 So this discussion comes up a whole lot for people who want to get into the MSP business What software should I use to run my business? And it's a really important question So but definitely do your time do your research when I'm gonna offer you is What I've been using for the last couple years Maybe three or four now which I remember we've been with them for a while They actually started out as a different company and they were purchased by SolarWinds From here on out We're just gonna call it the SolarWinds systems for those of you pointing and saying hey that used to be The name eludes me at the moment It's really not relevant at all because they bought the company and you can only get it through SolarWinds now So this is what the dashboard looks like I created a special demo user So I could do this demo when I set up a couple things in here to give you an idea of how it works This is one of our clients and so I can blur the least amount possible as we hear a lot about Client privacy. This is one of their really generic dispatch Stations that they have here Now what I've got is this client is got multiple locations. This is their Michigan office that has 16 workstations and two servers at it that we manage now They have other offices and VPNs and that's beyond the scope of this We're gonna focus on what the system does so don't ask a lot of client questions That's not what this is about for those of you wondering now when it comes to choosing The a system an RMM system I don't really have any bad opinions of any of them out there So if you say hey Tom, what about this wonder about that one? I don't know the only one that's popped up in a couple times now And I did a video about it because of the the scares of a Jesus out of me is the fact that Kaseya Has had some issues and they've had a two times They've been breached and the tool that you think is to help protect your clients was the vector of attack to attack Clients that's a disaster. So please do your research Don't just go with whatever company you think is the lowest price or whatever There's a lot of other factors. I want you to consider when you're purchasing this. This is just my opinion on solar winds I have not tried every one of them So I can't give you this conclusive that it's better or worse than any other ones I do know that everyone seems to have Issues with little quirks about all of them None of them are smooth sailing top to bottom the people who ever say that are sales people The sales people the only ones who say everything's perfect and magical. It's not perfect or magical Let's dive into this and kind of show you how the system works I'm gonna give you kind of an overview of it and that way you can share my review and opinion of it so we're gonna start with a Summary of this particular workstation And I chose this one because it's logged in as the user dispatch They have kind of a generic login for this one because it lets me know what users logged into it at the time Then you have all these little green dashes now if I unfiltered this you'd see the whole list of Systems in here and any status is related to them So it lets me know that 24 7 it's 17 checks passing DSC passing we're getting to what a little bit that means here in a second Here's another summary for all the features that we're doing on this Background take control which is the remote management tool so I can just instantly take control of this computer Active directory integration just all the little features that are in here. It's actually the take controls called MSP anywhere It's another tool I think you can even buy it standalone from SolarWinds, but it comes integrated with their RMM package that we have here No, by the way, don't ask me about pricing. That's between you and your salesperson So we're just gonna cover how the system works now. This also has their web protection in here now What you're seeing across here the green dots are active and there's no problem with them That's what we love to see. We want to see the green dots and this is The way we look at systems with this tool I'm looking and focused in with this demo account that's restricted to only see clients in the Michigan GSA account We have the way it lays out over here. Here's our account. It's actually called demo here Because that's who I'm logged in as it would list all the businesses all their sites all their stations Or you can filter it to show all the workstations across all the sites that way you can look for problems Indiscriminate of where they are and this is something I really like I can see all the machines across all of my clients and look for Common things that may be wrong for example, you know when a threat comes out Sometimes it needs to be you'll see it pop up on different workstations or patches And you'll see them across different workstations and they can tell you that that we were not dealing with everything on a per client I'm dealing with it on a per platform basis like all these people are running Windows 7 They all need to roll this patch and I can group them together based on that makes it makes it really nice They also have mobile device management. This client doesn't have any so I can't demo any of that for you. I Can't show you I guess I can click on the network It's gonna show this particular network and The subnet mask for it and then I can go to and show the connected devices and it gives you a list of IPs and devices that I'm Gonna blur out Down here at the bottom, but it gives you everything whether or not it's online when it discovers it So it can let you you know You can set up these networks and see the devices and things like that in here That is a piece of it that works on there. So let's jump back over here to the workstation So that's all the tabs that are up here I like the way it looks so as you go through any of this If you want reports for anything or settings for anything and actually let's go ahead and edit this workstation itself It really has even though this is all web-based it really feels like an application So patch management use policy on or you can override any individual workstation You can set mass policies for everyone for a single