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Ug so the business I have been working at is closing. After a series of poor management decisions before I took over left us with ~$300k in debt. So it looks like my best tech and I are going to go into business for ourselves. Oh this is kind of scary and exciting. My girlfriend can do our books, invoicing, etc. My tech and I can do the rest. Anyone have any cheap ideas for monitoring? Like really cheap.
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Dec 10, 2013 19:05
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NAble used to offer free basic agents. I would start there.
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Dec 11, 2013 02:49
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Featured Creature posted:Anyone have any cheap ideas for monitoring? Like really cheap. We only pay $2 a client for GFI MAX currently....though if you want to get REALLY CHEAP you can try out Meraki's system manager as well...poo poo's free, yo. https://meraki.cisco.com/products/systems-manager If you're going into business as an MSP, I'd consider using their networking gear as well, their cloud managed AP's and Appliances are stupid easy to deploy and manage.
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Dec 12, 2013 22:01
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Use Aerohive quotes to beat down Meraki quotes with, the two companies have very similar product offerings. Meraki wins out for having a better web portal and making it really easy to do stuff, Aerohive lets you fiddle with way more stuff but definitely needs you to know more about what you're doing.
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Dec 12, 2013 22:04
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I'm curious - do you guys publicly post your MSP's pricing levels - even if just a general guide? I'm finishing up the rebranding of my company (http://www.euclidnet.com), and the pricing section is the last bit I need to decide on. I'm leaning towards publicly posting my service tiers, just because I'm personally really annoyed when shopping for vendors and all I get is a 'request a followup from a sales guy!' when the company is detailing their product offering. But, thought I'd ask you guys. If not, I'd love to hear your thoughts on why you don't...
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Dec 16, 2013 08:19
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The problem with trying to put any sort of indicative pricing on your website is that every customer is going to be a little bit different and have different requirements. You can end up loving yourself in multiple ways - people will expect the price on your website to be the maximum they will have to pay for something, and potential clients might be put off by what they see is a high price and never get in contact. Being able to open up a conversation with these people to get an idea of their budgets and therefore what service they can expect is important. If you have a set of services that are a fixed cost to you then by all means list those.
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Dec 16, 2013 12:11
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mindphlux posted:
To make it a little harder for the competition to know what we're up to and because if price is the primary thing a potential client is thinking about when picking their MSP, we're not going to be in the running anyway. Our plan prices are fixed and updated once a year, but we don't have them online for that reason.
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Dec 16, 2013 18:16
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Caged posted:The problem with trying to put any sort of indicative pricing on your website is that every customer is going to be a little bit different and have different requirements. You can end up loving yourself in multiple ways - people will expect the price on your website to be the maximum they will have to pay for something, and potential clients might be put off by what they see is a high price and never get in contact. Being able to open up a conversation with these people to get an idea of their budgets and therefore what service they can expect is important. This is the approach that I am taking with my new business. I plan on pretty much customizing the prices for each client. I have 5 that are already set up on plans, and am going to keep them where they are. Also, Thank you all for your contributions for monitoring clients.
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Dec 16, 2013 18:43
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hmm, those sound like good reasons. but... well, in my mind it seems like posting prices would help weed people out who weren't ever going to sign on with me to begin with. I really hate having the "pricing chat" with potential clients, and it's always really annoying when I devote a couple hours to setting up an "interview" with a new potential client where it becomes apparent maybe 5 minutes into the meeting that I'm way outside of their budget - if they even had one to begin with. I get all my business referral right now, which is amazing, but I'd like to start advertising - so I feel like a sort of filter would just be beneficial to keep from wasting everyone's time as I get exposed to the General Public? Maybe I'm being Bad At Business or naïve or something though? I guess a compromise might be to list my service tiers and offerings, but have like a 'contact us for a quote' button rather than the actual price? hummm.
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Dec 17, 2013 04:14
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Don't post your prices. Your website is not going to close deals for you. There are reasons multiple posts say don't do it so don't do it.
