ControlUp v6.0 beta Release Notes

Dear beta testers of ControlUp v6,

Please review this document before upgrading to ControlUp 6.0.

Bugs and known issues will be updated periodically. 


New Features and Enhancements:

Major Features

  • XenDesktop Support – ControlUp can now be integrated with XenDesktop to allow full visibility for XenDesktop-related objects and metrics, including:
  • Monitoring health and performance of VDAs and delivery controllers
  • Discovering and monitoring XenDesktop user sessions
  • Monitoring delivery groups
  • Manipulating Maintenance Mode for delivery groups and VDAs
  • Hyper-V Support – the hypervisor monitoring capabilities of ControlUp have been extended to include support for standalone and clustered Hyper-V hosts.
  • Application Load Time – ControlUp now has the ability to measure the time it takes every application to become available for the end user. The application’s load time in seconds is displayed in the Processes view. Average app load time for all processes is aggregated on the session, computer, and folder levels.

Minor Features

  • Protocol session bandwidth usage / bandwidth limit monitoring – the Sessions view now includes columns which displays the bandwidth usage and amount of bandwidth available in each ICA/PCoIP user session
  • Column presets for all views - ControlUp Console now supports configuring a column preset for each view on a per-folder basis. Use the Preset Settings tab of the Settings window to configure which columns will be displayed when focusing on a folder or drilling down into objects in a folder.
  • Script-based Actions enhancements:
  • Actions on Hosts – script-based actions now support virtualization hosts as targets
  • Results export to Excel – the SBA results window can now be exported to Excel to allow for documenting output and advanced comparison of execution results
  • Export and Import – script-based actions can now be exported and imported as portable XML packages, which enables for sharing your SBAs with other users without uploading to the entire community
  • Suppressing the results window – Console-side SBAs can now be configured to hide the results window, which is useful when the SBA launches a third-party program
  • Create triggers from the Events pane – you can now right-click any Windows event in the Events pane to create an incident trigger for future similar events
  • Other new columns
  • User AD OU – for every user session, ControlUp now displays the name of the Organizational Unit in which the user’s account is located in Active Directory
  • User Full Name – the Sessions view now includes the full name of each user in Active Directory
  • PVS RAM Cache Usage – a more accurate and reliable metric for showing the amount of cache space used by PVS target device configured to use RAM cache
  • NIC Packet Errors and Dropped Packets – new metrics for virtualization hosts
  • Session Disconnection Rate – the Computers view now includes a measure of the rate at which user sessions are disconnecting
  • ICA Sessions Count – each computer will now show the number of ICA sessions established on it
  • Enhanced grouping in the Incidents pane – additional columns have been added to the group-by sidebar to enhance troubleshooting and investigating past incidents
  • Miscellaneous UI enhancements
  • Improvements to the Events pane
  • Redesigned SBA store window
  • Enhanced navigation between the views
  • Adding the monitor schedule name to monitor settings pane
  • Sign-in wizard - display organization list in alphabetical order
  • Remember the console’s ribbon state, tree size and actions pane size
  • .NET 4.6 Support – ControlUp Agent now supports .NET Framework 4.6
  • XenServer SDK updated to v6.5

Before upgrading to v6:

  • ControlUp console and monitor now require .NET 4.5 or 4.6. Please ensure this feature is enabled on your OS before upgrading to v6. The .NET requirements for ControlUp agent are without change.
  • App Load Time monitoring is an experimental feature that is disabled by default. We recommend testing this feature in a controlled environment to prevent compatibility issues. To enable app load time monitoring on a testing computer, configure the following registry value:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Smart-X\ControlUp\Agent\AppLoadTime

"EnableMeasurement"=dword:00000001

By default, this will enable app load time monitoring for the following processes: winword.exe, powerpnt.exe, excel.exe, outlook.exe, iexplore.exe, chrome.exe

ControlUp Agent needs to be restarted after adding the registry value above.

