N-able N-central Reviews

My use cases for N-able N-central always start with hardware monitoring, but since Enable expanded its portfolio, it's always getting more and more options and use cases. Sometimes we start with the hardware monitoring, but then we include patching of Windows servers and Windows devices. For now, we are still using their antivirus, although we are changing to Windows Defender, but that's a strategic decision in the company. We still have the central one as our second option, which is still through Enable.

The dashboarding at the moment is not yet through N-able N-central, but it would be that case in the near future.

The most helpful features of N-able N-central include providing a single pane of glass for many insights in an environment regarding their patching, their assets, their devices in general, and the active issues that they show. The fact that I can do 90% of my job through this platform is significant as I do a lot of monitoring for customers. I don't need VPN almost, I can send my scripts for certain things or check something directly through a device, which means I don't have to remote connect in many occasions.

I can just go to command prompt, start session and I'm connected to command prompt from the server, just send something, or I can do a script or an automation policy just through task execution. I can get information about the running services, processes, the registry. On the file system, I can retrieve files, I can send files directly from this single pane of glass, which is my office.

N-able N-central provides me with the Automation Manager that allows us to use their agents and probes to send scripts and other checks regarding the patch management.

There are areas in N-able N-central that could be improved. We always started it from the basic purpose of monitoring hardware, where vendors such as HP and Dell try to sell their own services which monitor and provide a dashboard, which is their logic. They want to make their own recurring revenue on that. We notice that SNMP has had a good run and still sometimes is used, but it's becoming an issue to maintain the same capabilities because HP makes it unreliable or even removes certain features that we used to be able to validate redundant array of independent disks.

Our service that has been running for 15-20 years suddenly is not working anymore because HP decided in generation 10 plus and above, or generation 10 hardware in servers, storage controllers particularly, they just didn't put the SNMP OIDs anymore. We are now following that market change or business change in hardware monitoring and the future is Redfish, REST API, IPMI type of monitoring with the REST API and Redfish being most common.

We have to do the effort ourselves because Enable is not really strategically going there because I assume there's not much money to make to improve that or to convince customers to start with their product. That issue could be better if they would be more prepared for that change and give us customers more tools, preconfigured, pre-available custom services for Redfish, REST API, where we just have to put a few items username, password and address and some dots and commas, but that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, which we are doing at the moment.

We are using HP iLO commandlets and REST APIs for Aruba. Dell is making it very hard to monitor their hardware. If it has an iDRAC, I can manage it and monitor it, but if it's something that's less common or due to the portfolio, they have done a good job at not exposing information about health. We would just want to have a red or a green dot that indicates if this device is healthy or not healthy.

Since nobody's investing in SNMP because it's a liability in security, they should invest in making a REST API and preferably also do the work on making it easy to pull or push information. That's something that the industry in general and Enable in particular could do a significant job to help us monitor.

I've been working with N-able N-central for more than 10 years.

For multi-tenant management, N-able N-central provides me the capability to serve a few hundred customers effectively that I manage.

Regarding the support of Enable, I am rather happy because if something remains an issue, we do get their third-line support to check on it and they do give back some useful feedback most of the times. Sometimes it's just that you need to update the product because it has a certain issue. That's not an easy thing because since we have many customers, we cannot just do it weekly or monthly. It's something that we do maybe every six months to be honest, to keep it useful and manageable. In general, the service is okay, and I would say we are a seven out of 10 satisfied.

The initial setup of N-able N-central is not something I did myself in production. I got the box already running, but I have done a lot of updates on customers' own servers. We have a customer which has their own server, which sort of is my issue because they always are behind with the updates, so I do the updates. The initial setup is easier these days than in the past.

It takes approximately a few days for the setup. If you take it for a few days, preparing and then setting it up and getting the last quirks out of it, that would be a fair amount of time. One day to do the actual setup and do it all correctly would be an assumption in my opinion because there's always something that you forget, but tweaking it and getting it to optimum performance might take another day.

I consider N-able N-central to be a cost-effective tool with fair pricing in the market. Fair if you're big enough. If you start, it's not that cheap, of course, because you don't have that much revenue and the initial cost for a small business would be a steep hill. Once you grow a bit to a medium-sized business type of customer, if your customers are big enough and you get enough licenses, you also have some negotiation space to say, can I get a better price per device? On a scale of 1-10, I rate N-able N-central an 8.

