r/msp

Hello

Currently, I am considering offering Afi to my clients via the reselling model.

In the past, I have seen that it's sometimes awkward between client and MSP as the client can see the retail Afi prices.

I know you can justify a bit of a hike to cover management, support etc.

But is there a way to further whitelabel the solution? For example, remove the Afi branding, use your own domain etc etc.

I need to start reselling services but I want to make sure I do this correctly, so that I don't end up with a disgruntled customer.

I noticed our account rep providing obvious AI responses a couple of months ago. I told him flat out I don't appreciate it. This week, I've had a couple of support cases that are just as obvious. I don't know which C level needs to be... gently persuaded, but this might just be the last straw for us.

Incoming rant in 3....2....1

We've been a customer of Ninja for years and honestly the software is pretty great. There's a few issues but usually the support team is fairly responsive and easy to contact. My pain point is with the account team themselves. I don't know if they are understaffed or have directives from management causing this but my former account manager was pretty great. They kept us updated with new features coming out, adressed billing concerns when needed, and seemed to actually care. This led to more sales going to Ninja for some of their non-rmm products (SaaS backup, MDM, etc). The new account team seems hell bent on making the relationship difficult. Calls unanswered, emails as well, and even when you actually connect the attitude is dismissive. Then there's the "small" things that are annoyances. Why can't I see pricing in my own portal? Why does our invoice just have one line that says "Invoice #XXXXXX"? It would be nice to see where my spend is going so I can properly allocate costs. I'll be honest, it's making me consider other (and probably more expensive) RMM tools.

Long post but had to get this off my chest. Is my experience unique or are others seeing similar issues?

We bought and updated (thus can't return open-box) a laptop that it turns out we won't need. Womp. We are considering trying to sell it on the interwebz instead. Anybody have success doing so? Did you use Ebay? Something else? Ty.

I was talking about this to some friends in the industry, and about when they call the vendor for support.

There have been very few situations where I have needed to get the vendor involved, but when I do it's usually something properly fucked or strange. However I'd say a good 65 to 70% of the time I'm figuring out the issue before they do. I suppose it does come down to a joint effort a portion of that time but a siginificant number of those they've gone down the wrong path.

Peers that I were talking with had a different experiance but they all work internal IT, so I'm wondering what your experiance is? Are you always calling the vendor for support when you're X amount of time into a problem? What's your point where you're calling them.

Some vendors are better than others. I have to say N-Able's engineers are really good and typically solve things quickly, but others are hit or miss.

Hi all- HELP. We recently ordered a new laptop from Ingram Micro, device arrives and is registered to some random “Axiom” company’s auto pilot when booting.

I’ve reached out to Ingram to return the device and it was denied. Escalated the claim and still not looking good. What are our options?

It seems you can't monitor appliance health for Axcient BCDR's like you can with Datto when using Backup Radar. Anyone found a good work around? Alternative products?

We have an architecture firm (15 people) who is a long-time Newforma Project Center customer, and they’re unhappy with the app and its cloud-based replacement (Konekt) that they did an extended eval of. They think it’s time move on, but a lot of their colleagues are using it, and they don’t have a wider frame of reference. Our other architecture customer is smaller (4 users) and just uses Microsoft Project and a lot of manual effort.

Monograph looks great to me since it’s architect-focused, integrates with QuickBooks Online (which they use for billing and accounting), and it has an external collaborator component built-in like Newforma’s Info Exchange.

What are everyone’s architecture customers using (good or bad), and has anyone found an app that can import Newforma projects so they can keep their prior work easily accessible?

Thanks!

Hi, how do you handle a client that says they want to own all the licenses meaning I give them my stack and they will purchase all licenses them self.

They will pay a set fee per user which is ok but I am not ok with the purchasing all licenses and making managing them more difficult.

Stack includes M365, itdr, antivirus, email security, rmm, ticketing, security awareness, backup, etc..

I said they can own M365 and they can pay for it, but everything else I will provide.

Hey guys,

We have a client that we are moving from local ad to m365 they are really hybrid right now and don't want to be local anymore. I'm assuming bittitan is one of the best for this to make it an easy transition and keep their desktops. Am I correct? If not please let me know as we don't do this type of migration very often and would love to know.

We have been using Huntress EDR with Windows Defender (not MDE) for a little less than a year now. We've had a great experience with their team and the success of the product. Coming from Bitdefender, it's been amazing.

We had an incident recently that has given me some concern. It was a Fake Captcha/ClickFix scam that tricked the user into running a malicious powershell command. Huntress caught it very quickly and isolated the endpoint. We re-imaged the machine.

However, it has me wondering if we can harden our endpoints further. EDR is by design a "reactive" tool. I'm not sure if there's something out there that can catch this stuff in the moment. I've researched S1, CS, and Field Effect in the past, but from what I've read these are all still reactive to these sort of attacks.

What's everyone else using to harden their endpoints and block these attacks as they're happening? Also, we do use DefensX - but unfortunately this website was categorized as low risk so wasn't blocked.

I have a client (courthouse) that currently has Huntress deployed across all the endpoints and managed by me. They have the opportunity to deploy S1 at no additional cost to them from a state-sponsored security vendor. My thoughts are to run them both and call it a second set of eyes.

Why not?

I know some of y'all are doing it already. Any tangible performance hits? Any good reasons to definitely do it? Any good reasons to definitely run away?

