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.

If you’re new to the whole automation piece, check out this blog David Weeks wrote on why automation is crucial to helping you scale your MSP business.

Although many MSPs can clearly see the benefits to their bottom line of automating more of these—often time-consuming—tasks, we still only see a small percentage of MSPs utilizing automation effectively in their businesses.

There are a couple of key reasons for this:

1. Implementing automation can be difficult if it’s down to a small team, or even one individual, to track the key issues and then prioritize and code the scripts. This means that automation, when it is implemented, can be implemented in an ad hoc fashion when techs have time, rather than as part of a cohesive business strategy.

2. There will always be some resistance to automation as long as you have non-developers writing code to automate. If you don’t have techs that have the core coding skills and knowledge of PowerShell, the idea of automation can be really daunting. While some techs can do this and enjoy it, often it is seen as a necessary evil rather than a career-driven one. And if you’re thinking of just hiring techs with coding skills, it can be prohibitively expensive—with the labour and skills gap, coding resources come at a premium. So, understandably, businesses are often resistant to hiring this expensive talent.

These are some of the key reasons we created our original Automation Cookbook. It provides a free resource for our partners to find and implement scripts for some of the most common tasks without having to get into the minutia of coding themselves. While some of the scripts are written in-house, many are written by other MSPs on their own automation journeys. To date this has been hugely successful for us and our partners, and we’ve seen a nearly 20% increase in script downloads in the past year.

As we’re keen to help the MSP community as a whole embrace the power of automation in their businesses, we have decided to launch The PowerShell Cookbook. This is an open resource that currently includes around 140 (and growing) PowerShell scripts that will work for MSPs and IT pros using any RMM platforms or tools, not just ours.

So, if you’re keen to start your automation journey or even if you’re looking for help with your existing automation program, come and check it out!

Marc-Andre Tanguay is Head Automation Nerd at N‑able. You can follow him on Twitter at @automation_nerd