We have been dealing with Enable EDR and N-able N-central, which is a management center. It's the NOC solution that we are currently running our asset management on.

We are managing tasks in that environment with N-able N-central. Any registered and managed tickets, SLAs, and other aspects are handled there. I'm not using it every day, but when something is assigned to me, I have access. I can close anything related to acquisition, roll out of training that I need to attend, or any operational issue that requires my attention. I have access, and most people have views where they can drill down to what is assigned to them and what is assigned to their team because I have that responsibility.

The transition to N-able N-central was very smooth. We were confident that our migration would not affect any operations. It was easy to migrate our clients into the new solutions. What we have experienced is that only branding has changed along with the way reports are structured. The solution is more advanced and the transition was well thought out. The process is managed properly.

Regarding the integration capabilities of N-able N-central, my colleagues who work with this solution recently completed an ISO quality audit. The auditor could understand and manage how we handle our assets and environment because it's quite simple, even for someone who doesn't use the platform daily. This demonstrates that we are using a solution that meets our compliance requirements.

N-able N-central is easy to use. Once licenses are provisioned, it's simple for my team to deploy the solution from anywhere remotely, provided there is internet access or remote access to the device.

The MSP part of N-able N-central has evolved over the years. They have been trying to move from professional or network server and desktop licensing to make it more comprehensive. With professional nodes, you should be able to deploy agents to any device regardless of size for management purposes. It was previously expensive and tedious to manage different licenses. Since all devices require management, separating and making servers and network devices more expensive was inefficient. They implemented a node process so there could be one standard pricing for everything.

We used the solution during the SolarWinds years and then moved to N-able N-central.

There's a new node for N-able N-central which they have addressed. Our outstanding items include reviewing our pricing and partnership level, which can provide additional benefits when we exceed 100 devices and fall under Silver status with approximately 10 clients for deployment. This shows we are a progressive partner.

They need to continuously evaluate our partnership with them. Some solutions offer incentives at certain brackets or ranges, providing discounts that encourage others to market the product more due to the benefits aligned with continued use of the solution.

As a product, I rate N-able N-central an 8 out of 10. To reach a 10, they need to improve the bundling of solutions, provide more structure on pricing, and enhance partnership levels to encourage partners to sell the product.

We are currently a deployment partner and reseller. In terms of additional benefits, we need recognition that indicates we are a trained and skilled partner capable of implementing the solution independently. Having a self-service platform for operations or procurement would allow us to view pricing for all clients and solutions in one place.

Our primary use case for N-able N-central is monitoring. As an administrator, I frequently work with N-able N-central for monitoring, spending approximately fifty percent of my time on it.

N-able N-central is an easy tool to implement with customers. Once we have details on a customer's environment and access, we can quickly integrate them into our N-able N-central environment. This allows us easy access to customer environments for management, including batch management and adding antivirus solutions. 

While we use Veeam for backup, N-able N-central could also serve as a backup solution. We also use ServiceNow for ticket management, though this could be done within N-able N-central. 

ServiceNow is a more mature product for ticketing, so we are working on integrating it with N-able N-central for automatic ticket creation.

One of my personal challenges with N-able N-central is the monitoring of services for server hardware. The industry has moved towards Redfish for out-of-band and in-band monitoring, yet N-able N-central still relies on older protocols like SNMP. 

This shift causes services to give false positives, false negatives, or become misconfigured. I believe N-able N-central should invest in a Redfish client for integration and provide a baseline of industry-standard services like HP iLO, iDRAC, and others, enabling easier configuration and implementation.

I have approximately ten years of experience working with N-able N-central.

At this moment, we encounter stability issues with N-able N-central from time to time. Sometimes sessions are logged out due to memory leaks or other process issues. Therefore, I would rate the solution's stability a seven out of ten.

N-able N-central is very scalable. Currently, we run it on an on-premise hardware solution, which presents challenges if rapid scaling is required. 

However, due to our gradual growth, we've managed to scale our resources as needed. If we were to adopt the N-able hosted cloud solution, scalability would likely improve, as they handle the hardware aspects.