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Dec 17, 2013 07:45
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Look at your competitors' web sites and see if they post their prices (they don't).
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Dec 19, 2013 02:18
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NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:Look at your competitors' web sites and see if they post their prices (they don't). One actually does, and is fairly successful - which is partly where I got the idea. <edited out url> but I'm not trying to argue - I mean if you all think it's that horrible of an idea, I guess that's a fairly strong consensus. mindphlux fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Jan 8, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2013 05:04
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mindphlux posted:One actually does, and is fairly successful - which is partly where I got the idea. Man, your site is so much better than theirs, so you at least have that.
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Dec 19, 2013 05:13
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Stugazi posted:Don't post your prices. Your website is not going to close deals for you. There are reasons multiple posts say don't do it so don't do it. thanks for being insistent on shutting me down. I've already had 3 potential new clients contact me this year that I think would have just pissed off if I had my prices up. one is a ~25 user company (big for me) who I think will end up hiring me. the whole deal closing bit has been extremely important/touchy with them - so I guess there's merit to it all. I perpetually have cost-saving goggles on - but I think most of the people who engage my company have ease-of-service and hey-we-know-these-guys-lets-just-hire-them goggles on. in other news, a GFI rep tried to court me back last week. lol. he listed all these really useless new features to their software, and I asked if there was any upgrade to their patching system, 3rd party antivirus support, remote access components (teamviewer lol), and a couple other reasons I ended up leaving them. answer : a solid "uhhhmmmmmmmm no, not really.' =( good luck guys. mindphlux fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Jan 17, 2014 |
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Jan 17, 2014 11:35
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Anyone find an SMB friendly SAN? We've done a few here and there but for SMB budgets it's hard to make it all pencil yet it's so important. Not interested in Netgear, Synology or QNAP as business class solutions. Curious what others have done.
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Jan 31, 2014 22:58
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Stugazi posted:Anyone find an SMB friendly SAN? We've done a few here and there but for SMB budgets it's hard to make it all pencil yet it's so important. What price range are you looking for? HP's P2000(MSA's) and Dells MD3200's are relatively cheap and aimed at SMB, the Dells can do SSD caching where as HP can not.
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Jan 31, 2014 23:01
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We are looking at the MD3200 from Dell. Problem is once I configure it the way it *should* be it's over budget. We won a new client that already has an MD3200 so we're getting some experience on it. Seems OK but it's impossible to get our Dell team to call us back to ask important questions, like can we have two drive pools for fast and slow storage etc? Any ideas?
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Feb 1, 2014 08:07
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Stugazi posted:We are looking at the MD3200 from Dell. Problem is once I configure it the way it *should* be it's over budget. I don't know what you're trying to hit then, I'd really need to understand the budget or environment you are supporting. Also raid levels are important, 4 15k 146GB disks RAID 10 are fast, leverage the data's cost. quote:We won a new client that already has an MD3200 so we're getting some experience on it. Seems OK but it's impossible to get our Dell team to call us back to ask important questions, like can we have two drive pools for fast and slow storage etc? Any ideas? If you do SSD tiering the Write/Read hit will be taken by the SSD pool then sent to disk, so performance will be dependent. Some vendors are keen on doing a 75/25 split 75% of cache is reads 25% writes completely depends on vendor though. Also are you buying direct or going through a re-seller? If a small show check CDW's pricing they sometimes and outweigh dell direct, as they can buy in a larger discount; or tell dell you're looking into "competitor and they offer some stuff can we get something competitive?"
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Feb 1, 2014 08:17
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50-75 user companies are a sweet spot for us. At that size it's important to have shared storage and proper VMware. However, budgets. I am pretty good at laying out the story of how employees are their biggest cost and they spend most of their time at a computer and how data is the lifeblood of the org etc. Still, there's a breaking point for cost for most SMB owners. That magic number is around $25k for a full project. One of our guys mentioned OpenFiler for iSCSI. They have a commercial version and can even do two nodes for redundancy. Once it's fully costed out it's not much savings though, especially if you do two boxes to match a dual controller scenario but I think we could get away with storage on the actual hosts in most cases. I may need to rework that scenario. There's no magic bullet. I just wanted to ask so I'd know I wasn't missing something obvious for our smaller storage dependent clients.
