What do you like best about N-able MSP Manager?
It sounded great from the beginning a single pane of glass from which to view and manage my MSP operations. Integrated antivirus, backup, monitoring, with a complete set of network monitoring and security tools. It sounded good until it wasn't I shoaled say. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about N-able MSP Manager?
The problem with the product in my opinion is the disconnected nature of the systems. First things first I am an Enterprise Operations manager with 30 years of experience managing very large scale enterprises in the manufacturing, financial health and educational space.
So back to the issues. my expectation was delivery of an on premises system which was all encompassing. This was not the case. We started with an N-Central deployment. This went very well we received the package and key spun up an MS Azure site and had it deployed in 45 minutes or so. Then began the onboarding process. Alarm bells started to go off in my head when the first of the onboarding calls was all about how to sell Solarwinds products. how to market the products etc. We were then referred to training and I must say this is not great but you should complete all of the training prior to purchasing the product. Do yourself a favor do not commit until training and evaluation's are complete. I was led to believe that cancellation was not a problem as stated on company web site however now we are learning of cancellation fees. Well I digress again.
OK N-central as it turns out is an on prep product however then I learned MSP manager is a hosted product. This went undisclosed during the sales process. I was not happy about this at all. We always host our own products. Well almost always.
Configuring N-Central was initially assigned to my T1-T3 team a very competent group. Unfortunately it proved to be too much. 40 or so labor hours later not complete. So off we go it is my turn delete and start over.
After a couple of calls to support I got the gist of the configuration process. also the YouTube training was pretty good and documentation was reasonable. I was a little annoyed that the the probes were unable to find and classify a group of devices by MAC address this is a problem when you are taking over management of an organization. I need to know what is out there before I touch every device, so Strike 1.
The probe did find all of the windows devices this is nice but not necessarily exceptional. First thing is to quiet all of the default alarms I am less interested in expired or out of warranty pc's than I am VMware, Storage, Server and network status. Which few were found this was very disappointing. The items that were identified were not very good or accurate. Metrics in the storage probes were temperature only and I'm looking for much more detail, Strike 2.
From here configure snmp and start snmp discovery. As you wold expect I found more items and go many more alerts. It looks like this client is in the middle of a melt down sound the Red Alert gong the ship is going down. Oh wait these are all default alerts and are not accurate. Whew standing down from Red Alert. So let's configure these alerts there are so many. Think about how may items are monitored. in a single small enterprise. Hundreds so I configure a couple of the probes and realize the configuration is not applicable to other clients. Quick call to support to learn that each problem / alert / monitor will need to be configured for every client. Strike3 Sent notice to quit now just waiting to see how much they try to stick me for. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