The quality of N-able N-central's technical support is an six out of ten. It could be much better, currently we encounter issues after upgrading, which is becoming a 'regular' experience. But support does not really take ownership of these issues so we as a customer can not get on and do our regular job, instead we need to waste days of implementing workarounds, codedrops, etc.

Neutral

While I do not handle the pricing, N-able N-central is not cheap, yet it is not the most expensive option available. I would rate the pricing and cost aspects as an eight out of ten.

The scalability of N-able N-central on-premises is an eight, and for the cloud solution, it would be a nine or ten. Overall, I would rate N-able N-central as an eight out of ten.

Customers that we manage do not have IT, but they still want to manage the PCs if they have any issues or any patches. They want to keep the operating system up to the latest version. 

They need support for their employees on the device itself. We use N-central to get access to the device, and we always monitor the device for alerts and any issues. If we get any security threats or something, we have access, and we can intervene and fix those issues for them.

The most valuable features of N-central are its ease of deployment and ease of use. It's easier than other tools. 

Additionally, it is efficient. Compared to other platforms, it performs as planned. From my perspective, it's quite efficient.

They have AI on their roadmap. It's about how to leverage AI to make recommendations about device maintenance, recommendations for areas, such as certain ports to close, and recommendations on antivirus configuration or patching. Involving AI in the platform could improve it further.

I have had experience with N-central for around a year.

The customer service and support are excellent. They have a self-service, and we are subscribed to the advanced support, so the response time is high. They provide additional services like training and more onboarding sessions.

Positive

We had another platform called Ninja. We switched to N-central because the team gave us a good discount, essentially making it half the price. It offered the same features and return on investment with less price and more ease of use.

On a scale of one to ten, the initial setup is rated nine out of ten.

Our return on investment with N-central is rated ten.

The pricing is competitive, and they have pricing tiers that work for most customers. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most expensive, I would rate it three.

We previously used Ninja.

The platform is good, and it's easy to use. People can benefit a lot from using it. It is successful, and we recommend it to others looking for a similar solution. I would rate the overall solution eight or nine.

We use it for many purposes. Because it also has some backup solutions and some antivirus solutions. The monitoring is well; for managed services providers, we use it. We also use it for our asset management and for our service desk tickets. But our primary use case is for monitoring. 

N-able N-central is quite an intuitive GUI since they have so many years of experience. Their support is also at a good level. So normally, we can always get to a solution when we are stuck with some monitoring problems that we encounter.

There is room for improvement in the development of custom monitoring services. This is important because not all products are easy to monitor, and it can be difficult to determine which monitoring solution to use. For example, do you need to use SNMP? SNMP traps? Or can you get the information you need from the API?

So, N-able N-central could be improved by making it easier to develop custom monitoring services for a wider range of products.

I have been using this solution for seven years. 

It is a stable solution. I never experienced any downtimes. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

We dedicatedly use the solution like on an hourly basis. 

It's very scalable. You can start with, for instance, five devices, and you can scale up to 200,000 devices. So it's very scalable.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. The entire engineering and even administration use this solution in our organization. So, there are around 150 end users. 

The customer service and support are at a good level.

Positive

The initial setup depends on whether it is on-prem or cloud. For example, for the cloud solution, it's more convenient. If I started today, I would not go ahead and put an on-premise solution anymore. I would use the cloud solution and maintain the provider itself.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. I would definitely recommend using the solution. 

N-able N-central is a versatile tool used for monitoring and managing systems, servers, and infrastructure like routers and firewalls. It supports automation, patch management, remote management, asset tracking, and overall system management. Customers primarily rely on it to monitor and manage assets, automate tasks, and maintain system security and stability.

N-able N-central offers a range of robust features. Its asset tracking capability is powerful, enabling you to monitor hardware and software across devices on your network. The remote control function is seamless, providing secure access to servers and routers. It integrates well with ticketing systems and tools like CrowdStrike and N-able EDR, delivering comprehensive network monitoring and security. The automation feature is particularly useful, allowing you to schedule tasks, respond to system triggers, and automate problem resolution, such as managing disk space issues automatically.

N-central currently has limited mobile device management (MDM) support, particularly for Android devices. Expanding N-central’s MDM support to include Android devices would significantly enhance its value and address this gap.

We have been sellers of N-able N-central for the last year.

We faced only one service interruption in a year, which lasted for a maximum of thirty minutes.