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Feb 1, 2014 08:55
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The problem with storage on the hosts is that while it's quite cheap in terms of licensing and the fact you already own the hardware that the disks are going into, it really doesn't work particularly well with the smaller VMware deployment of having 2-3 hosts, since you end up having to lose so much capacity due to the fact the data is only spread across a few nodes. Is the Dell VRTX completely out of the question? It seems to do some magic regarding shared storage that I don't fully understand. Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Feb 1, 2014 |
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Feb 1, 2014 13:22
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Stugazi posted:50-75 user companies are a sweet spot for us. Have you considered direct attached storage?
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Feb 1, 2014 15:58
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Syano posted:Have you considered direct attached storage? Seriously, SAN and "Small Business" just really do not compute. Also, I have had no problems with NAS appliances for <3 hosts. Just remember to leave higher IO loads on DAS storage, and not rely so much on the shared NAS. Also, to include a bit more insight to the MSP side of things. We currently utilize Level Platforms, which... isn't exactly a great product. It does have it's pros, but also many cons. We are using it for monitoring/alerting for 35 sites. It's pretty clunky and takes a ton of time to get the alerts configured properly.
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Feb 8, 2014 01:14
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:I don't know what you're trying to hit then, I'd really need to understand the budget or environment you are supporting. Also raid levels are important, 4 15k 146GB disks RAID 10 are fast, leverage the data's cost. Wouldn't 2012 R2 jbods/storage spaces/SDD+Raid shelf and use powershell to force specific loads to the SSD be an option? It may exotic-y and out of the scope of an MSP project though.
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Feb 8, 2014 18:54
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whitelabel-able system state/sql/exchange server compatible "cloud backup" solutions : go! (most every business I support has their own kooky setup. I'm looking to bring some order to the madness, while making a bit of profit on the margins - would love to hear y'alls setup / experience with vendors...)
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Mar 8, 2014 08:39
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mindphlux posted:whitelabel-able system state/sql/exchange server compatible "cloud backup" solutions : go! Like herding cats. Unless you want to get a SPLA agreement with msft and rent hardware and cals will be difficult. Or get into a vertical where you can provide a boxable solution to support a narrow set of apps. A friend pushes a lot clients to effortless office.com but that just makes him their 100% commission salesman. Mostly just go vmware no matter how small the client and get a decent backup like veeam or Datto and charge appropriately for your services. Most MSPs don't charge enough.
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Mar 8, 2014 15:37
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incoherent posted:Wouldn't 2012 R2 jbods/storage spaces/SDD+Raid shelf and use powershell to force specific loads to the SSD be an option? It may exotic-y and out of the scope of an MSP project though. It can, or just by an adaptec controller which will RAID 1 or RAID 10 SSD's and front end I/O.
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Mar 11, 2014 06:40
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Dell's affordable MD3xxx series iSCSI SAN can now mix and match storage pools (SSD and 10k) so we are looking at that as an option. It's half the price of an EMC VNXE. For SMB I think it's acceptable. I hope so, as we have a PO for one now. 
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Mar 11, 2014 06:47
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Stugazi posted:Dell's affordable MD3xxx series iSCSI SAN can now mix and match storage pools (SSD and 10k) so we are looking at that as an option. Nice those are good boxes, just make sure you load the latest firmware on those things before you start loading data on it.
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Mar 11, 2014 06:54
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Nice those are good boxes, just make sure you load the latest firmware on those things before you start loading data on it. Dilbert, how do you spec your storage? Not completely practical for us to run iometer on a dozen servers to get iops info. Slightly concerned about this dell box serving storage to that many VMs. Box will have 9 900gb 10k drives.
