This is a guest post by Gadi Feldman, Chief Bee (not just a drone) for Scoutbees, ControlUp.

As a Citrix Ready Global Partner, ControlUp is focused on working with Citrix, Citrix Solution Advisors, and Citrix Service Providers (CSPs) to help to deliver the best possible user experience on Citrix solutions while cutting costs and decreasing downtime. Scoutbees, a new, Citrix Ready verified solution, is just one more way ControlUp helps keep your environments in tip-top shape.

2016: It was a big year.

We were all binge-watching Stranger Things.

Hamilton won a Grammy, 11 Tonys, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

We celebrated the XXXI Olympic Games in Rio.

And ControlUp introduced its free logon simulator!

Since its release four years ago, this powerful utility has helped more than 10,000 IT professionals around the world stay a step ahead of their users and provide a stable, more reliable environment for their organizations.

Fast-forward to 2020.

Tiger King is our latest obsession.

The world learned how to work from home, thanks to COVID-19.

Everyone is baking sourdough bread.

And ControlUp introduced Scoutbees, the evolution of the logon simulator.

Get to know Scoutbees

For everyone who’s been using the ControlUp logon simulator to help keep their Citrix environments running smoothly these last four years, the tool is going away, but don’t you worry! Scoutbees, a new, Citrix Ready validated solution from ControlUp, does everything the logon simulator did, but, oh, so much more.

ControlUp created Scoutbees so you can proactively monitor the availability and responsiveness of your published resources. These business applications and workspaces are critical to your users’ productivity and business continuity on the whole. If you have to find out about problems directly from your end-users, well, that horse has already left the barn, as they say. But with Scoutbees, you’ll be notified about any problems with published resources before your users are affected.

Scouts, Hives, and Other Bee terms

Scoutbees takes complexity out of the equation.

You can launch proactive tests (we call those Scouts) to monitor the availability and responsiveness of your published resources. Scouts can be launched on the fly from Cloud-based Hives located in multiple regions from Citrix Cloud, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix Gateway, or on-prem from Custom Hives in Citrix StoreFront.

If you use a cloud-based hive, Scoutbees is SaaS-based, so you don’t need to install anything; all you need to do is configure your Scouts and set them to check the health of your applications at intervals of your choosing, simple as that.

But if you want to check internal resources, you can use Custom Hives, which live on-prem. Quickly install a service in any of your locations, then launch Scouts from within your internal network. Scouts show you the health of the published resource they’re checking. They can tell you about success ratios, how long it took to get a session ready, or give detailed information about the previous runs of any given Scout.

But there’s more! There are multiple types of resources that need to be checked, so your end-users can stay productive. Scoutbees supports multiple test methods, and Scouts can gain access to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops resources via multiple Citrix-supported gateways.

Scoutbees doesn’t just test resources’ availability; it provides you with valuable insights about the health of connection flow and the environment on the whole (e.g. login times, ICA RTT latency, brokering time, etc.)

A changing world requires changing technology.

Scoutbees is, effectively, an early warning system that alerts system admins to issues related to resource availability. Our Scouts mimic the behavior of your users and test your entire Citrix environment — whether you’re using Citrix Cloud, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix Networking solutions, or StoreFront — and proactively alert you to any issues and their root cause(s), so your users can stay productive.

All this makes it possible for you to tell a richer story about what’s going on in your environment and gives you the EUC superpower of knowing about issues before they even rear their ugly heads. This reduces IT downtime and allows you to deliver a more stable, reliable service to your end users.

This isn’t the end, it is just the beginning.

As a Citrix Ready Global Partner, ControlUp is focused on working with Citrix, Citrix Solution Advisors, and Citrix Service Providers (CSPs) to help to deliver the best possible user experience on Citrix solutions; Scoutbees is one more arrow in your quiver of ControlUp solutions.

Scoutbees is the evolution of the logon simulator; it’s everything you loved about it, and lots more. And you can try it out for FREE! So, what are you waiting for? Take Scoutbees out for a spin and see what all the buzz is about.