What’s New in Stratusphere UX 5.8.1

On the heels of the release of Stratusphere UX version 5.8, we’ve just made another incremental update available for download. Stratusphere UX 5.8.1 provides a number of patches an bug fixes, with a few usability and operations features too! You can get complete detail on this version in our Release Notes.

That aside, I thought I point out a few of the new features, such as enhanced XenApp visibility, Smart Groups, Basis Search and a new administrative health and operations overview dashboard.

Peeling Back the Layers on XenApp

The administration of multi-session Windows environments (think XenApp, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services/Terminal Services and Remote Desktop Session Host) can be troublesome. This is especially the case when it comes to looking at shared resources and separating what is being consumed by system, administrative and user-owned processes. This new level of Stratusphere visibility will extend and create more efficiencies for diagnostic, forensic and troubleshooting use cases.

As you’ll note in the screen grab above, I’ve popped-out an application view of a shared Citrix XenApp environment. You’ll see Stratusphere is providing some detail and metrics on the applications and services for the user we initially selected. In the screen grab below I’ve unselected the “Owner Name” option, and Stratusphere now exposes process owner details for this shared host—specifically, the system, user, network service and local service details for the machine name represented in column three.

This ability to toggle the level of detail between user-centric and machine-centric views will greatly extend and enhance Stratusphere support of multi-session environments and provide flexibility when changing perspective from a user to a machine–based orientation or vice versa.

Organizing with Smart Groups

As you gain visibility on machines, it becomes important to build groups on which you can view information and metrics. With Stratusphere 5.8.1, we now provide a Smart Group feature that offers the ability to auto-populate groups based upon things like the machine type (physical or virtual with Xen, VMware or Hyper-V), chassis type (desktop, laptop, tower, server, etc.), operating system platform (Windows, Linux, etc.) and operating system version (Windows XP, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc.).

Smart Groups will extend the usefulness and help create efficiencies for desktop monitoring and diagnostics activities.

Blazing-Fast Basis Search and Administrative Overview

Stratusphere 5.8.1 also adds a new Basis Search for our Advanced Mode inspectors. With this new feature, Stratusphere search queries are blazing fast—up to 300 percent faster—allowing an administrator to narrow searches with a focus on the metrics and information that is most relevant and important.

In the screen shot above, you’ll note I’ve run a search based on the basis of “Application Name,” “Machines,” “Users (ID),” and “O/S Version.” Basis Search provides a new and advanced capability to Stratusphere, increasing the ease of problem identification and ultimately problem resolution.

In addition to the above, release 5.8.1 also offers a new administrative interface that provides a high-level overview of the Stratusphere Hub Appliance. Details include user and machine count, database size, backlogged reports, pending database insertions and event log status.

We hope you like these new feature additions, and welcome your feedback. Please don’t hesitate to drop us a note and let us know how we can continue to improve Stratusphere.