Over the next few weeks, we are going to be revisiting the artist formerly known as ControlUp Edge DX (known as ControlUp for Desktops now).
About a week ago, they released some very interesting technology around real-time visibility on devices. Their name for it: “Live Remote Management” Today, we’re going to visit those amazing new capabilities:
- Live Network Visibility
- Live User Device Management
- Live Process Activity
- Live Process Explorer
- Final Thoughts
Live Network Visibility
The feature that really got me excited is the live network visibility, because beyond the tech itself, it’s a very cool looking feature.
You drill into a device, and its network tab and find a very interesting set of capabilities in real-time.
They slice it up into 3 areas, which we will look at in more detail:
Live Network TCP Connections
One of the really nice indicators they’ve added to show you the data is live is showcasing it’s “Connected” currently:
They do a nice job showing you the various NICs you have, which is mostly just for visibility:
You can also see how they list every process with its PID, local address/port, the remote address/port, user, connection state, duration, and the upload rate.
Overall, it’s neat the amount of information you have live within this view, along with the ability to search through it. I recommend not searching for edge, unless you want to be sad and see how many sessions Microsoft is running at the moment:
Live Network Map
Things start getting more interesting as we look at the network map. You can actively see where your traffic is going. I was amusingly able to see for some reason my OneDrive is connecting to servers in Dublin, Ireland. It’s really fascinating to see how certain processes are connecting all over the globe. Amusingly, it also makes it really easy to know which of your apps are talking to AWS (aka all the traffic to Virginia):
Live Network Topology
The live network topology is easily the coolest feature I’ve seen, which is why we will also deliver a short video demo of it below. Basically, you can see all of the different processes and how they relate, who they’re talking to, and the end-to-end connectivity.
I really like how it shows the traffic talking to Cloudflare from both Edge and Discord:
The reality is this information outside of being really neat, is laid out nicely and makes it much easier for a support technician to get insight easily into what is going on with a customer’s environment.
Live User Device Management
Next, we move onto management of user’s machines. We will cover:
Live File Browser
File Browser provides you with real-time visibility into the user’s file system. The key to leveraging it properly is first creating a Management Role as you can see below (Selecting “Device Permissions” > “Remote Management” > “Management” (Select All):
Without having that role, you will see there is limited capabilities in the File Browser:
Now, we can do all sorts of things:
You can now:
- Copy
- Move
- Delete
- Rename
- Download
- Upload
- Create Folders
This gives you a really nice and comprehensive solution. Really the only thing you’re missing would be edit, but probably not needed overall.
Live Registry Editor
The registry editor is restricted to 3 hives (HKLM, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, and HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG).
Simply, you can do the following:
- Read the key values
- Export keys
- Import keys
- Create/Delete keys
- Edit/Delete values
Live Process Activity
The live process activity is an interesting area too. This area shows processes live writing data to the file system inside of the “Storage” area.
You have the ability to search for process names, file names, and even group them together for better analysis. You can group by process and file path, to keep an eye on processes, where they’re writing, and the size:
Live Process Explorer
The Live Process Explorer is a REALLY neat enhancement. Basically, you can see all of the processes along with these attributes:
- Architecture
- Elevated or not
- User it’s running as
- Duration
- Priority
- CPU%
- Memory%
- Disk I/O
- Network I/O
That is only the beginning:
If you drill into a service, you can see a ton of information, including the command line execution with its arguments like this:
You can also see the Modules running as part of the process:
We also have the threads themselves, making this a really need addition to the ControlUp for Desktops stack:
You can also right-click a process to end it, which is really solid:
Overall they’ve made some amazing progress here, check out this video to view the full solution on Process Management.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I really love these new features in what is a logical progression for Digital Employee Experience. ControlUp is doing a nice job of extending ControlUp for Desktops into a more useful platform that is focusing nicely on solving problems administrators have daily.
I can’t wait to see what they announce on Thursday in London (which I will be onsite for). Come by and find me! I’ll have some Workplace Ninjas US swag and look forward to talking DEX with everyone.