  • Hyper-V integration is supported for hosts running Windows 2012 R2. In order to monitor Hyper-V hosts, they need to be added to ControlUp as managed computers prior to adding a hypervisor connection.
  • XenDesktop PowerShell SDK needs to be installed on all computers that will perform data collection (console, monitor and dedicated data collectors). To prevent all console and monitor instances from connecting directly to XenDesktop, it is recommended that a dedicated data collector for XenDesktop is configured in the connection properties window for the site.
  • In order to display the columns added in v6 in the grid, please open the Columns dialog box and click “Reset Defaults”. Otherwise, ControlUp will retain your column presets from the previous version, which do not include the new columns. This reset should be performed after upgrading to v6.

Bugs

The following bugs were observed in the release candidate version (build 6.0.0.710). They are expected to be fixed in the public release of v6 or in a maintenance build and do not need to be reported again.

  • The Protocol Bandwidth Session Avg / Limit columns might show N/A even though the ICA session is active. Restarting the ControlUp agent fixes this issue temporarily
  • Some files might remain in the ControlUp agent installation directory after uninstalling the agent

Bugs fixed in build 710:

  • Events might not be displayed in the Events Pane
  • When configuring a dedicated data collector for a XenDesktop site, an “ExtensionNotInstalled” error is thrown if the target computer doesn’t have .NET 3.5 installed.
  • The ControlUp agent might fail to start due to a failed CRL (Certificate Revocation List) lookup

Bugs fixed in build 702:

  • The Get Session Screenshot, Send Super Message and Remote Assistance actions are not working properly in this build
  • A warning bar saying that the incidents quota was exceeded might be displayed in the Incidents pane. If the limit shown is 0, this message is in error and can be ignored.
  • When disconnecting from all records in the console, some computers may remain in the grid in the “Managed” state.
  • Protocol Bandwidth Session Avg. / Limit - in some cases, these columns might display abnormally high values (hundreds of Mbp/s)
  • Sort order is reset to default after navigating between views
  • The Folders View Stress Level thresholds are not honored after using the focus option
  • Installing the ControlUp Agent via the MSI package places redundant files in the agent installation directory
  • The ControlUp agent might consume more CPU cycles than expected. This issue was seen on RDS/XenApp servers with a high number of ICA sessions
  • ControlUp console might fail to connect to specific computers with a timeout message although the ControlUp agent is running. Restarting the ControlUp agent on the problematic computers solves the issue  

Bugs fixed in build 734:

  • The ALT feature sometimes caused Office apps to freeze and consume high CPU resources

Known issues

The following are known issues in version 6:

  • Data from XenDesktop Linux VDA might not be displayed correctly in ControlUp Console
  • When uninstalling .Net framework 4.5, it’s not possible to uninstall ControlUp agent. Workaround: re-install .Net framework 4.5 and then uninstall the agent
  • App Load Time does not work on Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 computers which do not support SHA-2 code signing.  Workaround: please follow https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3033929 
  • App Load Time measurement might be inaccurate for large (>100MB) Excel 2016 files (since they create a child process)
  • On rare occasions, ControlUp agent might cause .NET processes to remain running after their UI windows have been closed. This issue was observed only on Windows 2012 R2 servers.
    Workaround: configure the “handlefree” registry value:
    Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Smart-X\ControlUp\Agent\ExclusionRules
    Value Name: HandleFree
    Type: MultiString
    Value/s: Process names of the affected applications, one per row.

As a result, process exit time and exit code for these processes will not be visible using ControlUp

  • On Windows 10 systems with Windows Defender enabled, console launch may be slow because of a thorough scan initiated by Defender
  • Protocol Bandwidth Session Avg / Limit - in some cases, due to environmental issues, these columns might display N/A even though the session is active. If you experience this issue please run the following command on the target computer and then restart the ControlUp agent -  regsvr32 /s "C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICAService\icaperf.dll" (http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/353219-missing-ica-session-counters-after-xd710icatswx64003/)
  • Hyper-V 2016 hosts were not tested and are not fully supported in this release
  • When uninstalling the agent not all files and services are removed