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Mar 12, 2014 02:13
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Stugazi posted:Dilbert, how do you spec your storage? Not completely practical for us to run iometer on a dozen servers to get iops info. Slightly concerned about this dell box serving storage to that many VMs. Usually I spec out what the environment is using currently, you an find this out with Dell's DPACK, VMware's capacity planner, or custom windows perfmon graphs. I'm generally more interested in the IOPS the server is using rather than determining Disk GB usage, granted you need to play for GB and growth usage but you'll mostly run out of IOPS before or when you hit your GB limit. Additionally you can also check the old array and see what kind of IOPS the box is reporting, and then it is determining based on things like latency, queues, and other metrics to determine how heavy I am hitting that IOP thresholds, then what the RAID penalty is. http://theithollow.com/2012/03/understanding-raid-penalty/ Generally you don't want to put everything in a large raid set, not only for rebuild times but for data access larger spanned raid sets can have worse performance on data quote:Box will have 9 900gb 10k drives. Generally speaking there is a common way of doing things, but again it completely depends on the use case and the data it is hosting. Fileservers/Exchange mailboxes/archival data - NL-SAS or SATA, usually in RAID 5 or RAID 6, writes take a penalty but reads don't. SQL/SERVER BOOT DRIVE/Front end server - 10-15k RAID 10, gives me some nice redundancy with good R/W performance as needed. Of course in SMB clients I see usually people just do everything RAID 10 which, isn't the best because loss of 2 drives in a single logical volume trashes the volume. Alternatively, people will often raid 6 everything then wonder why writing data is so slow. How many VM's are you loading it up with? What are their functions? Are you going NFS or ISCSI? Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 03:17
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Stugazi posted:Like herding cats. Unless you want to get a SPLA agreement with msft and rent hardware and cals will be difficult. you're talking onsite backup for each client though right? or how you're building your own MSP's "cloud" offering for your clients on your own infrastructure? sorry, everything you're talking about makes complete sense for a bullet proof one-off onsite backup for a couple servers, but as far as off site I'm just making sure I'm not missing something. just for reference, I've been getting quotes from 3rd party vendors that do whitelabel-able offsite backups - folks like IASO, Intronis, etc.
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Mar 13, 2014 03:03
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:
Thanks for the info! I'll have the guys run Dell DPACK. I didn't know that existed. It's free right? The Servers are a mix of lightly loaded Windows Servers, a couple of Cisco Unified Communications boxes for Business Edition 6000 voice and 2 Linux boxes. No Exchange or SQL today but they are planning a SQL and ERP box soon. We'll go iSCSI. I like the flexibility of NFS but since it's not a NetApp iSCSI seems like the best choice. My knowledge is a bit dated on SANs so maybe that's no longer relevant? mindphlux, I tell clients we can give them fort knox data security but it will come with a fort knox pricetag. Pick a standard with an optional offsite component and make sure they understand the risk / tradeoff of not automating that nightly transfer. If they are so cheap they want it for free they don't respect their own data or technology. That's a red flag. Most good business people will understand this important business function and will look for you to provide 1-2 options that are sized right for their finances/risk. Financial/medical/legal clients definitely get this need.
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Mar 14, 2014 04:59
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Stugazi posted:Thanks for the info! I'll have the guys run Dell DPACK. I didn't know that existed. It's free right? quote:The Servers are a mix of lightly loaded Windows Servers, a couple of Cisco Unified Communications boxes for Business Edition 6000 voice and 2 Linux boxes. No Exchange or SQL today but they are planning a SQL and ERP box soon. UCS should be able to give you a break down of local datastores and some network IO. SQL and ERP I'd segment an own pool or RAID 10 for, maybe store some OS VMDKS since this will be small I/O yet high IOPS. quote:We'll go iSCSI. I like the flexibility of NFS but since it's not a NetApp iSCSI seems like the best choice. My knowledge is a bit dated on SANs so maybe that's no longer relevant?
