ManageEngine Endpoint Central Reviews

We are using it for managing desktops and configurations and compliance.

We are using its latest version. We are all up to date with whatever we're doing. It is deployed on-premises.

It helps with compliance. We're moving into a regulated space, and we need to be compliant and have full control over every device. So, the primary purpose of implementing it was compliance.

Identification of gaps and filling the gaps with updates are most valuable. We are able to identify known updates or missing updates and then update.

Each of their products is an independent product, and they don't have anything to do with each other. It is a suite of packages. They all run independently, and they all are a little different because they were acquired differently. They could standardize their portfolio.

We found the team that supports us to be very difficult to understand because of their accent.

I have been using this solution for a year or so.

It is reasonably stable. I had a couple of issues related to corruption, and I worked with their support, but on the whole, it is reasonably stable.

I'm sure it is scalable. It is currently being used by three users. We are using it daily, and we don't have any plans to increase its usage. It is not for any real negative reason. I just don't have a need. I bought it for what I needed it for, and it is doing what it does.

I had some pretty significant problems, and they were very complicated. I've had a number of conversations with them, but the simple truth of the matter is that there were communication problems with their team because of the accent. We found the team that supports us to be very difficult to understand. They had a heavy Indian accent, and it was very difficult to communicate with them.

Neutral

We didn’t use any other solution previously.

It was of medium complexity. You have to get an agent out for every single machine by hand, or you need to push it somehow. It took a couple of weeks.

We implemented it in-house. In terms of maintenance, it requires a fair amount of maintenance. It takes some time. You have to touch it every week and make sure it is working and pushing the code. You have to make sure you're identifying the gaps and the packages to be deployed. You need to build those packages, deploy them, and monitor which ones didn't fire. It is not an install-and-forget package. It is an install-and-use package.

We have seen an ROI. I would rate it a solid four out of five in terms of ROI. The work that one person was doing by hand for each computer in the company is now being done by it in mass. Its value is large because I could free up that person's time to do other work.

The initial purchase was around $6,000 or $7,000. We most probably are not on an annual subscription. We bought it, and then we pay for the maintenance. I'm not 100% sure how that's working out.

We evaluated a couple, but I can't remember what we looked at.

If I re-implement it today, I'd strongly consider a cloud-based infrastructure instead of on-premise.

It is solid. It is a legacy technology, and it has been around forever. It does what it does. It is complicated, but it works. It is not brilliant, but it is highly functional.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

This company uses the product a lot to do the patch implementation. In terms of the configuration of all machines, they do a lot of remote sections for the end-users.

The patch distribution is so easy. 

The mobile functionality is very easy. 

Remote sections are very good. 

The initial setup is easy.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support has been helpful.

It's quite stable. 

The pricing is good. 

The graphical dashboard is so easy to do analysis from.

I don't have any suggestions to improve the solution at this moment. However, the problem is Desktop Central is a big solution. It is a very powerful solution. It can be overwhelming.

Desktop Central has very good information, however, you can't customize the dashboards. If they had dashboard customization, it would be a very good improvement. When you have a dashboard that shows where, when, and why you had some problem it's quite useful. Customizing it to meet your exact needs would be ideal.

I've been using the solution, more or less, for four years.

It is a stable product. The performance is good. There are no glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

Sometimes we have bugs, however, the support is very, very nice and the support is a very good to us.

With a customer, we have more or less 2,000 desktops, 50 mobiles, and 300 servers.

It is a scalable product.

We do have plans to increase usage in the future. Likely in the next two months, we'll be looking at getting 200 more licenses.

We don't have problems with support. They are very helpful and responsive. 

We also use remote sessions to do support for the final user.

Positive

We also did POCs with HPE and IBM. We also looked into CA, Computer Associates.

Before moving to ManageEngine's Desktop Central and doing the POCs we did not use any different products.

It's an easy implementation. The setup is not overly complex. I haven't had any issues with the process at all. 

