Have You Outgrown Your RMM? The Obvious Red Flags to Look For

As your MSP business grows and develops, it’s highly likely that at some point you’re going to find that the tools you originally chose to support your business may not be enough for your current needs. Obviously, no vendor wants to lose customers, and we’d all rather make sure you’re using your existing tools to their full capacity. However, there are going to be times when your existing toolset will be holding you back, and you need to know how to spot that.

To help you negotiate this crossroads in the growth of your business, I’m going to cover three key areas in this series of blogs:  

1. The obvious flags that signal it might be time to change your RMM,
2. The less obvious flags that you might otherwise miss or gloss over, and
3. When it’s not time to change your RMM, and some of the things you need to be doing to keep tabs on the performance of your platform.

This should help you ensure you don’t cause yourself unnecessary stress by leaving such a big decision until the last minute.

For the purpose of this first blog, let’s look at the obvious flags that signal it could be time for a change your RMM platform.

For me, the number one thing that shouts change is if you’re suffering major growing pains as you scale. If you’re really struggling with managing and monitoring the number of devices that you support in your environment then something really isn’t right. For example, if you’re finding it slow to onboard new customers because you’re having to manually monitor agent deployment or if you haven’t been able to (or can’t) automate key parts of this process.

Another massive area of concern would be if you’re losing confidence in your monitoring results. This could be for a number of reasons, for example, if your alerts are stale or misconfigured, or if there’s lots of white noise, meaning that you’re essentially monitoring everything and your techs are just ignoring things because there’s so much coming at them. This can have a huge impact on your incident remediation, making it very reactive and driving techs onsite to resolve problems. As we drive more and more to increased efficiency within the MSP sector this is not a position you need to be putting your business in.

Another all-too common sign of RMM failure is what I like to call patch mis-management. If you’re underutilizing your RMM to essentially detect, deploy, and approve patches, it may be because you haven’t configured it correctly, but equally it can be a sign that your RMM is not up to the job. On top of this, and this ties back to my previous point, you don’t want to be in a position where monitored patch status is being ignored or treated lowest in priority because of the amount of alerts that your techs have coming in.

These last two issues, can really get under the skin of your techs and create a low-level lack of trust and loss of confidence in the platform you’re using. If your techs feel like they’ve lost trust in your RMM and its ability to deliver; it’s a strong indicator that it might be time for a change and to look at something fresh.

Understanding the messages from your techs

The challenge in bigger organizations is that it can be difficult for people at the director or manager level to have the insight that their techs do as to whether their RMM platform is holding them back. So, what are the types of things that your techs might be coming to you saying that would trigger you to conclude there’s a problem that needs investigating?

Clearly you can see if it’s taking you forever to onboard a new customer or you’re having to manually deploy agents, but it goes further than that.   

If your techs are coming to you and saying, “we finally finished that new customer roll out, but it was a lot of work,” what they probably mean is there was a lot of manual work. This could be a sign that your RMM is not working hard enough for them. On-boarding is not something MSPs typically charge a huge amount for, so it’s a process you need to be working as efficiently as possible.

Alternatively, if they’re saying things like “We finally got all the alerts cleaned up as it was really messy,” that could be a sign that the alerts have been neglected, probably because there’s too much noise. This could leave your techs being forced to work reactively to put out fires, rather than having the RMM set priorities for them.

It could be something to do with the network in the customer’s environment, but it could also be a resourcing issue and that your RMM isn’t capable of just adding another hundred or thousand devices and being able to run new discoveries at the same time across multiple devices. Similarly, if they’re telling you that the alerts are just not there or half of the devices, you’re adding new are unavailable, something’s going on.

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Is there better way that starting afresh with a new RMM?

So, do you start afresh on your existing RMM solution? Or do you make sure there isn’t something better out there to be able to meet your needs? Clearly ripping out and changing something that is so critical to the operation of your MSP business is no small ask. It’s worth making a list of the key issues you’re facing and the new criteria by which you need to evaluate performance. This can not only help to evaluate new vendors but also give you clear talking points with your current vendor.

Looking to re-onboard might be your first port of call—it should be cheaper, easier, and less of a burden (including less training). This is especially true if your existing RMM does tick all the boxes for what you need (and if the product is fundamentally solid). But that doesn’t mean it’s the only answer.

In my next blog I’ll take a look at some of the less obvious flags you should look out for with your RMM.

MSPs can face some obvious challenges in knowing what the right RMM tools are for their business. The N‑able N‑central team helps mitigate these concerns by offering customers with existing RMM contracts with certain N‑able competitors the opportunity to switch to N‑central for just $1/month for up to 12 months*, as well as providing onboarding services for 1-on-1 training of techs, and migration services for hassle-free client migration. For existing N‑central partners, N‑able also provides health checks so you’re getting the optimum value from N‑central. To find out more contact your Partner Success Manager.

Chris Massey, Senior Manager of Partner Growth, N‑able

Chris has over 13 years’ experience in leading service delivery, technical operations, product, and marketing teams for an Enterprise MSP. He helped grow a service provider from 25 to 280 employees over a decade and was a key part of several organic growth and M&A activities for the service provider. Chris is focused on working with partners to overcome common challenges they experience with the MSP. 

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