client for or down to a single workstation So you have all these little options. We just leave them at global defaults But if you have some custom thing you have to do easy enough to do Because I have the right-click 10 context menus. I like the reboot options So if you have the schedule reboot just hit later, I can force a scan update threat definitions refresh or snooze web protection We use web protection on these and this allows me to very quickly go through and say alright Let's figure this out now related to web protection because that is an important piece for our clients But also a management question. It comes up a lot. I can't get to this website And if you go in the web protection settings web protection website look up right away it Immediately has the status of that website and you can report an error in here And then you can go through and whitelist something if it needs to be so if you get a call from a client What workstation you on you can Right away get with them and say okay this website I couldn't get to because it says it's blocked by the thing call the guys they were the guys They call us and we can right away look that website up and we can whitelist it and or even just say artwork We realized it's a fine website This is actually a funny story that came up related to this was all of a sudden They couldn't get to a local restaurant like as in this company is local to us And so is the restaurant and they couldn't get to it We're like that's really weird that it's blocking it But let's figure out why turns out the restaurants website got hacked and the system actively found problems of them and blocked Them out there so that was that was interesting so it's it's very on top of it even some small I mean literally a mom-and-pop Single restaurant with a website it caught and filtered it So their their web protection does a really good job on there And you can actually go through and see what websites were blocked it has reports and things like that that you can run Let's go to outages So these are anytime the device was offline or missed a heartbeat or anything like that the systems automatically go through and Constantly are checking I'm gonna put this wrong. I think every 30 minutes They send a check to make sure that everything's good So if anything goes offline or is a fail in a vulnerability you scan or a reboot required or a threat quarantine it finds it Some of the threat quarantines are interesting because it can be like the littlest trace of something and it just blocks it so it's very aggressive, but it doesn't seem to bother the clients because it's It doesn't seem to give it doesn't give them a notice when it finds something minor So some of these little things are like found this Potential threat blocked the JavaScript and it listed in here, but it does not pop up for the client and it's not annoying Then here's all the checks No fail login attempts at the last check. These are ones that are run like every 24 hours You can add more checks here. You can add custom scripts in here It's it's a pretty extensive system that default sets that they give you work really really well No missing patches of our abilities identified You can go through like a history of this if there's any problems So disk space check tells you how much space is left It's only 17.6 Used and of 82% so it's not going to you know, let me know that and you can also Disable checks so you can group a check and say, you know, I don't want to check that anymore I know they're at 80% we've notified them. We tried some hard drive or whatever it is And we don't need to get those notices anymore because we've done it. You can change thresholds as well Manage antivirus check and all the windows services and things like that so you can go through and say all right It's a service running out its history. You printer services things like that Like I said, you can get custom with any of these Notes if there's notes on this workstation of things you had to do you can add notes and time to this workstation and things like that you can also check the Details of what was found generic BT. This is just a generic thing that was found on there And this mail where dropper Thing that was found I think this one Yeah, this is actually a mess because it picked up something that was a tool that had to be deployed by them It thought there's mail where it turned out there was and it was actually an update for some software they use We had to contact the company and that's the whole thing happened last year We keep all the information there and here's the web reports for things like categories where they went Um In some of the information shopping sites You can see they pretty much stay where they're supposed to be on there But you can then filter this to figure out, you know or export a list So if the management would like a report on what they've been doing You can create those reports and get information on a per computer basis because sometimes Our clients are like hey, we got a guy. We know he's been doing something or not doing what he's supposed to be doing So let's jump over here to take control Well, I'm actually going to show you how I don't want to take control of their computer right now But this is you click this and it launches the take control to get remote control What I meant to say was let's look at the remote background. This is really cool So let me get the password put in here real quick Demo account. So I got a demo password set. It's not saved in last pass So remote management is amazing. I can look through files. I can get onto the computer I can do stuff with it without logging in they can be using it I don't disrupt their processes and I can just remotely look at what's running in the background Any processes they have that's in here? I can end the process add it to a check Search the process. This is actually really cool. If you're not sure what something is you can just jump in You can google it. You can bring it or yahoo it to I don't know why pretty much everyone I think google's on top for a reason Um, so that's really nice. I can just jump in see the running processes for this particular computer I can also start