It doesn't take long to deploy. The problem is this customer. I spent a lot of time not on the setup. We did a POC and I spent more or less three months on it as this customer compared ManageEngine with three other solutions. ManageEngine Desktop Central was benchmarked in the comparison of the other three products. We proved everything including patch distribution, configuration, machine configuration, OS deployment, and remote sectioning. We proved everything and we did a comparison with two other solutions. That's what took the most amount of time.

We have more or less 20 technicians working with Desktop Central.

In terms of maintenance, the Desktop Central team works with the client to maintain all the machines and keep them up to date in terms of configurations and patches. 

We handled the implementation ourselves. We didn't need outside assistance. 

We have seen an ROI. 

If you do have one company with more 200 computers it's impossible to have all the machines up to date with patches. It's hard to get to every final user's machine. The problem is when you have many sites and solutions and development solutions inside of the company, it gets complex.

If you do one patch optimization without doing a test before the real installation of the patch in all machines, you can run into very big problems inside the company. Sometimes you install one patch and this patch is not compatible with all solutions, for example. If you have to patch for 2,000 machines, you can't say how many people will need which patch, et cetera. This solution solves that problem and removed the hours of work and complexity that you'd have to face if you didn't have it on hand.  

The pricing is very good. It's very reasonable and less than other options. 

We looked into HP, IBM, and CA. We compared them against ManageEngine. ManageEngine ended up being the cheapest.

We are using the last version of the solution.

I'd advise users to try out a POC. If they have a lot of machines in their company and need help with patching, this might be the perfect solution. However, try it on some machines first. See how it goes. It's the easiest way to find a solution that will work for you. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

The solution is used predominantly for our service desk and IT uses it for capturing issues from our users.

The solution has a lot of the features we need and we are looking forward to taking advantage of them after a little bit of training. 

It seems to be pretty straightforward in terms of ease of use. The user interface is good.

We don't have any issues with the pricing. 

The solution is stable.

The product can scale.

The team I've currently got is not using it particularly well, due to the fact that they don't know how to use it particularly well. They've not done any training and so on. There are lots of things that need to be done. Hence, why I was looking to whether it's a good product or not, which I think it is. It's a good enough product, yet in terms of the team, they just don't know what to do. I don't know how good it's going to be. That said, it looks like it's going to be perfect for what we want; it just needs to be matured further.

I am an interim contract head of IT for the Commission, and the company I work with has been using it for about two years. I wanted to see what other potential solutions there might be out there, and also to see how it stacks up against others. I've only been using it for about six months, however, I was looking at the competitors as well.

The stability is good. Once we get going with it, and we get the partners to help us develop it further, it'll be absolutely perfect.

The scalability seems to be okay.

I have no comments in regards to technical support. I've never called them.

I did not previously use a different solution.

I was not around for the initial implementation and therefore cannot speak to how easy or difficult the process was. 

It is my understanding that the company had third-party support to do the implementation.

The cost of the solution is reasonable. 

I have been actively evaluating other solutions. 

We are using a previous version of the solution. It's not the latest version. 

The most important thing, when you're looking at any product, is to make sure you've clearly defined what you're trying to achieve and do, and then go through what it can and can't do for you to make sure you get a good fit. That's the advice I'd give to anyone considering implementing it. 

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. I've been pleased with its potential capabilities so far. 

My primary use case is for operating system imaging and deployment. We also use it for software deployment, automatic software updates, and computer remote assistance.

Desktop Central allows us to manage everything related to computing equipment including mobile devices and software licenses in a centralized place.

All of Desktop Central's features are valuable, especially its simplicity.

The team should work on improving the stability, particularly with massive patches deployment, clients are not 100% getting patches and the information provided by the system does not help; more detailed report would be very useful. ManageEngine should provide a periodic health checks for licensed customers; can be a sharing for best practices, tips or recommendation of critical patches or features the customer may have missed.

