Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2022

Top 10 Monitoring Features for Multi-Tenant Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

eG Innovations works with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) across the world, who use eG Enterprise to deliver value-added services to improve their customers’ resilience and business outcomes. Many of these service providers choose eG Enterprise for its secure and granular role-based multi-tenancy support. The service provider does not have to configure and maintain one instance of eG Enterprise for each customer.

Five Key Capabilities You Need to Deliver Modern Managed Services

Enterprises use managed service providers (MSPs) to handle their distributed IT environments in a flexible, responsive, and cost-effective manner. Service providers that help enterprises embrace digital business models and deliver outstanding customer experiences will see faster revenue growth and better profitability.

7 marketing trends MSPs should be watching for in 2022

If you haven’t started planning your marketing activities for 2022, it should be your number one priority this month. But what should you be doing and where do you start? To kick off 2022, I thought a post on the top marketing trends MSPs should watch for in 2022 would be a great springboard to get those creative juices flowing.

MDM vs RMM

For decades, IT teams have relied on on-premises, network-centric approaches to IT management. As these teams have grown to manage more and more cloud- and SaaS-based products for the business users, they have staunchly persisted in their use of legacy management tools. Even the growing mobile, field, and remote workforce has only marginally impacted IT management methods, with most simply finding workarounds to their network-centric systems that leave end-users frustrated and unsatisfied.

Adapting to the Digital Future: IT Efficiency in 2021

In the last year, the dual pressures of accelerating digital transformation and delivering seamless remote experiences have challenged IT teams to fundamentally adapt. Facing constrained budgets, threats from would-be cybercriminals, and a surge in new remote devices, their role has grown both increasingly critical and increasingly complex. NinjaOne's latest report looks at the top challenges and trends impacting IT efficiency. Read the report to learn how manual processes could be costing IT teams time, money, and exposing them to new risk.

Our top prediction for MSP M&A: It's a platform grab right now

The managed services provider (MSP) industry has been rapidly consolidating for the past several years as private equity (PE) firms buy up small IT firms and cobble them together into larger platforms. But that process is evolving quickly for two main reasons: there aren’t enough sellers of quality assets and PE firms have shortened how long they hold their investments. That means they need to hunt for bigger game—and with a rifle, not a shotgun—before they cash out and exit.

Does Your MSP Have a Single Point of Failure?

When I’m speaking to any IT solution provider or managed service provider (MSP), one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “What’s the one mistake you’d recommend any IT businesses avoid?” My answer is always this: Not documenting your business. The reason is simple. If you don’t document your business, you’ll inevitably find your business is prone to an SPF—a single point of failure.

5 IT Documentation Best Practices in 2022

As the IT world continues to grow in size and complexity, an increasing amount of information is needed for both the operation and security of IT devices. It’s nearly impossible for MSPs and IT professionals to remember everything without writing it down somewhere, but “somewhere” needs to be both secure and readily available to reference. Fortunately, IT documentation software was created to be both.

Using automation and monitoring for documentation

I often have discussions with N-able partners who need help capturing data for either regular reporting or just to have when a customer asks for it. Often people will use a tool like BrightGauge to pull data from their RMM platform and generate dashboards and reports. However, these can be overly complex if you only need to capture the data so you have it and can act upon it. What I regularly recommend is that you create a monitoring script to capture just the data that is needed.

Six sales skills MSPs need for successful selling in 2022

The MSP sales process has experienced some serious disruption over the past couple of years as a result of the pandemic, and as we make our way through this fifth wave, it is still unclear how much more we will all have to endure. But your MSP business still needs to grow—and to grow, you need sales, so what are the top sales skills your team needs to generate success in 2022?

Complete Guide to Differential Backups

Business continuity and security are top priorities for IT professionals. Along with data protection tools, data backup plays an important role in keeping an organization running. There is no shortage of tools and methods for backup and restore, but the glut of options can make choosing the most efficient and effective set of backup operations difficult.

How to Beat Burnout: A Survival Guide for MSPs

Now more than ever, it's crucial for MSP owners to be mindful of burnout and to help their teams address it proactively. While it’s been a recognized term among mental health professionals and those in high-stress industries for years, “burnout” has taken on new prominence and meaning during the pandemic. Case in point, searches for "how to leave IT for goat farming" have skyrocketed the past two years.

