ControlUp Monitor Overview (On-prem + Hybrid Cloud pre 9.0)

This article outlines the main differences between ControlUp Monitors in on-premises environments, or Monitors in Hybrid Cloud environments before version 9.0, from Monitors in Hybrid Cloud environments after version 9.0.

Prerequisites for ControlUp Monitor

Verify that the machine that you deploy the monitor on meets the following requirements:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 or higher. Windows client OS are not supported.
• .NET Framework installed
  
  • For ControlUp version 8.6.5 or higher: NET Framework 4.8
  • ControlUp version 8.6 or lower: .NET Framework 4.5 or higher
• Allowed RPC inbound traffic
• Powershell 5.x

To allow the ControlUp Monitor to connect to managed machines, you need to assign domain credentials to the monitor service as described below in the Domain Identity section.

Installing the Monitor

After you verify the prerequisites of the monitor machine, any user with the Manage Monitor permission can install a monitor from the Real-Time Console.

To install new instances of the ControlUp Monitor, click the Add Monitor button in the Home ribbon:

Alternatively, you can install a new monitor by clicking Monitoring Status>Deploy Monitor in the ControlUp Monitors area to install and configure a monitor:

Click Add Monitor. The ControlUp Monitor Installation Wizard will guide you through the process to install and configure the monitor instance. The first stage of the wizard is a machine object picker. Use this page to select a machine from one of your managed domains to serve as your monitor machine.

Note that by default, the monitor service listens on TCP port 40706, which you can customize in this screen. After you verify the prerequisites, all the files required for the installation are copied to the selected computer and a ControlUp Monitor Windows service appears. Immediately after installing the service, ControlUp opens the Monitor Configuration Wizard that gathers all the required information to configure and start the monitor service.
The wizard goes through the following stages:

Domain Identity

In the first stage, the wizard offers to import your currently saved credentials for use by the monitor service. If you agree, then your current list of AD Connections and Credentials Store is imported. Note that you need to click Edit for each entry to confirm that the correct credentials are used for each AD Connection. If you connect to more than one AD domain, choose one of the connections to be the primary one. If you decline to import your personal credentials, you will be prompted to create at least one set of valid AD credentials for the monitor instance to use when connecting to your resources.

The monitor service needs valid credentials to establish connections with all of your managed machines. It is also responsible for deploying ControlUp Agents to the managed machines, in case they have no agent installed. By default, the ControlUp Monitor service is configured to start using the Network Service account, which is not sufficient for administrative connections to your managed machines. In addition, if your organization includes several Active Directory domains, the Monitor will need valid administrative credentials to access all these domains.

We recommend that you create a dedicated account for the ControlUp Monitor in each of your Active Directory domains. This account requires:

1. Local administrative privileges on all your managed computers. Only required if your monitor is expected to deploy agents to systems.
2. Modify permissions on the directory used for scheduled data export (see below).
3. Shared Credentials Store. ControlUp allows managing credentials centrally so all authorized users can use shared credentials sets. This enables for more streamlined management of credentials and a quicker onboarding process for new ControlUp users which does not require them to know the service usernames and passwords.

Note that the Shared Credentials permission is set by the roles in the Security Policy Panel

The bottom of the Domain Identity page hosts the credentials saved with the Monitor instance in order to enable it to connect to your virtualization infrastructure. In order to monitor virtualization hosts, ControlUp requires that consoles and monitors to use the same credentials. In order to enable continuous monitoring of the virtualization hosts using the monitor, use this page to save the same service account credentials used by other ControlUp users in your organization to connect to your hosts. Saving those credentials is optional.

However, if no credentials are provided for hypervisor connections, the monitor will not be able to connect to the hypervisor infrastructure. For more information on monitoring virtualization hosts with ControlUp, see Connect to the Virtualization Infrastructure.

Login Mode

If your organization uses ControlUp On-Premises (COP), your ControlUp Monitor needs a COP license file, just like a regular ControlUp user.

Solve Settings

Solve uses the ControlUp Monitor to retrieve data from your data sources. This dialog links to the Solve web interface in which you can configure SAML SSO. If you use Solve On-Premises, you can check the Ignore SSL Certificate Errors checkbox.

To learn more about the configuration in Solve, see Solve On-Premises configuration.

Insights

If your organization uses Insights to store and analyze historical data, the monitor uploads the aggregated data to our cloud-hosted Insights platform and for exporting activity files to Insights On-Premises. Before relaying data to Insights, the monitor reduces it to a manageable size by decreasing the resolution and calculating average values for each data point.

On-Premises Monitor Backup

In an on-premises environment, the ControlUp Monitor creates Activity Files for the Insights On-Premises appliance. This screen allows you to define intervals for backing up IOP activity files on the monitor machine's local hard drive, simplifying the update process of Insights On-Premises.