I've been using Desktop Central for two years.

This solution is scalable.

Excellent technical support, the team is very supportive and responsive to all issues.

Positive

I previously used Microsoft SCCM, but it was difficult to deploy, while Desktop Central is more flexible and user-friendly.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it by myself, which took two days.

We pay 40,000 per year for Desktop Central, ready to manage any size of IT computing environment without having to pay additional fees.

Desktop Central is easy to deploy, manage, and integrate with other ManageEngine products. I would recommend it to anyone managing a computing environment - it's a complete product for all sizes of enterprise, and it's ready to be deployed straight out of the box. I would score it as nine out of ten.

I used it about six months ago. We implemented it in the last company I worked with. We were using it for patching, rolling out images, and other similar things.

We were using the most recent version.

I like being able to image over the network. That's a nice feature that it has. Patch management is pretty decent on it as well.

The only problem with it is that the setup isn't very intuitive. I know that they just upgraded the product to make it a little bit easier to use, but compared to some of the other platforms, it is not easy to configure it, set it up, and get it running. However, once you have set it up and got it running, it runs great.

Once it was set up and running, there were no issues with it. It seems to run fairly well.

It is scalable. I was the admin for this system, and we probably had over a thousand end-users. I was the only one who knew how to use it at the time.

Their tech support was pretty good. For any issues we had, they'd come in and work with us and get them resolved pretty quickly.

Its setup isn't very intuitive.

We had perpetual licenses. The cost was around 36,000, and then you'd have the yearly maintenance fee of 2,000 or 3,000.

They have a service where they come in and configure it or do the setup for you for a price. I don't remember the price, but it was pretty reasonable. If you're not familiar with the platform, that might be a good thing to go with, especially if you don't want to go in and do the ifs and buts trying to set it up. It would be a lot easier if you had them come and set it up for you. With all the alerting and everything else that you have to set up with it, it takes a minute to get it up and running and have everything the way you wanted.

I'd give it an eight out of 10. I was really happy with it.

We deployed ManageEngine Desktop Central mainly for the patching of systems. Additionally, we have used it extensively for doing ad hoc software deployments, making changes to systems, such as if we need to deploy a registry fix. The solution also allows us to have local repositories. When we do a deployment at a local operation, everything is deployed locally from within that operation. We do not have to use the network to receive anything.

We do not use it for remote assistance very much, and the reason is we use ScreenConnect. I know that the Desktop Central remote control works. The other thing that we use Desktop Central is to receive quick access via the command line. It's very convenient that we can open a command prompt on a remote host.

We have seen a lot of benefits in reporting, we are able to pull a lot of information. For example, we can go ahead and pull out a report saying how many Windows 11 machines are in the organization, how many machines are missing patches that are older than 60 days, and how many machines have a specific version of the software.

ManageEngine Desktop Central automatically alerts you if there are newer releases or updates. You do not have to go to their website and check.

Your agents or your assets that are managed by ManageEngine Desktop Central, if you have a relay server, the agents will work over the internet. If there is an asset, then there is some vulnerability. As long as it's powered on and connected to the internet, it doesn't need to be on the corporate-wide area network. As long as it's on the internet, you can go ahead and manage it.

ManageEngine Desktop Central should keep up with some of the features that other major vendors are providing, such as Microsoft. 

If this solution could include the MDM component, then it would be a very strong contender with the other competitors.

The OS deployment of the solution could improve, I tested it before, and it was weak.

I have been using ManageEngine Desktop Central for approximately four years.

The stability of ManageEngine Desktop Central could improve. We have found that at times it can become a bit unstable. We have had issues with that in the past, but not much lately. 

The performance of the solution is good.

The solution is easy to scale. What you need for your scalability is to have more assets. You can scale the resources, such as the processor and memory. The way to scale would be doing the repositories at sites.

We have approximately five IT users using this solution in the organization.

