r/msp

Following the recent UK post, I am reviewing vendors and wanted to get everyone's thoughts. That thread mentioned a mix of Veeam, Acronis, and ShadowProtect.

We're looking for a full replacement covering Microsoft 365, workstation win/mac and server backup, and DRaaS.

I came across Commvault and wanted to know whether anyone has had good or bad experiences with it compared to Veeam.

Posting to see if anyone else has encountered an issue with Freshdesk.

I had a credit card charge go through 2 weeks ago and put in a request to investigate as it was much higher than my renewal price shows on my admin screen. Today, i received a notification that my discount was being reduced and a docusign to acknowledge that. To be clear my renewal date was August 2, I was charged 50% more than my "Plans and Billing" rate (it still shows that number online righht now), received no invoice and now am being told that my actual renewal was for that amount and can I please sign an agreement after the fact for the price increase.

So, anyone else? Any suggestions of contacts at Freshdesk. Any suggestions of better helpdesk software?

We have a client that has multiple locations spread out over a large geographic area with a lot of employee turnover and employees who "float" between locations. Their Windows 11 machines are Entra-joined using a location-specific shared account, and our MFA solution for them has been to set their MFA to call their location's main number.

However, with Microsoft retiring SMS and voice as MFA options, we're looking for solutions. Microsoft Authenticator isn't a very feasible option due to the turnover. FIDO2 keys could potentially work, but they could get expensive (not to mention the strong probability they'd get lost - A LOT).

What solutions have you come across that could work?

What's the best way to get back in? It's a Gateway, 7 switches, and 65 APs. I've asked the client who sold them the gear it's been through the hands of 2 MSPs and no one seems to know passwords. Transitional passwords between the last 2 MSPs (not ours) are not right.

I want to work veryhard to make sure we don't brick this stuff and get into a mess.

It's newer gear, so unlikely the maintainer account is still in place on this firmware.

How do we go about getting access back/proving ownership to Fortinet?

EDIT: We were able to track down credentials from MSP 2. Thanks for all the responses.

I am looking for a good domain registrar to register new domains through for my clients and move them to to get them away from GoDaddy. I was originally planning to go with NameCheap but the recent major outage has me concerned. I am using CloudFlare for all DNS management.

Is any other MSP using OpenSRS with white labeled store front? What is your experience.

If not what are others doing for this situation?

To be fully clear, ALL client domains are registered to the client and owned by them. We just manage the technical side.

Hello!

We're looking for some bulk storage that will live in a CMMC enclave. It looks like my fav NAS drives - Synology - aren't compliant. Seems like TrueNAS and Buffalo have compliant products - has anyone used these or could suggest another product?

Hi All,

We're currently a little stretched on resources and are looking for some help getting CIPP set up, along with a bit of training once we're onboarded.

If anyone has worked with a consultant or company they'd recommend for CIPP implementation and training, I'd greatly appreciate any referrals.

Thanks!

I'm really struggling with this claim. On the very surface it sounds reasonable, but security should never stop at the surface. We have a suite of systems protecting our users and I'm having a really hard time picturing an AV-less stack. One less layer in the onion. Then again I am old and set in my ways. Am I being stubborn here or are my Spidey senses working normally?

We have a small construction customer that are a nightmare for buying their own hardware. I’d guess at 50% via us with reseller sorting the intune hash for us meaning easy all round plus a markup on hardware for us.
But when they get their own kit they want us to come out gratis and setup. That’s a no from me Bob. What do you guys do?
We have a small team some on leave, some busy with projects, and my car is in the garage. It’s a 20 min drive for them or for us. But as they got the kit themselves they should come to us. What are your thoughts.

I've been dealing with intermittent slowness on our cloud hosted ConnectWise Manage (PSA) instance for the past two to three weeks.

I've opened a support ticket and while we can sometimes reproduce the issue while support is watching, normally the problem comes and goes enough that they say the issue is resolved.

I asked if we could have our instance rebooted, they said no. I guess there are multiple instances running on each VM, so they won't do that.

I asked if we could have our instance's resources increased. They said no.

My guess is that they have overprovisioned our instance and this won't be resolved until they reallocate resources or move us to a less busy VM.

Has anyone had any luck getting this resolved?

Anyone else dealing with clients second-guessing every IT/security decision because they can ask ChatGPT/AI?