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Mar 15, 2014 16:39
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I work for a medium msp (almost 50 employees) where its a requirement that all clients have backups for servers. About half use hp livevault or crashplan. Most of them have no backups for the end users, and use terminal server or citrix heavily. Backups are a lot less expensive than recreating everything from scratch. Has anyone used symform for backups?
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Mar 17, 2014 06:59
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Just moved over to a company that has a pretty good MSP business going, with a fairly standard complement of random software applications cobbled together to cover patch management, asset inventory/discovery, remote assistance, anti-virus, etc. I'd like to dive more into something more consolidated from an RMM standpoint, but this thread spans multiple years. As with many software packages, this looks like a "lets pick the least bad option", which I think we're all ok with. With all the consolidations/purchases, etc. in the market at this point, what are people currently using/happy with? Maneki Neko fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Apr 15, 2014 |
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Apr 15, 2014 22:51
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The answer is different depending on your size, needs, typical client etc. Also, the RMM shouldn't be chosen without a plan for a PSA. I'd argue PSA first and RMM second. Autotask has some advantages over CW but CW is finally getting modern-ish. Never used Autotask so I may have a "grass is greener" perspective. For RMM I think the big question is would you use someone else's NOC? If so, IMHO Continuum is your only choice. If not, GFI is your price / ease of use leader.
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Apr 15, 2014 23:47
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We're at probably 3500ish managed assets, 300ish servers or so, scattered over a couple of states (and growing). Typical client is probably a 50ish person "professional" company and in most cases we have decent connectivity options to them (10mbps up to gigabit). I don't think we would want to use someone else's NOC, just basically at a "should we just keep developing the stuff we're using now" point, which spurred the look. Basically, what I'd like to roll up/consolidate are:
We have existing billing/crm/etc systems that I need to poke at more to see if they're worth keeping or dumping.
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Apr 16, 2014 01:33
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Stugazi posted:The answer is different depending on your size, needs, typical client etc. I agree with all of this. I don't really use Continuum's NOC services, but out of everything I've trialed and been quoted on, Continuum and GFI are the two I've liked enough to actually use. GFI has cheap going for it, but uses Teamviewer and I didn't have confidence in the patching and reporting. Continuum has their 3rd party NOC going for it, and uses Logmein. I have stuck with Continuum just because I can't stand Teamviewer. But teamviewer has actually pushed out quite a few new versions since I started with GFI, maybe I should look at that again... Maneki Neko posted:We're at probably 3500ish managed assets, 300ish servers or so, scattered over a couple of states (and growing). Typical client is probably a 50ish person "professional" company and in most cases we have decent connectivity options to them (10mbps up to gigabit).  I'll get that big one day  what I'd recommend is choosing a smaller client that is easy to work with and trialing the platform you're thinking about with their site for a month. See if you like how it works and go from there. That's basically what I did when I was doing my search a couple years back.
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Apr 16, 2014 02:17
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Working for an msp of 6 guys. 750 computers, 40 ish servers all in the same state. LabTech has been an awesome solution for asset management, remote access, monitored services, scripts, patching, the works. The only thing it lacks is a quality ticketing system so we have ConnectWise as a supplement. The two pair great together. This job has been an awesome experience-gainer as I'm allowed to do anything I can learn to do. No limitations and the guys I work with have great patience to help me along when I need it. It's paying off for everybody as I'm taking a huge work load off the other guys and sharing whatever new info I pick up with the rest of the team.
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Apr 16, 2014 04:27
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Out of curiosity, anyone spent much time looking at Microsoft Intune as an RMM type tool? The pricing looks high (not sure what the discount breaks look like beyond 250 seats) compared to the other options we looked it, shame you can't just spla the goddamn thing, but Microsoft seems hell bent on screwing over MSPs on their cloud stuff 
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Apr 28, 2014 21:54
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