We have been using ManageEngine Desktop Central extensively in my organization but in the last year or so more we have been focused more on the SCCM. We plan to increase usage as the company expands.

I've spoken with technical support in the past. It's a hit and miss, depending on who you speak with support. Some agents are very strong and some agents tell us to read an article and come back if we have any more problems.

The technical support could improve by being more consistent.

I have used other solutions in the past.

We do our software deployment based on a logical grouping of computers. ManageEngine Desktop Central provides the ability to create groups or a collection of computers. That's what they call it. If we can create the collection, of the software we've just uploaded to ManageEngine Desktop Central, it synchronizes it against all repositories. Then based on that collection, we only need to tell it to deploy that piece of software to the computers.

We can also use another tool for deployment that Desktop Central has which is really nice called the self-service portal. We have a list of applications that are common and ones that are not. The applications that not every user uses. For example, in the SAP GUI, not everybody uses SAP. We can have it published in the self-service portal and if the user needs it, they can deploy it themselves.

We use one person for the deployment of the solution. However, the deployment difficulty and time depends on a few factors, such as the size of the collection, how many computers are you deploying it to, how many users, and what is the size of the package and their complexities. Usually, once it's all replicated and the agents are online, if we tell it to deploy, it's almost immediate. Additionally, we do deployment based on off-hours, we can do them immediately or we can schedule deployments.

When the solution is up and running it does not require a lot of maintenance because it uses PostgreSQL, they have routines that manage the database. The only thing that you need to keep your eye on is the size of the repositories because as you patch more and you deploy more software, the size of your repositories grows and you need to keep a watch on this.

We make everybody else look good. We have received a return on investment because we were able to deploy applications a lot easier where we do not have to get the field services team involved.

The solution is very affordable.

The nice thing about ManageEngine Desktop Central is that when it's time for renewal, you can increase your footprint by the number of assets you're managing. I can scale up and down based on the size of my organization.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution would be if they have a small IT department and they do not have strong IT people, ManageEngine Desktop Central is pretty simple to deploy. The complexity is not as big as an SCCM or some of the other products.

In terms of training, there's a lot of things on YouTube that tell you exactly how to do it. There is some good documentation from ManageEngine Desktop Central. It is very simple to deploy and get it up and running.

I rate ManageEngine Desktop Central an eight out of ten.

I am certified for two of the modules of ManageEngine. I am a certified associate for AD Manager Plus (Active Directory Management) and I also have the certification for Desktop Central. Desktop Central is a management module used to manage devices and services from one location.  

To manage a large number of users and devices and push upgrades and patches, we need a solution that allows us to do that in an efficient way. We can do this with Microsoft Active Directory. That would be our primary use case for this solution. There are other things that we do with it.   

If we want to track an incident more closely to do some root-cause analysis, Desktop Central can help us with this.  

If I have a large group or area of a company that extends into EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) and APAC (Asia-Pacific) and maybe LATAM (Latin America) that is on Windows 7 and I want to upgrade multiple devices to Windows 10, I can plan for these upgrades and do them simultaneously. Desktop Central has certain use cases within IT, Ops, and DevSecOps (security as a part of software development and IT operations) roles. Using these you can build a DevSecOps pipeline using Desktop Central.  

In the case of a well-formed pipeline, the Ops is given the liberty to do the releases rather than having to get IT involved at multiple locations. With minimal help, the Ops can do the releases, they just have to define the release and the release goes out smoothly without any IT intervention. The automation process can be built out this way to give technical control to non-technical users. We built our own platform for doing that from scratch Java based. But the technology matured and there are more options available from vendors to solve these issues. We chose to deploy Desktop Centeral as our dedicated solution.  

It has greatly simplified updating and patching within our systems.  

