Barracuda RMM (based on the former Managed Workplace product acquired by Barracuda from Avast in 2019) is a Remote Monitoring and Management platform. Managed Workplace serves as an agentless tool that MSP’s can use for clients with an emphasis on security assessment and reporting. It also provides other system monitoring functionalities, including patch management, asset management and tracking, and task automation with a library of prebuilt and user-designed scripts. It also offers…
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ConnectWise Automate
Score 7.9 out of 10
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ConnectWise Automate, formerly LabTech, is a remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform. It provides powerful automation to discover and manage devices, monitor for problems, and scripts repetitive action.
AVG Managed Workplace has more tools and features. The pre-existing templates and alerts are working properly while Continuum does not even provide service like that. There are some specific tools to work with and they are super easy to complete the task, for example, you can …
If we have to do it again, we would not choose to Automate due to the number of efforts and monetary investment (3rd party consultants) to implement it as well on going managing it. But, in comparison to the other RMM products we used in the past, Automate offers more …
We purchased and used N-able for 12 painful months when we first switched to offering MSP services in 2010. The difference was night and day. N-able was such a train-wreck that my company probably would have gone out of business if we wouldn't have switched to LabTech. Within 6 …
With a lot of fine-tuning, it works very well to keep the Tier 2 team aware of almost any variable of interest of notification from your servers. You can automate scripts to deploy based on these events. It's cut down the amount of time spent digging around for answers or sifting through logs. Software deployment could use a lot of work for simplicity. We opted for other apps to accomplish this. The helpdesk function may work for those needing something basic, but again, we opted for a full ITSM based on ITIL. It works well for Remote Desktop Support, even for support on the fly for those who don't have the Premium Desktop app installed.
I recommend it to all IT colleagues; regardless of the size of the PCs with which you work most of the time, the application allows connection stability between computers that make it possible to continue working or taking care of the infrastructure from afar.
They have conflicting scheduling paradigms. When scheduling patching for clients, the 1st Friday is interpreted as the very first Friday of the month, even if this is the 1st of the month. For scripting, the 1st Friday of the month is interpreted as the 1st Friday of the 1st FULL WEEK of the month. This makes no sense to have two different interpretations, and makes it unreliable to schedule recurring scripts to fall when recurring maintenance does. The scripts need to be done manually because of this.
There is no way to dictate reboot orders for patch policies. This tied directly in with my first point. We have some clients that require reboot orders. This is not possible without having different patch policies for each server and specifying a time this way. But, there aren't small enough increments of time to make this reliable, plus patching duration might vary. Excluding reboots with patching and scheduling reboot scripts fixes this. However, this can't be done once on a recurring schedule due to the different scheduling paradigms already discussed. We have to schedule these manually each month.
The primary reason for this rating is that ConnectWise Automate is currently so integral to our operations that moving away would involve more man hours than we would realistically have to invest. However, ConnectWise Automate is also completely capable of meeting all of our business needs and customizable to the point where if something is not meeting those needs out of the box, it can be modified to do what we want. From only installing software on machines if a different software package exists, to push a new version of that software is available, to check if credentials for user/machine have been updated to our new standards and then updating them if they have not, ConnectWise Automate is capable of doing everything we ask of it.
Basic use of the product is fairly easy. Information about the machines you manage can be found in customizable dashboards, which can be unique for each user, and, therefore, properly suited to the users' needs/job function. This is not a 10 because some of the interfaces are very clunky (Patch Management), and some features are not intuitive and not well documented (reporting). Scripting and Patch Management have a fairly steep learning curve (For structure in patch management and syntax in scripting), but once learned, they work well.
It used to be great, but then they broke reporting, speed and responsiveness with version 11 and the new Patch Manager. It's really bad and their support people are way behind on fixing so many bugs. They have really gone downhill. If they don't get it together soon, we'll start looking around.
We've tried many times to work with support to accomplish various tasks in the system with minimal responsiveness and success. Most of what we have accomplished has been without support and through trial/error.
ConnectWise Automate lets you manage more endpoints, with enhanced productivity and improved service, all without increasing expenses. It can manage patches and updates across thousands of computers. We also use it for customized monitoring and alerting on workstations and servers. Monitoring is really robust and granular. It does a great job of gathering a TON of data about the network, and that data is searchable. There are a bunch of different reports built in. Integrates with Manage, Control, and other applications. It does a ton of stuff out of the box, and has endless customization options.
The Online training has been re-done and needs a lot more work. When you look at training in different roles, it shows a lot of the same topics but no explanation to what is different about them. Several times that topics are the exact same, but they make you re-take the same information for a different topic, instead of marking that you have already completed that portion of training.
Start small and learn the in's and out's before making policies and rolling things out company wide. Ask the questions of why if you don't agree with something or your company does things a different way. Usually they are done a certain way for a reason. Start simple with roll out and slowly enable or add on the functionality that is needed.
AVG Managed Workplace has more tools and features. The pre-existing templates and alerts are working properly while Continuum does not even provide service like that. There are some specific tools to work with and they are super easy to complete the task, for example, you can show what was replaced for your client. You can do it with others and even with Excel, but with table grid view mode of AVG will help you to do it more easily.
I believe the monitoring and alerts in Continuum command is better, but [ConnectWise Automate (formerly LabTech)] does have stronger scripting, and perhaps a better interface. N-Central is inferior on all fronts to both. I did not make the purchasing decision. I would myself likely pick Continuum if I had to make a on the spot choice.
We found we were able to provide good monitoring of our customers sites which was an objective. However, that came at a significant time investment that never seemed to be finished.
We were able to negotiate a price that worked for us for an up-front purchase which was nice.
We found the pricing to be very competitive.
Bottom line for us was despite the pros of the product, we found other RMM solutions to be a better overall "value" due to not having to dedicate technicians to maintaining the product.
