Stratusphere UX 5.2 delivers major new features for “point and click” diagnostics and seamless integration with VMware vCenter™ Operations Manager

CHICAGO, IL - January 17, 2013 - Liquidware Labs, the leader in desktop transformation solutions, today announced its Stratusphere UX 5.2 software release is now generally available. This release delivers new improved Preview Inspector Views to allow administrators to quickly drill down into user, application and machine data to uncover process issues or resource constraints. Stratusphere UX 5.2 is also optimized with the Stratusphere Adapter technology, an integration plug-in which feeds critical desktop end-user metrics into VMware vCenter™ Operations Manager to complement VMware vCenter Operations Manager systems metrics and provide a single-pane-of-glass view into the entire infrastructure.

"The new features in Stratusphere UX 5.2 make it more responsive to the day-to-day needs of administrators who need to get complete, near real-time visibility into both the end users' experience and the supporting infrastructure," said Jason Mattox, CTO, Liquidware Labs. "More than ever, Stratusphere UX helps administrators prevent issues, plan for change and, ultimately, optimize the environment."

Preview Inspectors

The Preview Inspectors feature within Stratusphere UX improves on existing Inspectors by providing an optimized query layer, and portraying more data relationships among users, desktops and applications. The Preview Inspectors also deliver significantly enhanced tailored screen views for users and desktops with pop-out links to the application and operating system process workloads. Administrators now also have the ability to search, sort and filter and drill-down on the data and export it to Excel. Administrators can proactively monitor physical and virtual desktops in their environment and quickly spot issues with color-coded alerts that highlight abnormal performance, for quicker response to Help Desk calls and other desktop support tasks. In addition, Purpose-Built Views provide commonly needed overviews to display:

• FIT Metrics: indicating resource allocation, consumption, total and peak usages, constraints and overall FIT Rating of the users, desktops and applications for migration purposes or for ongoing provisioning needs.


• UX Metrics: indicating the quality of the user experience in terms of event-based metrics such as login delay, application load time, non-responding applications, network latency, failed network connections and additional time. Count-based indicators to determine if resource levels are sufficient to support functioning of desktops within thresholds and user expectations.

Stratusphere Adapter

Stratusphere Adapter provides a focused one way feed for Stratusphere UX metrics to flow and display directly into VMware vCenter Operations Manager. Administrators create custom dashboards in order to view these metrics for their environments and utilize other VMware vCenter Operations Manager functions like creating KPIs and parent/child relationships for AD groups of users. The Stratusphere Adapter can utilize as many as 40 key, time-based indicators and metrics for identifying consumption and user experience from physical and virtual desktops as well as VMware vSphere® Resource Pools and View Pools. The data can also be viewed by AD User group within VMware vCenter Operations Manager. These standardized, pre-defined metrics can be further correlated into overall FIT and UX Ratings that can provide color-coded at-a-glance indications of desktop performance compared to thresholds to alert administrators of potential issues. The desktop metrics data is pulled from Stratusphere UX, which provides an independent data collection device separate from VMware vCenter Operations Manager for an additional level of insight and control over systems monitoring. Stratusphere UX uses lightweight Connector ID (CID) keys and Network Stations to capture metrics data.

"Stratusphere metrics are complementary to VMware cloud infrastructure data, and we are pleased to see the formal launch of the Adapter for VMware vCenter™ Operations Manager," said Mason Uyeda, director, Technical Product Marketing, End-User Computing, VMware. "Visibility into both critical desktop metrics and host environment data in a single, customizable view is important in order to maintain the health of the virtual infrastructure and help enable uptime."