From my hands-on experience, the features I have found the most valuable in Desktop Central is the way it is tightly coupled with the rest of the modules and the entire gamut of ManageEngine. So if I want to collect data about who the users are on the system, I can pull that from the Active Directory. The AD Workbench is a dashboard that gives all the data about the users enterprise-wide.  

Desktop Central has got a dedicated mobile device management module. ManageEngine has got the complete gamut of offerings. It has got asset management, service management, and asset classification. It can do any kind of patch management. It is best at the general management of assets and reporting.  

For example, we can use it for virtually anything having to do with security on endpoints. Say we have maybe 4,000-plus devices that we have to monitor and upgrade the OSS (Operations Support Systems) and apply patching. This can all be handled with Desktop Central from a central location. That is what makes it a very good option.  

Desktop Central manages pushing upgrades to endpoints and how to securely manage those endpoints. That is how it is most useful.  

The product has several places where there is room for improvement.  

Although it is on the cloud, sometimes the performance is slower than it should be. One of the reasons could be that it is tightly integrated and tight coupled with the rest of the modules and all of them have to be in sync. This syncing takes time and resources. When I go to our Desktop Central console, sometimes it runs slowly. So performance is one place where it could have room for improvement.  

In terms of patching, which is a major benefit of the package, patch management can work even better as well. The vulnerabilities are obvious. Every day we get reports on a lot of new vulnerabilities. It is clear that ManageEngine is doing the patching and the package is easily deployed once they are developed and available. The incident management, the root cause, the planning of the resolution, the service management — all these things are known and available. The team at ManageEngine is good at that. But they do not provide reports to user admins on the development and delivery which is information they already have and admins could use. Once the patch is added to the repository the defense against vulnerabilities improves. But the information about developments and vulnerabilities would be good to have and could be shared more candidly.  

I have been working with Desktop Central since February 2020, so that is about 2 years now.  

The product is constantly being upgraded by the vendor for any known issues with some features or some bugs. That kind of stability issue will always be temporary.  

There can be minor bugs that linger because they are not affecting operational issues, but even these can be escalated for fixing. We can get it fixed through the support and the product team for that. We talk directly to the product team if we feel something is important. It can happen over the phone, or it can happen by email. The entire product team has got different account managers for each of their customers. We can go directly to the team professionals that we need and get a bug fix and get it applied.  

Although Desktop Central is performing well, it sometimes experiences lag because of the resources available. The CPU and memory available might be temporarily low. Desktop Central needs a lot of resources to perform its services and syncing.  

Overall we have not had any serious, lingering issues with stability.  

We have not had any issues overall with any type of scalability. Right now we might have more than 12,000, 15,000-plus users spread across the geography. We can add more.  

All the service management gets taken care of by Desktop Central, which monitors everything. So if you need to expand services you configure this in Desktop Central. There are business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), so it is KPI driven. How many incidents we are expecting, how much we can scale and all these system variables can be driven by business KPIs.  

Quest Office has a product called Foglight that has been used for quite a long time to order business KPIs. There are two different types of KPIs: the business KPIs, and then the functional or technical KPIs. So those are all integrated with Desktop Central from Foglight.  

We have incident management through Alacrity which is made by a different segment of BMC Software which has also got the product called Remedy. Alacrity is something similar.  

Within Desktop Central there is a production management function that is at the core of the application. When we configure Alacrity to care for incident management or Foglight to manage KPIs, this becomes integrated with the Desktop Central modules.  

We can tightly integrate other applications to the Desktop Central solution and expand out what it oversees and interacts with.  

If the workload increases, we can scale services easily on the cloud or make other plans for enhancing our architecture.  

I am quite satisfied with the customer support. They have bigger support teams available and the routing to the proper people and resources is quite good. They have support out of different cities, so they 'follow the sun' from the perspective of support and the availability is quite good all the time.  

Neutral

VMware was our solution at first. It was a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering with built-in security and a part of vCloud Air. Workspace ONE was on the top of that. It was the first real desktop virtualization. Like Citrix, it gives you VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). With that, VMs can easily be managed through Workspace ONE and integrated VDIs.  