Overall, the system has been relatively stable.

The scalability of N-central is impressive. Adding many devices to my dashboard is easy without contacting N-able for each addition.

I find the support for N-central to be supportive. The technical support team responds promptly to my requests, and I'm delighted with their service.

Positive

I've worked with several vendors, including Athenaero, PRTG, Ninja, and SolarWinds. We switched to N-able from SolarWinds and NinjaOne because N-able provides a comprehensive suite of services that centralize everything we need—monitoring systems, email protection, EDR solutions, antivirus, security solutions, managed detection and response (MDR), and more. Having a single vendor for all these services is more convenient for our clients. Additionally, N-able's pricing is reasonable, their support is excellent, and I can communicate directly with the vendor for quick responses and assistance.

N-central offers both on-premises and cloud deployment options, making it flexible.

The solution impacts most of our time and effort savings with automation, scheduled tasks, and auto-responding to incidents. I estimate these features save us about thirty percent of our time.

The pricing and licensing are average, almost six out of ten.

N-central has AI scripting capabilities. It helps to generate scripts even without having essential programming skills, saving time and effort in performing tasks.

I've exclusively recommended N-able products. I find their support, training, and updates to be exceptional. They are proactive in addressing user concerns and continuously improving their systems. 

I would rate it nine out of ten.

N-central is an RMM we use to manage networks for clients.

I like the remote connectivity, reporting suite, and patch management module.

The integration with other applications could be better.

I have been using N-central for the last 14 years.

N-central is a highly stable platform. 

I've taken N‑central implementations from 1,000 devices to around 20,000, so it's highly scalable. That's one of the things I like most about it.

Their tech support is excellent. We were a Black Diamond partner, so we worked with their developers extensively. They have a fantastic support team.

We had several run-level platforms, including Continuum, but the only other one I've run is Nagios. That was custom-built for Unix devices. Our previous RMMs weren't scalable like N-central. We ran into problems we created for ourselves, not knowing enough about what we were doing in the beginning. Ultimately, we found that we had gotten to a place that we couldn't come back from, and it was easier to change RMMs rather than trying to fix what we had.

N-central is complex. It's more of an erector set than a pile of Lincoln logs, but you can do anything you want with it if you know how. I rate N-central seven out of 10 for setup difficulty. 

I rate N-able N-central nine out of 10. My advice to future users is to work with your partner success managers and the onboarding team. I've never had a question they couldn't answer.

We use it for remote management monitoring, backup, etc. We are using its most up-to-date version.

It's a very robust product. They're continuing to invest and put new enhancements into the product. They're very open about what their roadmap is, which is very good for us because then as a business, we can plan.

The support from our direct team is very good, but the support from their day-to-day ongoing help desk isn't that good. They have still got some work to do on that, but they have been focusing on that a lot over the last number of years. So, it has gotten a lot better than it was.

In terms of features, I don't have any input at this time. I only use it twice a month to do a quick update of data.

We have been using this product for nine years.

It's 99.9% stable.

It's highly scalable.

They have improved drastically over the last year.

It was set up before my time.

It's one of the more mature products on the market. So, do your research before you decide which product to go for because not every product fits every size business.

I'd rate N-able N-central a nine out of ten.

We use N-able N-central for inventory, remote access, and automation for patch managers.

The most valuable feature of N-able N-central is the many options it has.

N-able N-central could improve the remote access, my technicians have complained about it. They have used other free tools instead to compensate, such as TeamViewer. Additionally, when using remote access on the web, it is lacking reports.

I have been using N-able N-central for approximately eight years.

N-able N-central has good stability.

The scalability of N-able N-central is good.

The technical is good they always provide a quick response when we needed help.

The setup of N-able N-central was easy. However, the difficulty of the setup depends on the environment.

I rate N-able N-central a ten out of ten.

We are an MSP, and N-able N-central is the main tool we use.

The solution's service is good.

The solution's overall integration should be improved.

We previously used ConnectWise. We switched to N-able N-central because ConnectWise was a little bit complicated and didn't do a good job for us.

The solution's initial setup is very easy. I rate N-able N-central ten out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

N-able N-central is not an expensive solution. I rate N-able N-central a six out of ten for its pricing.

Overall, I rate N-able N-central a nine out of ten.