and stop services on there and this I'm going to get into how this works for servers as well But it works the same way you get the same set of tools for the server to be able to do this And it's it's really clever because without sometimes you just have to start and stop a service to fix a little thing for the client And I'm able to jump in there and do that without actually having to remote into the computer And then you can even add scripts and tasks to this to extend functionality So if you have a custom cleanup script or something that has to be done because as we know I made a joke about this before me and my friend we write so many scripts for things to fix the thing to fix Is the thing and you can integrate all that in there and then automate it That's something they really give you a lot of on here. So that's really cool Uh integrations is well, uh is kind of cool for things like Seeing that they can get to a site and I built this I set one up separate in here, uh this morning So it didn't have a ton of data in it because I can't show you all of them because of some of the stuff and where it goes to the sites So what these are is this is the net path tool And it will show you I just grabbed one of the servers that are in our office here But it will show you the ping times and hop times on a regular basis To understand how a client can connect to a site So you can set these up between different client sites and things like that So it gives you these uh visuals for how they see things From inside their network and you set a series of these net path tools And what it's doing is it's showing you the path the client takes to a certain site And you can put ones that are regular recurring so you can see like for example how they get to their cloud systems And a lot of our clients don't have servers. They just run things in the cloud So you set a net path to the cloud so when they say I can't log into this This will give you a history and a view for from their internal network to the external networks That they go to because you can go well, I can get to it and obviously that doesn't answer it and help them So that's what this net path tool is pretty cool. And this is another integrated feature to the rmm So Let's go over to quickly look at the servers And we get a lot of the same thing with the servers, but a few more checks Than that The other cool thing about the servers is you get these reports processor utilization reports where this is the max This is a four cpu server max and averages processor utilization memory utilization You know things that got maxed out physical disc it was you know hits max once in a while But the average excuse me the average is only 6.1 per cent These are utilization reports that you can kind of keep Ongoing looking at to make sure that the server one, you know something suspicious not going on it with all of a sudden That it's peeking out and being used too much or when it's time to run a new server and These are the tools you can do To do to kind of dig into that i'm going to run another report And you can get more reports related to this now So this will give you those reports to let you know that the system over time what it's looked like So eight day 24 hour length and these are just kind of drilling tools when people are having slow performance on something So you can kind of drilling into it with the server and go okay. I need to know these things are that thing You can also set up different alerts. You have a script manager The reports the executive summary reports are kind of neat I don't use them as much we we haven't found that the clients really want all that data sent to them automatically So what we do is we run them as needed and maybe you have Meetings with clients every now and let them know how they're handling things and that comes down to some of the clients of Well, they're not they care This is a client who just fully trusts us. They don't worry about some of those details and They're just happy to have us managing all of it And actually a majority of our clients you like that they they're fine. We say hi to them Um once most of the owners, but they're like we trust you we pay you You know, you're doing your thing here And if they call when we got questions and we got answers and we make sure everything's happy and their Staff has something to call so we don't always do those but the reports They're kind of novel and they they summarize like how many patches were loaded and things like that They're kind of cool But honestly at the end of the day a lot of businesses going I trust you load the patches You don't need to send me a report every month that said look you load 26 patches on each machine or whatever Now speaking of patch management, it's There's an entire workflow to it. I'm not going to dive in details It works really well It also finds a lot of other software on their computers that may not be patched And for example for this one here This is kind of interesting the patch management found that free file sync It doesn't automatically patch it and this is some file sync tool that they had set up on here That just has a new version out So they're saying hey you're missing a patch for the software and it just found it So we can go get a new version of the free file sync tool that's on the server that I know it just copies data between this and the other server Because they have a really weird program that runs. It's a custom written If you're not worked in any industry some of the unique industries where you have edi It's a special script that copies this file for edi over. It's it's a it's a mess It's a yeah, we'll be on the scope of this, but nonetheless it's still watching for things like that same with the Other reports if you have a different custom active directory settings for a particular client now not a cool thing Is you can do here with the risk intelligence policies now this client we don't run it because it's not not an issue for them But this is an issue for some of our legal clients any clients in like a HIPAA compliant or a legal industry Where you want to know now risk intelligence is cool and for each one of these things it adds