The power of N‑central’s reactive support tools
By Paul Kelly
Prior to joining N‑able, I worked for MSPs that supported clients all over the island of Ireland. That career in IT started back in the last millennium (yes, I’m that old), when reactive support often meant hopping into the car and driving to a customer to resolve their issues in person and on some rare occasions jumping on a flight if the situation was that urgent.
Slowly over time as we moved from dial-up to ISDN and then to broadband we started to get limited remote access to these customers. But even then it sometimes felt as though it would be quicker to get in the car than wait for the remote sessions to establish. However, as speeds have increased, remote reactive IT support sessions have become quicker and more reliable, so much so that today customers expect their issues to be resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible.
In this blog I’m going to look at some of N‑central RMM’s reactive support tools and how they can help you provide the best levels of service to your customers.
Direct Support
N‑central’s Direct Support tool was introduced way back in N‑central 10.0 and for me it was love at first sight. When I’ve demoed this feature in the past, I’ve often joke that if I’d had this functionality working at an MSP, I might have a few less grey hairs and still be working there. The ability to remotely access end-user devices through the RMM’s UI was a massive gamer changer. With Direct Support, you could now start to troubleshoot and resolve issues for your customers without even the need to disturb the end-user.
Direct Support allows you to do so much, including the ability to stop and start services, see what processes are running, edit the register, update third-party applications, toggle on or off start-up applications, change default printers and print test pages, access a live command prompt (which also gives you access to PowerShell), transfer files to and from the device, and run scripts and automation polices on demand. Often when demoing these features, it’s not uncommon to be asked if there’s anything it can’t do. So, to give you a feel of how Direct Support can benefit you, let’s look at a couple of common reactive support issues on helpdesks and see how Direct Support can be used to resolve these issues.
“My computer is slow…”
If there’s one thing, we all hate, it’s when our computer slows down. Whether it’s taking forever to log in, or just generally slow to respond to any commands, there are few things more frustrating, and we won’t hesitate to log a support ticket for this. Using Direct Support, you can get straight down to business. The Processes tab will show you all running processes on the device, and by default will list them in order of which processes are using the most, this allows you to identify problematic processes and end them if needed. You can use the Applications tab to see if any programs have been installed lately that may impact the performance of the device and remove them if they support a silent uninstall, and you can use the Startup Applications tab to see what’s running on startup, and what impact they are having and then switch off anything that doesn’t need to be running. These are just three easy steps you can take before you ever even need to consider a remote control session.
“I can’t print…”
If only I had a euro/pound/dollar for every time I’ve heard this. Direct Support again allows you to tackle this issue without immediately relying on a remote control session. For a start, jump to the Printer tab, select the user from the dropdown, and ensure they are printing to the right printer, you’d be amazed how often this happens. From here you’ll be able to manage print jobs with actions like cancel, restart, pause, or resume—you can even change the default printer and print a test page if needed. Sometimes though fixing printer issues isn’t as simple as that, maybe you’ve tried to clear the print queue, but they just won’t budge. Well, you can pop over to the Services tab, and stop the Print Spooler service, then head over to the File System tab, browser to C:\Windows\System32\spool\printers, delete whatever files are stuck in there, then head back to the Services tab to restart the Print Spooler service before heading back to the Printers tab to print a test page to ensure the issue is resolved.
One of the great benefits of resolving issues using Direct Support, is that every action you take is logged in the Audit Trail, so if you have an integrated ticketing solution, you can easily select the actions you have taken and create or update support tickets with them.
Domain User Management
Another common call driver on the helpdesk is users forgetting their passwords or locking themselves out of accounts. If you have an N‑central agent installed on a domain controller, you can utilize N‑central domain User Management to retrieve all the users for that domain so you can unlock accounts, enable/disable them, delete them if they are no longer required, and, of course, reset passwords, again saving you time and effort on this common helpdesk issue.
Remote Control
Of course, while you’d like to be able to resolve everything without ever disrupting the end user, there are going to be issues where you have to access the device. N‑central has up to six different remote control options, allowing you to control as many different types of devices as possible. The most commonly used remote control tool for reactive support issues is Take Control, this will give you a live view of the end user’s device, so you can see exactly what you would if you were standing right in front of it. I’ve a soft spot for Take Control as I used it for a few years before I joined N‑able. It offers more functionality than a Remote Desktop session, and the more recent additions of voice and video calls only enhance the support experience with the end user.
These are just some examples of reactive support in N‑central. If you are reading this and have questions about anything here, why not join me on the N-Central office hours at www.n-able.com/events or reach out to me directly—my details are below.
Paul Kelly is the Head Nerd at N‑able. You can follow him on Twitter at @HeadNerdPaul, LinkedIn and Reddit at u/Paul _Kelly
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