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.
$700
Oracle Management Cloud
Score 6.1 out of 10
N/A
The Oracle Management Cloud is a PaaS combining a suite of IT infrastructure and application performance monitoring solutions. On the standard edition the Oracle Management Cloud includes Oracle Application Performance Monitoring and Infrastructure Monitoring. On the Enterprise Edition the Management Cloud also includes Oracle IT Analyics and Oracle Orchestration. The Management Cloud is also available in a Log Analytics edition.
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.
Ideal for a complex organization with requirements to build very complex reports. Especially useful for organizations that already have numerous Oracle products and need to pull information from them. This tool works best when plugged in with other Oracle tools and databases. If you're a larger company, and/or if you're managing a lot of data, Oracle IT Analytics Cloud Service is the perfect tool to manage your Oracle deployment. It provides a number of different options for intelligent analysis while not being too overwhelming to manage. Companies that want a robust tool to manage all data and present it in a visually appealing way to users will greatly benefit from this tool. The tool is very customizable and can be tailored to meet the needs of different users.
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.
There's a pretty steep learning curve that needs to be overcome in order to properly deploy this tool. So, unless you're a seasoned IT administrator, you may have a fair amount of homework to do. Implementation and maintenance of this takes a bucket of consulting hours from outside consultants to come in and set up the tool and regularly maintain it, in the long run, this could be costly.
The dashboard is not as easy to set up as I would like, however, after setup it will serve your purpose in the best possible way. You may not be able to find out how some data related to another and you can create a report that you think has all the details you need, but it comes up blank because the data really is not connected.
There aren't enough self-learning materials available like tutorials and how-to videos. I would like to have access to more e-tutorials from inside the tool. A steep learning curve for most. It would be nice to have a robust learning portal within the application where users can access self-learning material directly from the application and step to spet guides on how to perform different tasks.
Does not provide the ease of adding additional data sources without lots of complications. Even though it can handle large data sets, rendering of reports can take a fairly long time if the parameter set is large. For some time it seems like processing takes a bit of time when large data sets are being used. This is not the case with other competing tools.
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.
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.
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.
Oracle Analytics Cloud is an enterprise solution and can't be compared apple-to-apple with a data visualization tool like Tableau. This is not the same use at all. Before selecting Oracle Analytics Cloud, it is most important to consider the data you are looking to collect and how you plan to visualize it. Other tools like Tableau and microstrategy feel smoother to work with, have better UI's and are quicker when processing data. It is also important to think through how you will use the data across your organizations. Can have a steep learning curve but once you are well trained on this tool, the possibilities are endless. The tool is highly customizable and will generate what you design it to generate. If you are having issues with reports and analytics, it is most likely due to data quality issues. Oracle Analytics Cloud also benefits by adding Essbase in it, to perform multi-dimensional analytics.
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.
