to act on.

What They Tried: Citrix Tools and ControlUp

The team started where most health systems do, with their Citrix tools. Those tools did what they were designed to do. They showed the health of the Citrix layer. But a clinician’s Epic session crosses the endpoint, the network, the hypervisor, the Citrix or VMware Horizon session, and Epic itself. Seeing one layer clearly doesn’t tell you which layer is failing and without integration to Epic it is difficult to tie the performance of a degraded IT element to specific clinicians using Epic Hyperdrive.

So, they added ControlUp, running it side by side with their Citrix tools. It gave the team more
visibility into their virtual desktops, and for general VDI monitoring it had a lot to offer. For Epic,
the blind spots remained.

The team wasn’t short on tools. They were short on answers. That’s when they started looking for a
ControlUp alternative.

The Solution: Goliath, Purpose-Built for Epic

The team found Goliath through KLAS Research, where Goliath is “A” rated and is the only KLAS-measured third-party solution validated for improving EHR reliability and response time. They reached out, and began a full proof of concept to find an alternative to ControlUp.

It started with Epic. Goliath’s module for Epic Hyperdrive integrates with Epic System Pulse and combines three data sources in one console: Epic System Pulse, the clinician’s end-user experience, and the underlying Citrix or VMware Horizon infrastructure. In addition, the Goliath Epic Module provides automated optimization checks to make sure that the Epic environment is fully configured to Epic best practices guidance or on target. For the first time, the team could see an Epic slowdown and trace its root cause in one place.

 

The second difference was how little work it took. Goliath auto-discovers the environment, monitors 250+ failure points out of the box, and tracks all 33+ stages of the logon process. No scripting projects. No custom dashboards to maintain. The team could open Goliath and immediately see the top 25 users having issues, how long each issue lasted, and why.

 

Most important, Goliath tracks the experience of every clinician, not a sample and not only the ones who call the help desk. The End User Experience and Logon Duration Scorecards grade that experience against industry standards, so “Epic is slow” becomes a measurable number that leaders can track over time.

One Set of Facts, Used Across the Organization

After the ControlUp alternative was implemented, Goliath became the shared source of truth for four groups:

• Clinical executives use it when they meet with clinicians. They know who is having issues, how long the issues lasted, and what caused them before the conversation starts.
• IT executives see the same data. Clinical and IT leadership now work from one set of facts to fund initiatives that improve clinician experience.
• The help desk resolves many issues on the first call. When a ticket does need escalation, it goes to the right team, whether that’s network, server, Epic, or Citrix, with root-cause data and screenshot evidence attached.
• Architects use Goliath’s analytics to spot global patterns by location, department, device, and time of day, and to plan capacity and upgrades based on evidence.

A ControlUp Alternative That Cost Less

The health system expected better Epic visibility to cost more. It didn’t. Goliath came in below their
ControlUp renewal. The pricing was simple to understand, and the full platform, including unlimited
reporting, retention, and synthetic monitoring, was included.

In addition to the product the health system executives opted for the Goliath Clinician Experience
Measurement and Benchmarking support package which provides continuous measurement of clinician experience with Epic and compares that to benchmarks from similar health systems.

Going Forward

Today the health system uses Goliath to proactively manage clinician experience in Epic, along with the delivery infrastructure behind it: endpoints, network, Citrix, and the servers underneath. Issues get caught and fixed before clinicians feel them, not after they call the help desk.

Learn more about Goliath as a ControlUp alternative. Get results like these—start here.

See more about our Epic Speed & Reliability Improvement programs here.