We manage dental clients with our MSP model. We use Autotask Endpoint Management to maintain, monitor, and connect to over 1500 devices. AEM will alert us based upon customized alerts that we have set up, as well as some of the built-in alerts which come with it. We are able to have high level alerts text the on-call technician's phone and respond to downed servers very quickly.
This service also tells us when servers are running hot and are ready for dust to be blown out.
The alerting system: It helps us determine what are high level alerts, and what are alerts which can wait for a day or two. We catch RAID failures, hot servers, bad drives (or predicted failures on drives), etc.
We also find the scripting to be very valuable. Instead of some proprietary scripting language, such as what is seen in N-able, we are able to run batch files, PowerShell, and many other types of scripts.
We would like to see a little more functionality when monitoring network devices, such as switches and routers.
While there is some simple SNMP monitoring of these devices, you can't dig into the traffic stats of the individual ports of switches (as far as I am aware). The setup of SNMP devices is pretty confusing and requires a lot of research as to what certain codes mean. This could definitely be streamlined a bit.
None at all
None at all.
Tech support has been really good whenever we have had an issue, which is very uncommon.
We used N-able prior to AEM. We switched because we bought several products from them that we were not satisfied with, but were unable to cancel. Also, their sales team was very high pressure.
Finally, the cost for onboarding new licenses was expensive and we needed loans to cover new professional licenses. AEM is a lot more scalable as you just pay per agent instead of having to purchase expensive licenses.
The initial setup is straightforward. All you need is admin rights on the server to push out the agent on a domain.
If the client is not on a domain, we would send them a small batch file to add an administrative user that we could then use to push it out over the network. It was a little cumbersome for those clients not on a domain.
We conducted the implementation all in-house.
Less than six months.
Be prepared to spend a lot of time on conversions if you have a lot of clients.
We had to pay out some overtime for a few problematic sites. Sites on domain networks are incredibly easy to install. We learned a few tricks that streamlined the process, but in the beginning, it was a bit tedious.
We used N-able and Kaseya in the past. We also demoed LabTech.
We felt that AEM had the best features with the best Mac support.
It is a great piece of software, so if you are on the fence, I would trial it.
