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. By doing this, it’s always available at your techs’ fingertips. You can also create automation scripts for when a remediation is required.

So, why would you want to use monitoring to capture data?

Well, maybe you have some data that you need to capture, but you don’t need to have it in a spreadsheet. A good example of this is Bitlocker keys. You don’t need to have a list of all the computers and their keys (most of the time), however you do need them kept securely. Furthermore, if Bitlocker is off, you may want to enable it through automation and capture the keys afterward. This is something you can do in less than five minutes within most RMMs by using scripts that are available out there—take a look at our Automation Cookbook  for some examples.

Another use case would be to monitor if certain basic apps have been installed. For example, your customer may want to make sure that all devices have Microsoft Office, Teams, a VPN client, and Slack on them. You can create one or more monitoring services to check for this. This allows you to be alerted if someone removes one of those apps and you can use automation to remediate it and install any missing apps.

Finally, your customer may want you to capture the size of all PST files across a user’s profile drive. To manage this, you can create a monitoring script that captures that information, and, if it is found to be bigger than “X” meg or GB, it will trigger an alert so you can contact the user to let them know.

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Uploading data directly to an external resource

There are a lot of examples where you could and/or should be using monitoring to capture data. People often focus only on running scripts on the computers and uploading the data somewhere. Sometimes (not always) that will be required, and we should discuss that too. A good example of this would be if someone asks for a report of all users across all computers in a table format along with their group memberships, or a local AD report per company/domain.

Depending on the RMM you use, you may be able to export the data to a report and/or export it through things like custom fields or APIs.  If you can’t use those, you may want to create a script that will run on each machine, then either upload to a cloud service database, file storage, or simply email a report per machine to an email of your choice.

What I find is that people often do things the hard way purely because they are used to it. I recommend you go and review what your RMM can do, how it can do it, and then figure out if someone already did it. Oftentimes, people have created scripts, mechanisms, or tools to generate those reports for you. If that’s the case, reuse it—it’ll help you get a jump ahead.

Happy scripting!

Marc-Andre Tanguay is head automation nerd at N‑able. You can follow him on Twitter at @automation_nerd.