uberAgent 4.1: Blue Screens & Hangs, Custom Scripts, Optimized Config
We are happy to announce the newest version of our user experience and application performance monitoring product. uberAgent 4.1 brings exciting new features and improvements for any kind of device.
For a full list of all improvements and bugfixes please consult the change log. As always, upgrading is highly recommended (instructions).
Blue Screens, Power Losses, Hard Hangs
Stability and reliability are important cornerstones for a good user experience. Machines that crash, hang or reboot randomly cause data loss and user frustration. That is why uberAgent’s new blue screen & hang reporting is so important. It shows you far more than just which kinds of stop errors happened how often. It lets you drill down by site, machine type, or OS version to get to the root cause of where the errors are coming from.
Various conditions can lead to a stop error: if the system detects an unrecoverable error it collects rudimentary information and then halts execution in a controlled manner displaying a blue screen. Sometimes, however, that is not possible. The machine might reboot seemingly randomly or just freeze (“hard hang”). Those types of errors typically indicate hardware failure or power loss. Sometimes users perform a hard power off by pressing and holding the power button for four seconds, trying to fix an error condition.
uberAgent detects all of the above, providing visibility and helping to improve productivity.
Running Custom Scripts in User Context
Splunk’s Universal Forwarder is very good at running scripts while capturing output and sending it to Splunk for indexing. It does, however, have a limitation that is sometimes relevant in end-user computing: it cannot run scripts per user session.
uberAgent can. It executes custom scripts either per machine or per user session, optionally running them in user context. This provides the unique ability to run queries or perform actions as the user. This works very well on RDS hosts like Citrix XenApp, of course. Needless to say, flexible scheduling options are available.
More Improvements
Configuration Optimized for Data Volume
uberAgent now comes with an alternative configuration that has been optimized for low data volume, minimizing Splunk licensing costs by approximately 10x (details).
Standby/Resume Duration
The data collected when the system switches to a low-power state like suspend or hibernation is now much more detailed. It not only includes the duration of the standby or resume operation, but also the effective power state and the reason for waking up. And it works on Windows 10, too.
Citrix Site Monitoring Performance
We have been able to significantly reduce CPU usage of the Citrix Site Monitoring feature to a point where uberAgent’s footprint on the Delivery Controller is almost negligible (details).
About uberAgent
The uberAgent product family offers innovative digital employee experience monitoring and endpoint security analytics for Windows and macOS.
uberAgent UXM highlights include detailed information about boot and logon duration, application unresponsiveness detection, network reliability drill-downs, process startup duration, application usage metering, browser performance, web app metrics, and Citrix insights. All these varied aspects of system performance and reliability are smartly brought together in the Experience Score dashboard.
uberAgent ESA excels with a sophisticated Threat Detection Engine, endpoint security & compliance rating, the uAQL query language, detection of risky activity, DNS query monitoring, hash calculation, registry monitoring, and Authenticode signature verification. uberAgent ESA comes with Sysmon and Sigma rule converters, a graphical rule editor, and uses a simple yet powerful query language instead of XML.
About vast limits
vast limits GmbH is the company behind uberAgent, the innovative digital employee experience monitoring and endpoint security analytics product. vast limits’ customer list includes organizations from industries like finance, healthcare, professional services, and education, ranging from medium-sized businesses to global enterprises. vast limits’ network of qualified solution partners ensures best-in-class service and support anywhere in the world.