If I already have VMware and vSphere as my core backbone for the virtualization strategy in the organization, I might also look at automation for deploying updates. If I have a containerized application that is not automated, I can build in the automation using the DevSecOps pipeline or I can look for another solution. If you want to do the DevSecOps pipeline in the VMware workspace, you can do that with vRealize automation.  

VMware, compared to Desktop Central, is far more expensive. Desktop Central has got a license and pricing advantage similar to your windows update and Windows WUSP (Windows Update Services: Client-Server Protocol). That is your Windows update platform. With Desktop Central, you pay something similar to that. It is only a few dollars per license per user.  

Switching to Desktop Central was a matter of having an opportunity to make a switch, keeping aware of the developments in the technology and on the market, and moving to a product that was cheaper and had the capabilities that we needed to carry out the task.   

Our process and roll out for doing the setups are pretty easy. We have managed to gain familiarity with the product and created a pretty smooth process for the installations.  

I have installed a lot of modules by myself, like EDI Manager, and I even installed Desktop Central. We run tests until we are satisfied that these two modules are installed correctly and this usually does not take much time.  

We do not necessarily handle the setup and deployment totally by ourselves. We stay connected to the managing and support team. There are different product teams within the managing team. There is one for EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) Manager, there is one for Desktop Central, there is another one for the service management. There are many different parts at the support team level. Most of the installations do not require assistance but we can consult support when required. They will help us cope with any sticking point and we can move on from there.

Desktop Central can be less expensive than other solutions like VMware for managing DevSecOps. You have to pay per asset with Desktop Central and the final cost depends on how many assets you have across the organization. Per asset, the license cost will be less than using a more expensive license for VMware and vRealize. I think per desktop it might be somewhere around $50 or $100 each using ManageEngine.  

This is the only product I have in mind for this type of solution currently, although we have not evaluated Sophos yet. After that, there is only Citrix and VM Workspace ONE. Citrix is the oldest vendor we have had since Citrix MetaFrame Presentations Server days. At that time they were using screen sharing on desktops, RDPs (Remote Desktop Protocol), and still using all those older technologies. So that is too old as a solution. Desktop Central is doing much better things and has advanced well beyond that solution.  

My advice to people looking into this solution is that if you want to improve on the patching processes as a part of a DevSecOps pipeline, Desktop Central can help you do that. It will help you make that workflow easier and it is a better option than other solutions. So this works out to be a better because everything is built-in. You do not have to integrate with any other company's portal or any other incident management or tracking.  

If you plan for a patch, there are different tools to use, different notifications to set for the patch, and they can be administered within Desktop Central itself. So the admin can approve it and once the notification changes, the patch can be released to the endpoints. That works pretty fast. That built-in workflow makes it more productive and easier to use.  

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Desktop Central higher than the VMware and Citrix Workspaces. The workflows are much better and easier, and the different roles for IT and Ops are well defined. So I would rate somewhere around seven.  

It is a seven because it still has got some room for improvement, but I think seven is good.  

I'm a system admin and network engineer.

I've found the solution to be user-friendly for us in the IT department and for our employees. Raising a ticket is pretty much effortless and getting it to the next level is also simple. The entire package is quite flawless. The functionality, the basic elements and the help aspect are all fine.

The user interface could be improved because it's quite hardware based. There are no dynamic changes on web pages and it's lacking visually. 

I've been using this solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. I haven't found any crashes or abnormalities in the program.

We haven't fully tested scalability. For now our users include three IT people and 105 employees.

We haven't needed any support but I think everything is available on YouTube.

The initial setup was straightforward and took maybe half an hour. I found some useful tips on YouTube.

We've only tested the help desk aspect to date. From that perspective I would definitely recommend it. We've been testing ManageEngine for the past six months and we'll continue that for a while longer. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10.