Remote monitoring and management is great. It allows MSP’s and IT teams to shift from being reactive to proactive, monitor issues and take brisk action before errors develop. However, implementing an RMM isn’t without its challenges. Below we share 6 of the key challenges, have you faced any of these?
Resistance to change
Implementing a new RMM is tiresome. Nobody likes change, especially technical teams that rely on the tool everyday – change can be time consuming. So, for a smooth transition to a superior solution, the only answer is a clear and agreeable outline of the new RMM’s benefits. This will help to encourage buy-in from all stakeholders in the sales process.
Delegating the project to a suitable candidate
Typically, the decision to implement a new RMM will be made top-down. However, to drive the project forward a suitable candidate needs to be chosen from further down the organisation. This candidate, or champion, must be efficient, but more importantly, can clearly demonstrate benefits and able to ensure buy-in from all the other engineers within the business. This can be tricky to accomplish and failure to do so can create further resistance to change.
Noise
When you’re monitoring thousands of devices, a new, yet to be configured tool can generate dozens of unnecessary alerts. To avoid this, one must ensure that the RMM is configured correctly from the start and as much automation is generated as possible. Like above, having a champion who has trusted authority within the organisation to make decisions around what alerts should be shown or hidden is recommended.
Integration
When an alert is generated by an RMM, an engineer would normally have to create and log a ticket manually with a service desk, ensuring the correct people can be assigned to work on the problem. This manual ticket creation is a huge bottleneck. However, with correct integration, scripts can be written to ensure that the RMM only creates the tickets that are important, thus reducing manual monitoring. E.g. a script could ensure that a ticket is only created if the CPU spikes 5+ times.
Toolset Utilisation
Many organisations are missing large chunks of utility and features from their RMM. They regularly pay 100% of a fee, whilst getting say just 50% of the system’s ROI. You can imagine what much of the C-suite might say. This is usually through ignorance of features, laziness, fear of creating noise and – with cloud based RMMs – losing track of the constant updates and improvements RMMs receive.
On-going platform maintenance
RMM software increases in sophistication over time. And in order to maintain on-premise RMMs (as opposed to cloud-based) RMMs must be updated manually. This means a technician must visit the RMM in person and ensure the RMM is up to date and backed up. The last thing a business wants is a server down.
Dealing with these challenges
Inbay offers two key services to combat the above challenges. Firstly, we offer in-depth audits. These ensure every aspect of the new RMM is configured properly and is correctly implemented. This minimises noise, maximises ROI, eases the pain of switching and ensures there are methods in place to minimise the bottleneck on the support team. We check to see if you’re missing any tricks and that every element is being used optimally.
Secondly, Inbay can provide ongoing maintenance of any server your RMM is hosted on. This gives back time to your service desk team to focus on more challenging and strategic technical tasks.
Contact Inbay for an independent audit of your RMM tool and see if there are any improvements that can be made to its configuration.
