In the rapidly evolving world of IT and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), optimizing your Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) system is critical to stay competitive and deliver the highest-quality services to your clients.
There are three powerful RMM tools that can transform your business: ConnectWise RMM, ConnectWise Automate, and N-Able N-Central RMM.
Even then, it’s not enough to simply purchase a top-performing RMM. You need to implement and optimize it to get the most out of your new tool.
For example, you can customize thresholds and notifications to keep your team informed of any critical incidents across your clients’ networks. By setting up sophisticated monitoring and alerting systems through your RMM, your technicians can proactively identify issues and address them before they escalate — or before your clients even find out.
However, most IT/MSP businesses receive false alerts, causing service technicians to lose trust in the system’s accuracy and rendering it useless.
To avoid this, MSP+OS has put together this comprehensive guide, where we’ll explore proven processes for monitoring and alerting across top-performing RMM systems, like ConnectWise RMM, ConnectWise Automate, and N-Able N-Central.
As an IT/MSP business, you have seemingly countless ways to increase efficiency with ConnectWise RMM. One easy access point is leveling up your monitoring and alerts.
You want to ensure your processes are tailored to produce accurate, actionable alerts, as opposed to false, redundant, or purely informational alerts that only slow down your team.
After all, as soon as your automatic RMM alerts start producing unhelpful information:
Let’s say one of your regular RMM alerts says, “Group policy failed to load.” If this happens multiple times per day, the problem always resolves itself, and your team knows this, they’ll ask themselves, “Why should we even bother paying attention?”
These types of self-fixing or purely informative alerts seem helpful, but ultimately aren’t the purpose of monitoring.
Fortunately, MSP+OS specializes in powerful RMM tools and automation strategies. We’ve gathered the best practices for monitoring and alerting, which we’ll dive into today.
No RMM platform should be sending out alerts that do not benefit the client.
Instead, your team is most efficient at delivering proactive, top-tier services when equipped with accurate and actionable alerts.
Luckily, IT/MSP teams can configure their RMM software for trustworthy alerting.
Regardless of which path you take, the following tips will be game-changing:
Let’s dive into some of these tactics:
Consider your service agreements
One way to determine what to include in monitoring and alerting is to go back to your SLAs.
Consider each service level aspect that needs to be included, and then adjust your alerts accordingly.
Tailor alerts to what the client is paying for
Monitoring matches within your RMM ecosystem will show strong returns. Much like Tip #1, this practice will both:
You’ll be able to monitor patching (and, really, all aspects of your RMM) so that your back end reflects precisely what the client is investing in.
It’s a win-win: Clients receive nothing less than the security and maintenance they’re expecting, while you don’t expend any more resources than necessary.
Tailor thresholds to client use cases
Start by evaluating the monitoring that was already enabled and set up for you out of the box. Take a closer look, and then make your adjustments as necessary.
Here’s an example:
To this end, make sure to consider unique use cases.
Switch off unnecessary alerts to eliminate redundancies
Many IT/MSP teams will apply changes globally — switching on monitoring across every system in their network or none at all.
Otherwise, you will not be strategic and efficient in your use of resources.
For instance, let’s say you adjust a threshold to be alerted if there is only 1% of RAM left. However, it won’t actually generate an alert for something that’s using RAM when it shouldn’t be.
Again, you should strive to keep alerts actionable for your techs.
Consider how alerts are streamed and received
Take a step back to consider the most basic questions:
These are all mechanical questions that need to be addressed on the back end to ensure information even reaches the right people at the right times.
You can even go as far back as communicating with your RMM provider. Depending on the services you're selling, how can you best partner with your provider to have your RMM software facilitate these services through alerts?
When you invest in getting monitoring and alerting right from the very beginning, the results (and your team’s trust in automated RMM alerts) will soon follow.
Ultimately, being proactive about monitoring and alerts management with your RMM will immensely benefit your IT/MSP business.
By borrowing the strategies above from MSP+OS, you can expect:
In other words: Airtight monitoring and alerts will enable you to deliver your services to satisfied clients more efficiently than ever.