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bj2001holt
Apr 6, 2003

Will do my best to keep this short. I work for one of the largest MSPs in the world, top 10 according to the stupid MSP mentor list. I started working for the company at 5 people, currently over 250 employees in our division (now part of a larger company). We use a combination of monitoring systems which sort-of apply to the conversation here, our experiences have varied drastically over the years so I think I have some pretty good input.


N-central:
We use this system for performance monitoring of infrastructure devices. We have been a customer of N-able since 2005, we were one of their first real customers and are currently one of their (possible the) largest. We currently monitor approximately 350 customers, 15,000 devices and 400,000 monitored services mostly made up of servers and network equipment. We run the system in-house out of our datacenters and it is a very efficient system considering our size.

We have a love-hate relationship with N-able and always have. In the early years the product struggled with stability problems and horrible support, these issues have basically gone away. The monitoring functions in N-able are amazing, solid with a great UI. The remote control functions have vastly improved over the past few years to the point that we use it full time for an 80-person NOC. Deployment of N-central is insanely fast. We have spent significant time working with them on development of the system and been able to influence a number of features that have really helped us grow our company.

The thing that always pissed us off about N-able that they still struggle with is poor development control, poor development testing, and piss poor documentation. System upgrades (every 6months or so) are always a mystery, our recent upgrade resulted in 30 support tickets on undocumented issues. This being 2 months after the last HF release...who passed this crap through QA...seriously? They have also spent the past few years watching them integrate a bunch of crappy products that clutter the system. Their AV and backup solutions are the worst in the market. Meanwhile they are dropping key support items that their larger customers need, like voice system monitoring. Their desktop management is terrible and we really wish they would re-focus on the market they are good in.


netForensics:
We have used this system for about 2 years for security monitoring. We moved to this as a cloud based replacement following the Cisco MARS system dieing a slow death. We run the service out of our datacenters as a "cloud" system for our customers. About 200 customers on this system, not sure on device count.

Overall they are an interesting company. Good monitoring system but it is still suffering from the early product development blues. Weird problems, poorly designed UI, and un-scalable deployment practices to name a few.


Kaseya:
We use Kaseya for desktop management, patch management, managed AV (Kaspersky) and recently mobile device management. Our service desk is about 50 customers with about 40 employees in the department. Customers range from 50 to 500 devices, not sure on the total system device count.

We have been pretty happy with Kaseya for what we use it for. I don't personally use the system a whole lot but of the features I occasionally use work well; Patching, asset management, remote control. We have been happy with it. The system has been reliable and fast, we run it out of our datacenter.

Probably our biggest issue with Kaseya isn't the product itself but the company and its sales/pricing structure. Their sales staff is terrible, they seem like a bunch of used-car salesmen who have no clue what they are selling or who their market is. Whenever new features come out the company tries to charge astronomical amounts of money for licensing, AV and MDM are perfect examples of this. Eventually they figure out that they cant charge 10x everyone else for products that are half-good just because it is more convenient since it is "integrated".

bj2001holt fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Jun 5, 2012

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