Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

N-central Custom Properties, if you're not using them, you should be

Over the years, I’ve spoken with many of our partners that use N-central, and it always amazes me how few leverage custom properties. Often when I explain one or two uses for them, their minds are immediately racing with other potential uses as well, so today we are going to look at some of the many uses for custom properties and how they can benefit the support and service you provide to your clients.

Automation: Check out our open-to-all PowerShell Cookbook

Automation is critical to unlocking efficiencies in your MSP business and helping you grow. By creating scripts and policies that can remediate some of the most common problems your customers face, from enable and monitor bitlocker or checking battery health to monitoring backups, you’re freeing your techs up to deal with bigger issues. This effectively allows you to be able to do more with what you’ve got and take on additional customers without having to employ more techs.

N-able wins gold, two silver, and bronze at American Business Awards

Earlier this month, we were delighted to have been awarded Gold for IT Department of the Year at the American Business Awards®. Last year (2021) was a transformative year for N-able and the award was received for the IT Department’s ability to spin off, revamp, and rebuild a whole IT infrastructure for a brand-new public company and be fully operational within an impressive timeline of only 10 months.

The Value of Employee Engagement

There was an IT Salary Report 2022 that was recently completed by a Facebook group that our #HeadNerds team is a part of called “This Is an IT Support Group”. Although the survey asked for salary information for IT personnel, there was also a section in the survey where the respondents were asked, “What is the biggest pain point you have working in IT?”

Thinking smarter about M&A-how automation makes a difference

As a business, we talk a lot about automation as one of the key ways to drive efficiency and growth within an individual MSP. By automating the response to and remediation of some of the more common IT issues customers face, technicians are freed up to spend more time dealing with bigger issues. Ultimately, this means the business is able to handle more customers without having to invest in growing its technician base.

Adding Mac Support, Part 3: Alphabet Soup

One difficult part of taking on a new role, especially a technical one, is learning all the jargon. Listening in on a conversation among specialists in any field you’re not intimately familiar with can be highly confounding. It sounds like they’re speaking English. At least some of the words are English, but you’ve never heard them put together in that particular order before. I heard someone mention SMB and SME? Is that a Small to Medium Business or Small/Mid-sized Enterprise?

N-central Hardening Part 2 (including some best practices)

In my final blog as the Head Nerd for N-central and now your newest Product Manager for N-central, I thought it would be time to update my previous blog from July, 2021 and provide a few more details as to why hardening the N-central server—and for that matter any on-premises server that has an operating system—is critically important.

When, How, and Where to Patch Workstations and Laptops

Patching devices, whether you’re an internal IT team or an MSP, is something that takes time, costs money, and honestly isn’t a particularly pleasant job. Different products do different jobs at patching, but no matter what you use, you should always make sure you patch in a timely manner. If we go back ten years, it used to take upwards of 30 days for people to exploit security vulnerabilities, but in recent years, we’ve seen that decrease to 15 days.