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Kaseya VSA in a nutshell
March 06, 2018

Kaseya VSA in a nutshell

Christopher Jon Olesch Jr. | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA)

We use Kaseya to automate patch management, audit equipment, and finish systems configs during the build process on all managed systems.
  • Applies specific settings to machines that match certain criteria
  • Remotely run scripted procedures against monitored events in system event logs
  • Maintains and audit and change records of all devices
  • Manages machines across multiple active directory domains
  • Policy application & push. Currently all policies claim to not be current on 1000's of machines, when in fact they are. Re-running policy sync's across all devices daily is a huge tax on the system. Although this is strictly a cosmetic issue, because the policies are in fact correct & current, the dashboard lacks the ability to keep its' records straight. This has been a problem since version 6.
  • Live connect. In earlier versions I could customize web links for end users, this feature was removed in 9.0, and has been raised to dev on multiple occasions. Under the current version only a max of 5 links appear, and they are customization by the end user.
  • Patch policies need to include a simpler way to exclude patches. Like with WSUS its much simpler to have a policy that denies specific patches rather than creating a policy to allow everything with exceptions. When policies are changed every month with new patch cycles this is hard to manage.
  • The Reporting feature lacks an intuitive interface. Its easier to write a query and run it on the back end in Microsoft reporting than use the built-in reporting feature.
  • Procedure log interface needs to be created. When writing procedures and then testing them, I have to leave the procedure section and browse logs under audit, then return to procedures.
  • Procedures that fail need to have additional logging, there is a lot of guess work when trying to understand why a procedure failed, this could be simplified by passing the powershell or dos failures directly into kaseya, instead of saying this line item failed.
  • Procedures that fail under IF then statements, it would be better to state which line item failed when using if then statements instead of saying a script failed at the if then statement and not a line within the if then statement.
  • The biggest ROI is the reduction of engineering hours spent performing maintenance. We've reduced our hours by 75%.
Both SolarWinds & Autotask appears to have a better user community, but they have the same issue with out of the box scripts (non-existent). With Kaseya, I can write everything in PowerShell, dos, vb, java, and then have Kaseya execute across applicable devices. In fairness, its been a year since we compared Autotask, and I cannot find my notes on why we axed Autotask (I do remember that there were very critical components missing by Autotask).

When comparing to remote desktop, [LogMeIn and WebEx specifically] I actually prefer Kaseya's Live Connect remote desktop over all others.
Since the Kaseya VSA module is very specific in what it covers, this module is well suited for patch management, script automation, third-party updates, and device state statuses. I honestly cannot think of reasons for why it would not be appropriate. It excels at automating scheduled procedures (a lot better than SCCM).

Where Kaseya runs short is in their product support. They lack the understanding of their product, I end up solving most of my problems even after opening tickets. They also like to close tickets that are still in progress, as well as open multiple tickets for the same issue.