to your bill But of course thing you in turn add it to your clients bill But what like risk intelligence does is it can give you reports on finding things like credit card numbers That's saved in word documents and things like that That's actually a really nice tool when you're trying to sort out a file server That just has a ton of crap on it and clients who save things and then you find out they're saving credit card numbers inside Of word documents with soul security numbers you're like no don't do this But telling them no don't do it's one thing having a report that you can run to say Here's all the files that you guys need to audit so you can get into proper compliance It's it's a service action that we can do so we can run these reports Letting the client know of course up front and then those reports can help Meet with clients who need this situation remedied and you can work with them to remedy it So it's really a nice way to do it Um, if you have it set up you can do bandwidth history. I don't think it's set up on this particular Client yeah, it's not so I can't show you this one Bandwidth history report so it can do bandwidth testing and things like that for the clients Which is really nice. So you can you know get a lot of You can get a lot of good details on these fault history reports device inventory reports Here's the report. I was looking for the asset tracking report So this will break down for each client lots of details on software licenses client inventory reports, this is This is the report that's pretty cool because we're going to go filter it for that one workstation But we can add we have in a Entire report for what software is running on their computers what software is installed what? Licenses if we have them snare hot fixes that are installed updates are installed patches are installed And the hardware on there so we can pull all the hardware information for these computers One of the other nice things is too with it being like these are aldell workstations at this client the systems are The service tags are in here as well So we're actually able to get the service tag and look up warranty information or anything like that I can run a mouse report, which is kind of cool too if it has the uh Mice which mouse is in here. I think it's kind of cool as it'll list that video controller Which video controllers are installed in each one? Obviously they have some a vmware. Some of these are on vmware. So I'll do ring that physical memory reports For that so you can actually look at the memory look at the bios versions of things processors that they have This is it's really nice because being able to pull all that information together Makes it a lot easier to okay. What does the client have and you can start generating reports It's also nice as as you add things if you do not happen to dynamically update a separate list I can pull the list as needed. So every now and then when you want to check to see what computers need to be upgraded or things like that We can kind of okay. What are they running right now? We can look at the client like that and make assumptions or maps are not making assumptions make factual Statements without making assumptions, but I think the computer was installed and then there's no assuming we run the image report All these computers are here Let's talk about an upgrade path or when we should be calling them about upgrading the computers So like I said overall, I'm really happy with this as an rmm tool. It works really well. Their support's been great Now I've done a separate review of their System, which is their backup system, but it's integrated in here if you noticed right here It says backup successful So it does do the integration in there, but it is a separate spot They're working on merging it all into one, but for now They're they're backup, which I did a review of typing solar winds backup I can leave a link in the description here and you can kind of see it's it's a great tool I've been using that for a while and I've been really happy with it But so this was the overview of the solar winds rmm tool Reach out to their salespeople if you're interested in In their system. It's it's good. We're happy with it. It works Well, we've got quite a few clients a lot of workstations in here And it's been a great tool to really help automate our business and Especially things like the remote background being able to just to fix things On the fly like that or like I was showing over here Being able to say just reboot this later after we load a patch That's just really helpful little things, but it creates a very good workflow going. Okay We know the person leaves at five will just set it to reboot at five fifteen little things like that Being able to see all the clients at once in a very concise dashboard And only sort it by things that are not patched when we have float updates That works out really well too and security I'm not knock on wood haven't heard any problems solar winds and I know just from logging in you can't log into this without two factors It's not like you have to turn two factor on two factor is the default with this and That's important. It's two factor and ip checking So if we log in from somewhere outside of here, you have an approved ip list that you set up to Only allow them so you know if you got a guy that works from home Or you work from home and you work from the office You can add both of those ip's to the list that way so many even tries to log in from a different ip Before they even get to the username password two factor problem The ip is a restriction on there and has to be added So that's they do a good job at solar winds I feel of really locking it down and they haven't had problems like I mentioned before with casayas The only ones I know of that had like a major breach But hopefully this was helpful and gives you better understanding the rm tools Like I said, if you ask me how does it compare to some of the other ones? I've not used the other ones so I don't have those good comparisons This is my review of the solar winds tool and hopefully you found it helpful Thanks for watching. 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