MSP Minded? What You Must Know About Remote Monitoring & Management

In early 2006, Steve Solbrack, president of Solbrekk IT Network Solutions in Golden Valley, Minn., decided to make a move into the MSP space. Since building a custom solution for monitoring and managing his clients' networks was far too expensive, he turned to N-able Technologies' software package, which appeared to offer a relatively easy path into the market, he says.

Unfortunately, Solbrack says, things didn't quite go as planned. Like many other solution providers looking to use third-party software platforms to ease the managed service transition, he quickly ran afoul of a combination of problems with the product, the managed service business model and what he calls "unrealistic expectations."

"We're still moving in that direction," he says. "But for the moment, we're regrouping, refocusing and narrowing our offering."

Slide Show: 4 Tools That Put MSPs In (Remote) Control

Solution providers are setting their sights increasingly on remote monitoring and management (RMM) in the quest to expand their services offerings. It's not hard to see why; RMM fuels a consistent revenue stream and relatively high margins. It also offers potential cost reductions in the form of automation and fewer customer site visits.

"Really, what we talk about is how to evolve your strategy and your existing business. So you've spent a long time developing into a services business. You've got to, obviously, because of the reduction in hardware margins and so on," says Dan Wensley, vice president of partner development at Level Platforms. "We as an entire industry have moved toward a service model, and we really see MSPs as nothing more or less than an extension of that model."

The question for most solution providers, then, is not whether to move into RMM, but how. And, as it turns out, that's not an easy question to answer.

Until recently, offering RMM as a service in any kind of systematic fashion required complex and expensive custom-built solutions that were too resource-intensive for most VARs and too cost-prohibitive for most clients. But as the MSP market has grown and solution providers have migrated to the managed service model, new vendors such as Kaseya, Level Platforms, N-able Technologies and SilverBack Technologies have moved in with software to ease the complexity and cost of RMM. In effect, they provide all of an MSP's basic software infrastructure in a box.

All of these RMM products feed the service provider a constant real-time stream of data from a variety of devices on the client's network--including servers, networking hardware and desktops--and allow them to remotely manage those devices. Each of the RMM vendors has sought to find a balance between ease of deployment and customization; new would-be MSPs generally need a relatively forgiving technical learning curve but also must tailor the application to meet their own capacity and their clients' networks. Most vendors sell the primary monitoring and management console for installation on the solution provider's network, though several offer a hosted service option. Some, but not all platforms, require the installation of one or more software agents on the client's network.

NEXT: RMM growing pains.