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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N-able N-central
Score 7.2 out of 10
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MSPs
and IT professionals use N-able™ N-central® to monitor and manage devices and complex
networks remotely. N-central provides
visibility and efficiency as the user's needs scale. N-central can help users:
1. Proactively monitor everything on a customer network—not just servers
and workstations—and troubleshoot.
2. Stay on top of threats with features like MFA, antivirus, integrated endpoint
detection and response, data backup, disk encryption, email protection,…
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.
In my opinion, N-able N-central is a good "learn your lesson and move onto something better" tool. I've used many RMM tools over the years and I feel that this one is slow, does a terrible job with reporting, alerting, monitoring, software deployments, etc. The ability to turn on services like AV, backup, etc easily is cute, but you're not going to be able to use your own tools with this easily. In my experience, if you do turn those tools on for testing during the trial, you'll be charged later (despite it being a trial). They also turn off your ability to monitor these increased costs or to turn them off yourself. As a company, I found that they were impossible to work with. The sales team is right there if you want to buy something - but if you need anything other than to buy something, in my experience, they take days or weeks to navigate. I found that they are not a terribly ethical company and are more concerned with making a few dollars than creating a partnerships with MSPs. I can see value is in the advertised price of $99 for a hundred endpoints. However, you need to remember to not trial any other tools (like AV, backup, etc).
Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.
Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.
The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.
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.
Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.
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.
Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.
