I'm new to this type of software and management in general so I was just wondering what things the community has tried. I have been using Kaseya for about 3-4 months to manage about 250 machines in about 40 different groups. However, it has not helped me much. Kaseya is very dodgy, and many of the features simply do not work. Their "agent procedures" are a joke, as well as the fact that not even things that you would think would be simple like a scheduled reboot work properly. So far all it has done is provide an easy way to remote access these machines without having to RDP. Which is great, but I was sold a product that was supposed to do a lot more for me. I really need something that works, because we are up to our necks every day with stupid issues that take too much time away from the projects I actually enjoy. Thanks for reading.
What kind of management are you looking for? I use Ansible for config and infrastructure management.
I think Chef will work for your Windows environment.
I'm not exactly an expert on the Windows server side of things, but my recommendation is to look into Microsoft remote management tools. I remember something about a tool you can use to more or less connect to the server and work on the config, if that's what you need.
We manage whole networks for small to medium businesses. So we manage firewalls, switches, servers, IP cam systems, security systems, and hundreds of user PCs. We are looking for something that can monitor this stuff and allow us to automate tasks like patching, scheduled reboots, deploying software, doing system maintenance, antivirus, etc. (what Kaseya in my experience only tries to do).
Basically just lots of low level tasks that we'd rather not sink our time doing. We are trying to grow but when you have about 40 different site locations to manage its pretty daunting especially when you have to do all the little things yourself. The average user is not savvy enough to know how to run an antivirus scan or disk defrag let alone not infect their own computer.
Nagios. Plain and simple. It's really the only way to go.
That's more difficult. For some things, ansible, chef, puppet will work, but not everything. There's really no "one stop shop" tool for this that I'm aware of.
As far as software updates go, WSUS (at least it used to be called that) is a Microsoft tool for curating and managing software updates. Give that a look on Windows.
Ansible should help you manage patching on Linux, but I can't speak for the more specialized hardware.
That can be configured in Windows scheduled tasks, but that's probably not the answer you're looking for.
That can be configured in Windows scheduled tasks, but that's probably not the answer you're looking for.
Yeah, just doesn't make sense for us time wise to try and go around and do that manually. If we could script that and push it out somehow, that would be amazing.
That's more difficult. For some things, ansible, chef, puppet will work, but not everything. There's really no "one stop shop" tool for this that I'm aware of.
Kaseya was supposed to do it, but a lot of the features are just flatout unreliable. Maybe an assortment of software instead one centralized solution is the way to go?
You should be able to run a script via GPO, if I remember correctly...
Absolutely. It's typically a "choose two" situation between does it all, stable,works as advertised and up to date...
Sorry I can't be of more assistance.
Also, we use NCentral at my work and we like it quite a bit.
@SgtAwesomesauce Nagios, Chef, etc. do not make sense in a MSP context.
Thanks for the link! Looks like a great subreddit