The best solution if you already use SolarWinds' other products.
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds MSP Manager
I provide IT services to small businesses and non-profits, both break/fix and managed services. I use MSP Manager in concert with SolarWinds RMM for ticketing and billing. It helps to automate the tracking and billing of my subscribed clients. I tried to use it as a ticketing system for my unmanaged clients, but it's a bit slow and cumbersome for that, and doing that work in QuickBooks seemed just as useful.
Pros
- Billing automation straight through to Quickbooks' desktop has saved me a lot of time for clients on subscriptions. Adding tickets during the month and having them all show up in the Quickbooks invoices at month-end is a godsend in terms of time spent in billing/invoicing.
- The ticketing system in the helpdesk definitely gives my business a more professional look, especially for clients looking for that kind of ticketing system.
- Alerting me to aging tickets and the use of SLA (service level agreements) helps me prioritize client responses. Even with some of my better clients who don't have an SLA with me, I set up some fake SLAs to ensure I am responding in a timely manner.
Cons
- It is just simply too slow! The web interface requires patience, even when moving between tabs or menu choices. This is by far the biggest detracting element of MSP Manager.
- Input customization -- I would like the settings pages to allow me to customize some input screens, especially the Ticket Entry window. The "Quick Ticket" entry is missing a few key items I want in a trouble ticket, and the full ticket entry window has numerous fields I never use or are always the same, and so it just takes more time and effort than is necessary.
- Both the asset tracking and the knowledge base should be more robust and integrally tied into the RMM console, so that licenses, serial numbers, procedures, network data are quick and simple to access from either interface.
- For my managed service clients, MSP Manager has seriously reduced the time I spend billing. Overall data entry time may be the same, but now it's focused on documenting the work that was done and the billing simply follows.
- The first few months of learning MSP Manager definitely meant doing lots of admin work twice, and double-checking the MSP manager invoices against the paper trail, to ensure it was accurate and working. Plan for this extra time overhead during the learning phase.
- Pulseway and Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA)
The most important factor was integration with my RMM, so once I chose SolarWinds RMM, MSP Manager was the obvious choice.
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