Background: We have a relationship with an ownership/management group in the HC vertical. This group is selling their interest in one entity and our company will be departing as well.

We have been on the other side where the outgoing MSP would only would give us mailbox exports from M365 and not the tenant itself.

How do you handle such transitions from those who have experienced this? Same as above, or screw it - here is a GA account and take the tenant?

We have put an awful lot of work into compliance, CA, etc...We clearly want to work for a smooth transition but don't want to give away all that we put into it.

EDIT: THANKS ALL FOR THE INPUT. We will clearly do the GA route.

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Is it me… or are all posts that I’ve been seeing about this getting deleted or removed?

There was a post here that I was following… now it’s gone. Without a trace.

Several posts on the MSP Facebook groups are now gone. Replies that I’ve made on other posts aren’t able to be seen by others.

I get that a lot of people love CyberFOX and love AutoElevate - but since AE was purchased, the product stalled, and the support went to absolute hell. After that experience I vowed never to do business with them again. That, and their account reps would call or email me daily asking me if I was really sure I wanted to leave. Really left a bad taste in my mouth.

I’m absolutely afraid that the same thing will happen to Timus. Now… I’ve had issues with them in the past… my AE emailing my customer info to a company with a similar name one state over… not getting maintenance notifications and having clients lose access to IP locked tools… but I fear this purchase is going to just make everything worse.

Not to mention… any email I’ve sent out after the notification email asking if I can cancel my current commitments have gone unanswered.

Has anyone else noticed this?

We've recently migrated to Halo from ConnectWise and have had an extremely challenging start. I'm wondering how normal that is and if other companies have had similar issues?

We partnered with a specialist and have spent dozens of hours configuring it over the last year before the changeover, but it doesn't feel like we're even within striking distance of a working solution.

I have some of my guys saying they're frustrated and overloaded. We track ticket load and queues constantly to avoid burnout and I'm not seeing it from my analysis, but wanted to get some feedback from the community.

The average technician is getting around 5 tickets per workday on average.

Our busiest tech (who's good at closing tickets) has been averaging 6.5 tickets per workday. Looking through our metrics, there were 3 busy days in the last 30 when he was assigned 12 tickets on 2 days (about a week apart), and 13 on one day. Those are the highest ticket assignment days and were all either a Monday or Tuesday.

On 2 of the busiest days, a couple techs had their queue increase by 2-3 active tickets, but they quickly got those closed out the following day.

Overall the techs are closing as many tickets in a day as they receive, we're not seeing any queues growing across the techs (though us in management who are doing onboardings and projects have seen some ticket queue growth related to that).

When the phone rings, techs open tickets from calls they answer so those calls (should) be in the ticket metrics and the guys are telling us they are opening tickets when they get calls.

We have a documentation/credential management system that's pretty well filled out for most clients, with some smaller/legacy clients still having some documentation gaps but we're working to close those.

To me, this doesn't appear to be a situation where our helpdesk team is overwhelmed but I need a second opinion. I know some days there might be a rush of tickets that all come in at once, and that's to be expected, but I feel like our overall per-tech ticket load is likely at or below the norms for other MSPs.

We are a M-F, 8-5 shop. As of now, the guys don't work past 5 99% of the time, consistently get their full hour lunch break, and we don't have them on call weekends or after hours (the two owners and helpdesk manager field any after hours emergencies so our techs don't have to).

Any feedback as to what others are averaging within their helpdesk team? Do these numbers seem reasonable?

I felt as if we're managing the workload ok, am I losing my mind here??

We've got MFA pretty much everywhere except the actual Windows login screen.

Starting to think it's time to fix that. Anyone running MFA on Windows logins? Looking for something reliable that users won't hate after a week.

Would appreciate any recommendations.

I have struggled for over a year, to get setup in Standards and Templates the way I want to be able to work.

I've love to see how it's working well in actual practice. I think I understand the theory, but for some reason, despite spending a lot of time on it, there are things that continue to allude me, and I work best if I can adapt from a working example close to what we want.

We have 3 security plans, basic, pro, advanced.

As far as CIPP goes, we want to implement standards in 3 phases. Low, Medium, and High Impact, as the onboarding project progresses.

Some standards don't apply to some customers for a variety of reasons.

We like to proactively communicate changes to customers.

The original plan (before drift templates became a thing) was 9 Templates; Basic-Low, Basic-Med, Basic-High. Prior to putting a customer into say Basic-Low, we would send out an email, explaining what was happening. There was originally intended to be a brief(ish) meeting to discuss standards which might be problematic for the customer, or for whom a standard setting might differ from the default. The intention was, the first time an exception was made, there would be a tenant group created, named after the standard exception, any customer who wanted to opt out of a standard could be added to the group. The issue became the order of specificity, and that when a conflict existed, the date of the Group creation (or last change) was the deciding factor, potentially causing gaps we could not easily identify.

As I understand it, the correct way to do it now is Drift Templates.. Because there can be only 1 drift template per tenant, in order to move a client from Basic-Low, to Basic-Medium, we would need cumulative templates each which contained the standards from the templates below it.

It is not apparent to me if moving a tenant into a new drift template retains their prior exceptions, and if not, there is a fair amount of manual work, likely resulting in some inaccuracy and gaps.

We want this to be as simple, scaleable, and repeatable for our techs who are implementing these plans, ensuring no horrible gaps exist.