ConnectWise Automate

Formerly LabTech

Alerting / Monitoring

Process Automation

Software Version Control

Selective Targeting of Automations

Patch Management - kind of clunky, but works well

Reporting

Endpoint user management

The way we can automate tasks to run keeps our client's system as up to date as possible.

It allows our engineers to work silently on a customers machine without interrupting their productivity.

The vast array of plugins, allows for great customization to fit your needs.

Patch Manager could use improvement. At times, it will crash in the middle of patching, or switching between configurations. Setting the patch priorities seems a little convoluted.

The ability to copy over a file using the silent File Explorer would be nice. Rather than having to interrupt the user to replace a file or execute a download.

I would like to see more details in script logs. I want to see why a script failed, what step it was executing.

Desktop sharing / view with chat to the operator, file sharing and pass-through for keyboard strokes

Computer/server monitoring with thresholds and warning

Search - tracking down computers when you have many by name, logged in user, IP

End user ticket raising is built into the tray icon which make access really easy

Really minor niggle but login to the management website can be a pain at times

Would like to be able to access the remote desktop session as an option to manage rather than always accessing the console session on windows. There is command prompt option to manage computers without interrupting the user but sometimes its just easier to use a GUI.

The management website has come on leaps and bounds but occasionally we still have the odd issue, but nothing that really stops us achieving what we need to do.

Performs maintenance and daily routines.

Performs security and patching solutions.

Allows for ease of support of end users.

Comes with lots of tools, but most of which you must assemble yourself.

Great for the tinkerer who likes to try and troubleshoot, but support is lacking.

Requires lots of configuration out of the box.

Automation

Monitoring

Configuration reference

Automation can be difficult to implement

Discrepancy between web and installed client.

Takes care of updates

Support

Technical documentation

Has a big learning curve just starting out.

Needs mores simplified directions.

Better support.

Manages Windows updates.

Alerting for offline servers.

Antivirus management.

Backup management.

Due to its many features, it seems some areas are a bit difficult to configure.

Automated patching. The patch management is very robust and doesn't let us down. We can rely on it to do its job.

Scripting. The scripting engine and layout is excellent. It's very easy to work with and adapt Powershell scripts and other script to the native format with its functions. It also gives detailed logs to help determine why something went wrong if there's issues.

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.

Computer Management

Remote Control

Performance

Integration

Automation of mundane and repetitive tasks.

Management of our clients

It can be painfully slow.

It's quite complex and needs a lot of training.

Seamless integration with other ConnectWise products.

Works well and is feature rich.

Allows me to access servers at anytime for patching and maintenance.

Honestly, there is not much I would change.

As far as I am concerned; it is the best by far.

Might be a little expensive for small MSP's...But worth the investment.

The reporting is great and it shows clients and staff how many issues have been resolved and how to decrease trouble areas.

Great at patch management.

Scripting is one of the thing we use extensively and ConnectWise has great scripts to use and also it's very easy to create your own.

The remote control capabilities are fast and responsive and the bandwidth overhead is minimal.

New features are constantly being added.

Wish is was cheaper. This is a competitive market and they should lower the price to be more competitive.

The GUI needs to be cleaned up and more streamlined. Currently it's a mess.

Tech support could be better.

Remote control.

Patching.

Monitoring.

It is a little slow some times.

It can be difficult to set-up and maintain.

The interface is not very intuitive for new users.

It includes a ticketing system using workflow automation, SLA, as well as performance monitoring and access tickets from mobile devices.

Dashboards of the tool show overviews and detailed explanations of KPIs. Your business can also use the custom report writer to generate reports on whatever issue you want.

You can use ConnectWise to automate the range of ITIL process, such as: incident management, availability management, change management, service reporting, service-level management, service asset and configuration management, request management, and knowledge management.

You can track all your clients information and every single job you do for them. You can do quotes, send them, add providers to compare prices, manage the calendar of the employees, assign tickets to the correct person, there is nothing you can't do with this tool.

Inside all the greatness, there are some works around that you have to do for specific duties that could be automated.

Make sure you keep notes on each client profile, you can use the private note section, it is secure and it works as a reminder of everything you need to do about that specific client, only you and your employees will see those.

Scripting.

Centralized configuration management.

Healthchecks.

The GUI interface is archaic.

Scripting engines could use work to be more PowerShell native.

Ability to work in VDI environments.

Scripting

Remote asset control

Asset reporting an inventory

The local client is very robust, but it can be a resource hog.

The web client is not as full-featured as the local client but runs much faster.

Updates on the local client are installed automatically when you launch the application, but they can take some time to run. Since there is no option for a window to install them, this can cause delays when launching the software for the first time after a period of inactivity.

It feeds tons of data to our reporting solution.