What is Cloud Backup and How Does It Help Small Business?

Cloud technology has enjoyed exponential growth over the past several years. Increases in broadband and wireless speeds have spurred a rise in everything from cloud storage to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Before the cloud grew into its current form, it was primarily a tool for backing up data in a safe, remote location. Throughout the evolution of cloud, backup and restore remains one of this technology’s most widely-used and important functions.

Sustainable competitive advantage: 10 Ways a Small MSP Can Punch Above Its Weight

Sometimes we associate “big” with power and success, but being small doesn’t mean you can’t compete—you just need to be smarter at creating a sustainable competitive advantage. Here are 10 things you can do as a small managed service provider (MSP) to punch above your weight.

Asset Lifecycle Management Using NinjaOne

NinjaOne released our custom field functionality in 2021, adding a new level of flexibility, customization, and automation power to our platform. Custom fields are an advanced feature that requires setup to use, but once you start, the power and flexibility of this feature is almost limitless. In this blog piece, we’ll walk you through a powerful use case for custom fields in NinjaOne. Refer to part one of this series for a quick overview of NinjaOne Custom Fields.

What Professionals Need to Know About IT Helpdesk Portal Software

Help desks became staples of the IT industry in the early 90s, earning their place by being the most efficient way to deal with calls from IT users. Help desks became the go-to means of dealing with IT troubleshooting as well as handling requests for guidance or new software. This trend rolled out alongside the general progression of IT in the workplace. During this time, technology began to integrate and support every aspect of the organization from marketing to customer service to HR.

Debunking the image-based backup myth

The state of backup technology has moved forward, and many of the old assumptions are no longer true. For years, image-based backup was considered the industry standard. But today’s IT professionals really need full-system recovery capabilities without the built-in inefficiencies of legacy image backup products. Image-based backup backups are far from ideal, especially for managed services providers (MSPs).

Remote monitoring and management for MSPs: Predictions for 2022

Managed service providers (MSPs) proactively deliver on-premises services to client organizations and manage their IT networks. To achieve this, they rely on numerous customized tools designed specifically to manage the complete IT infrastructures of all their clients. MSPs most often rely on remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools to provide services to customers, meet their SLAs on time, and have a good ROI.

No Hyper-V Server 2022 Free-What's that about?

I don’t usually do blog posts on news stories, but this one has the potential to impact a lot of people, so I thought it was worth taking a closer look. The top-level story is that Microsoft announced it will not be releasing Hyper-V Server Free as part of Windows 2022. However, if you’re already using Hyper-V Server Free 2019, you can continue to do so until 2029. Hyper-V Server Free is basically a Windows Server Core on which Microsoft has pre-installed the Hyper-V role.

How to Provide End-User Self-Service Tools with NinjaOne

NinjaOne released our custom field functionality in 2021, adding a new level of flexibility, customization, and automation power to our platform. Custom fields are an advanced feature that requires setup to use, but once you start, the power and flexibility of this feature is almost limitless. In this blog piece, we’ll walk you through a powerful use case for custom fields in NinjaOne. Refer to part one of this series for a quick overview of NinjaOne Custom Fields.

Exploring Ninja Data Protection

With image backup now generally available to our partners, Ninja Data Protection is ready for prime time. When we first launched Ninja Data Protection in 2020, our backup solution was a Windows-only, cloud-only file and folder backup solution. With several hundred partners adopting the solution and providing feedback, we were able to rapidly adapt our backup roadmap to customize the solution to our partners needs and wants.

How to Automate 10 Common IT Time Wasters

Helpdesks and IT teams are inundated with repetitive, timeconsuming, often low-value tasks that distract from larger strategic projects. With most IT leaders saying their staff is already stretched thin, this leaves little room for important projects that will lead to greater organizational productivity and efficiency. Most of the repetitive, time-consuming, and low-value tasks that plague helpdesks can be automated away through scripts and Ninja's automation engine.

2021 Patch Management Best Practices Guide

Patch management is one of the most important tasks an IT team undertakes. Businesses spend significant resources on keeping their infrastructure up-to-date, yet more than half of breaches could have been prevented by installing available software and OS patches. We worked with Ninja partners to understand how they use NinjaOne's patch management capabilities and combined their expertise with our own. In this guide we share those insights so new partners can get the most out of patch management.