We have an environment where the IT roles already have pretty poorly defined roles. Now AI is making it worse. They don’t understand they are putting their own bias into it because they don’t know what good looks like and can’t prompt it enough to figure it out.

A recommendation gets made, someone throws it into ChatGPT, gets a different answer, or chatgpt adds things not realted to the problem and suddenly we’re reopening the entire discussion. Then they change the prompt and get another answer.

I’m obviously pro-AI and use it constantly. The issue I’m seeing is that it can give less experienced IT staff enough terminology and confidence to challenge decisions without actually having the experience or accountability to own the outcome.

This sysadmin was essentially helpdesk tier 1 before. Now they think they are a cyber expert. Same sysadmin doesn’t understand why we had to fix any/any rules on firewall and thinks org has MfA because some people do but doesn’t understand that it’s not enforced so both MfA and non MfA is valid. Just some examples.

I’m just sitting here cringing at responses I get but have to be polite and suck it up.

This specific client is legacy co managed

Are other MSP owners starting to run into this?

Big Tech continues to fund the artificial hype behind AI.

For months now it has filled social feeds. “News”, “memes,” and now MSP vendor ads, all puked out of Chat GPT, all looking the same, all posted completely unironically.

Please, let’s all agree to stop clicking on AI ads.

End rant

Following up on my post from four months ago, I went on the hunt for a Dropbox backup application. CloudAlly checked all the boxes, did an overview with a sales rep, got the trial going, did a few test restores, and all was well. Three months later I'm looking at my quarterly vendor spending report, and I see that we're paying over $350.00 a month for a mere 2TB of data for this one client. For that price, we could be self hosting a backup with versioning and retension on a Synology NAS, though that comes with its own risks both through technical and legal exposure.

Other than self-hosting, what other vendors should I be looking at?

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Hello,

I I'm a small MSP currently managing fewer than 50 endpoints, and I'm curious what ITDR tools or services other MSPs are using.

I recently had a meeting with Huntress, but the salesperson wasn't interested in giving me a demo because of our size. I found that a bit surprising.
We already have MDR through SonicWall, so ideally I'd like to find a solution that can complement or integrate with our existing MDR service.

If anyone has experience running both MDR and ITDR together, I'd love to hear what you're using and how it's working out.

We’ve been using Cloudflare ZT for some time, works fine, free for 50 users etc…

Now we’ve been using GSA for larger accounts and though it’s not fully comparable, it has the added benefit of being fully integrated in Entra/365 suite, so no separate portals, no separate software and the 12$ cost is not really an issue for them. But the price is too high to justify for smaller customers i think.

So what are you guys using, what are your thoughts on GSA? And if you use it, do smaller customers see the added benefit to pay that price?

I've been delaying the migration from self hosted network server to Unifi OS Server to allow it to mature a little more. I feel as though I can't kick this can too much further down the road and I'm curious to hear from any other MSPs who have successfully migrated before I take the plunge.

Have you migrated? How did it go?

Cheers

I'm trying to set up Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. When signed into my M365 Global Admin, the Lighthouse works fine. I can search for users. I can access a customer tenant's M365 admin center, etc. But when I sign into Lighthouse as my regular Microsoft 365 user, I can't do any of that. What am I missing?

I added myself to the Reader role in Lighthouse.

I created a GDAP Template with all the recommended roles.

I added myself to all five role groups. Account Manager and Service Desk Agent have JIT disabled. The Specialist, Escalation Engineer, and Administrator roles have JIT enabled.

The Relationships tab shows I have several "Active" tenants with GDAP permissions. I assigned the Lighthouse GDAP template I created to a couple of these tenants.

Finally, when I go to the Lighthouse page to search for a user, I get the error, "Your account doesn't have permission to view or manage this information."

If I try to access a tenant's Microsoft 365 admin center, I get a login box. However, after selecting my user, I get a message stating I am not a user in this tenant.

I no longer work for the company that provided break-fix IT for this client, but I still keep in touch with both the client and the company that serviced them.

I presented the client with an MSA from my new company, but they decided to go with someone else.

Here is the tricky part: I can get the passwords and have the knowledge to help them with a proper offboarding. We serviced them for about 4 years with no MSA or any written agreement (my ex-boss never presented a contract—that’s a whole other story), and we never even did a proper onboarding.

To complicate things, my ex-boss's company is about to close its doors at the end of this month.

Should I even help?