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 5000 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 Control Up 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 Control Up alternative proof of concept on one delivery group and run it side by side with Control Up.

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 for the enterprise. Contact us at techinfo@goliathtechnologies.com.