In order to complete this product walkthrough please make sure you have the following:

ControlUp has a Data Science team that has anonymous aggregated access to infrastructure metric data. They study the data in an attempt to gain key insights into what is happening in EUC environments and share the knowledge and wisdom that is obtained by this research with ControlUp customers.

One of the studies this team completed was on CPU and RAM provisioning of virtual machines. We recently released a white paper on this VM provisioning data. The lessons learned from the white paper lead to this report.

We reviewed 148K virtual machines and found 77% of servers were over-provisioned in memory (an average of 11 GB), while 88% of virtual desktops were over-provisioned in CPU. The potential for cost savings in server memory alone was almost $33K per company. How much could you save? The Sizing Recommendation report can help you understand if your virtual machines are also over-provisioned.

SECTION 1: Connect to all monitored resources.

Right Click on the TestDrive-vmwtd.com folder in the left pane, then select "Connect" in the context menu to connect to all the monitored resources.

Section 2: Open ControlUp Insights.

Once the ControlUp console is running, click on the "ControlUp Insights" menu at the top left. Next, click on the ControlUp Insights icon on the left of the menu bar.

This will open up a browser that takes you to Insights.ControlUp.com. Your ControlUp credentials should be automatically passed through to ControlUp Insights. If not, logon with the same credentials you use to access the ControlUp console. The home page should start at the "Top Insights" dashboard. At the the top left in the section labeled "Virtual Expert Findings" click on Sizing Recommendations.

You should see the Sizing Recommendations report open up now.

In the top right you see a menu with four options.

In the top left you see a drop down box that says "Entire Organization". This menu allows you to filter the report to focus on any particular folder of resources that were created in the ControlUp real time console.

The sizing recommendations report reviews average and peak CPU and memory usage over the last thirty days for all monitored virtual machines. The report needs at least two weeks of days to work - thirty days are recommended to get more reliable data.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the top of the report is divided in CPU sizing and RAM sizing. This screenshot shows of the 95 virtual machines monitored in this environment, 100% of the virtual machines are over-provisioned with respect to CPU, and 91% are over-provisioned for memory. You can see that 69% of 314 CPU's are un-utilized, while 50% of the RAM is not utilized.

In the bottom half of the report, you can see the data for each individual machine. The columns available include -

You can sort by any specific column, and you can click the "+" next to any computer name to get more detail. Click on RAM Recommendation to sort by that column, then click on the "=" next to the machine at the top.

Now you can see for this specific machine the average and peak CPU and memory usage over time, and how that compares to the resources provisioned and the recommendations.

The Sizing Recommendation report is a very useful tool to understand how CPU and memory resources are utilized in your Horizon environment. For the most useful data, make sure to capture peak utilization in your Horizon environment before making any provisioning changes.