How LabTech has improved our day to day operations.
September 16, 2016

How LabTech has improved our day to day operations.

Eric Christiansen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with LabTech

We use LabTech primarily in our managed services group within our company. We use it to manage over 4000 client workstations and servers. It lets us consistently monitor, patch and remotely manage our client systems as efficiently as possible. We also use it for other tasks as well like assisting our clients with keeping their hardware and software inventories up to date and using it to deploy software to systems.
  • LabTech lets us consistently monitor client systems for basic things like server up/down, low disk space and high CPU and memory usage. It also excels at automatically detecting and monitoring specific systems like e-mail and database servers. Because LabTech automatically applies the proper monitoring, onboarding new clients is very simple.
  • We use LabTech for automation for repetitive tasks. For example, when a low disk alert is received, we run a script automatically to clear out temp and other unnecessary files that we've defined. A tech only needs to get involved if the script isn't able to automatically free up enough space. Automation like this greatly increases our efficiency.
  • The ScreenConnect remote control is fantastic. Having the ability to instantly connect to a client system directly from LabTech makes our job a lot easier. Previously we had to depend on client specific remote access solutions which varied from client to client. Now we can connect to every client the same way.
  • While LabTech does an excellent job at monitoring servers and workstations, it lacks in network device monitoring. We tried for a while to use the built in SNMP device monitoring effectively but eventually went with a different product which fit our needs. However, the nice thing about LabTech is that it is open with integrating with third party products and we are working on integrating the SNMP product
  • Support can be slow to respond which is a minus. However, once you are able to get to someone, the techs are very nice and helpful.
  • Due to the level of automation LabTech provides us, LabTech lets us provide increased quality support to more clients with fewer techs.
  • As LabTech synchs with our PSA ConnectWise, we are better able to accurately bill our clients for the number of managed systems. Previously we would bill a client for a fixed number of systems in initially, but the client bill would be fixed at that amount. LabTech automatically adjusts the quantity of managed systems on the bill based off of the computers it discovers on the network.
  • While LabTech is an expensive product when you first look at the pricing, the pricing is in line with the competition. It also does a lot for us and if you were to purchase individual products for all solutions (monitoring, remote control, patch management, software deployment, inventory, etc), it would undoubtedly cost more money while being much more difficult to use.
  • Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA)
Prior to using LabTech, we used Kaseya. While Kaseya and LabTech have much of the same functionality, LabTech does things better and more consistently. Also, we rely on ConnectWise as our ticketing system and PSA. LabTech has two way ticket synchronization with ConnectWise that Kaseya did not have. This makes our lives a lot easier in that we don't need to look into issues that automatically resolved themselves. I would say the only advantage that Kaseya had over LabTech was that the Kaseya management interface was web based versus LabTech's Windows application. This made it more convenient for our techs as they could manage systems from anywhere. However, LabTech does have a web interface which techs can use. Its just not as robust as the full Windows application. While techs complained of this some during the initial deployment of LabTech, we operate just fine now.
LabTech is well suited to MSPs who manage mostly Windows Systems. While LabTech can manage Mac computers, the feature set is limited. Also, LabTech does a lot of different things so if someone is looking for a solution to a single problem (monitoring, remote control, etc.), LabTech could be overkill. LabTech is an ideal tool for MSPs or larger organizations to manage many systems. As LabTech is a complex system, it requires a certain amount of care and feeding so LabTech may not be an ideal solution for a small organization with not a lot of systems to manage.