A good overview of client endpoints, online status, av status and access to many tools to keep from disturbing end-users while troubleshooting their computers.

Synchronizes with our PSA to automate billing changes.

Tightly integrated with the remote control tools so we don't have to jump into a different console to make that connection.

Alerting on multiple items (got one just a little while ago from the VMware plugin about a failed drive on a VM Host) and automatic ticket creation, and in many cases, automated remediation.

Patch management is always a little finicky. Gets better every time.

If you decide to hitch your MSP to ConnectWise Automate, make sure you have a clear plan of what you want to accomplish and please, save your self a ton of hassle and use ConnectWise consulting to get things going initially.

Conflicting answers from support on more complicated items.

Not sure if this applies, but you need to have someone at your MSP whose job is the care and feeding of Automate, as well as that script and automation creation. Not really a complaint, more along the lines of "you are buying a business automation platform, you need to dedicate people to get the most out of it."

Integration to ScreenConnect and ConnectWise are fairly tight at this point.

Powerful tool for automation and custom scripting - if you have the technical capabilities and time, you can do more with Automate than any RMM on the market...

New UI is built to be pretty, but it's bloated, slow, and lacks the information that used to live on the main screen. You now have to dig to get information that was once easily at hand...

Too Noisy - it alerts on EVERYTHING, and it's very difficult to tone it down without missing things that are important. This puts a drain on staff time... We can't respond to every ticket, and then important details get lost in the noise...

No Mac/Linux client - my admins need access to a Windows PC to function...

Automatically perform and records billable work time.

Consistently perform representative tasks.

Schedule tasks for off-hours to minimize disrupting our clients.

Excellent source for details in developing new sales.

Having to pay for licensing in advance. If you need additional licenses you need to plan ahead to have them available.

Some ConnectWise Automate options such as third-party patching could offer patching for more software.

ConnectWise Automate can be very complex so it can take time to understand all it can do. The more time you invest in ConnectWise Automate the easier and more powerful it becomes.

It's better than Kaseya.

It's flexible, allowing our integration team to leverage the data therein, creating custom tools that empower and accelerate us.

It's fairly stable, considering its immense power.

Its interfaces have a wide variety of looks and feels, and it might be nicer if it were more cohesive.

Documentation of usage and features can be hard to locate at times.

A little more memory stability would be nice.

It organizes client machines very well.

Is very good at automating processes.

Is great for setting up alerts on client's machines.

The cost of the product is way too high.

A better GUI and wizard would help streamline the process.

The auto-install process for other applications could be made a lot better.

Scripting in Automate is very comprehensive and flexible. Other tools we've used pale in comparison to the scripting in Automate.

Remote control is 2nd to none. Screen Connect has proven to be incredibly fast and stable. This is a significant improvement over the old LabVNC in previous versions of Automate

The ability to group things manually and dynamically. Being able to automatically add systems to groups based on some criteria (almost anything) and then run scripts or commands against those groups is a huge benefit. A great example is adding machines to a group based on anti-virus install. If a machine doesn't have AV installed it gets added to a group. The group is setup to run a script at some frequency to install AV.

The biggest issue for Automate is their support. They seem to be completely overwhelmed. Chat support for simple questions can be anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes in the queue. Then when you are connected they are doing little more than creating a ticket that will take days to hear back from them.

Patching. The documentation and advice from our implementation person do not match reality. The process of denying a patch is documented, but doesn't work. We were unable to block certain patches from being distributed until we spoke to a specialist about it. He couldn't explain the mis-matched documentation.

Speed. Using the Automate client is painfully slow. Very sluggish and non-responsive at times.

ConnectWise Automate helps us manage Microsoft updates for our client base.

ConnectWise Automate makes it easy to remotely troubleshoot issues for our client.

ConnectWise Automate works well when we need to push a script out to one or multiple computers.

Sometimes computers show as offline when they are really online.

We find that sometimes a computer will show in the program multiple times.

It often will not update the current username so makes it harder to find computers sometimes.

It connects quickly

Signing in is bar none

Connection is fast

Lots of additional features have been added.

The upgrade GUI is a little hard to use out of the box

It disconnects randomly sometimes

Some commands like rebooting can be a little slow

Remote Control via ScreenConnect is wonderful.

Scripting is the best of all RMM products we have tried.

The customization capability of Automate beats all other RMM products.

Because Automate is so configurable it also requires the most time put into it of all RMM products we have used. It requires a dedicated employee to just managing the product and the services provided by it. Without that dedicated resource, many alerts will be missed (due to configuration issues).

Support is not very good. This is a larger scale Connectwise issue.

The product is very resource intensive if you host locally. Upgrades are usually pretty buggy and add the need for extra resources.

We found VMware and Dell Open Manage monitoring to be very weak compared to other RMM products.