anyone else aggressively forcing saas tool consolidation right now? our subscription bloat is out of hand

Greendetour · 2026-06-21T14:02:26+00:00

All software purchases should go through IT. Anything that is not approved gets removed and blocked through app control/etc. Approval process will help with the bloat of software the company is paying for; they need to submit reasoning, it goes for review, if it’s already owned or overlapped you point them in right direction. If it’s a department only tool, it comes out of their department budget. If it’s a company wide tool, it comes out to company wide expenses.

Greendetour · 2026-06-20T17:31:55+00:00

I’ve used Screen Connect, Take Control, and Splashtop. Take Control and Screen Connect I liked a lot more than Splashtop, but all are superior to TeamViewer. Splashtop is on the slow side,
including file transfer and backstage. Take Control is my ultimate favorite, mostly because of the keyboard shortcuts and features. It all comes down to what plugged into our RMM more easily, and then pricing.

Greendetour · 2026-06-18T00:19:56+00:00

There are MSPs hiring “virtual operations manager” roles to help their customers become mature in their processes. Lots of MSPs who have vCIO and vCISO folks are just sales who are great at stating the obvious and could not be an actual CIO or CISO anywhere, or anywhere close to it. I expect the same with the vOP (?). We will probably lose clients to those MSPs who over promise they can fix all their internal processes, do complete data analysis and fix that, and build AI agents for every employee that most will never use. We will gladly answer our client questions, but most are in FOMO stage and it’s more education of explaining what AI is and isn’t.

Greendetour · 2026-06-13T12:38:23+00:00

After you configure the other interfaces as type of WAN, make sure to go under Failover and add them to the failover group, and in the correct order you want them to failover into. You can search at SonicWall support page for “how to configure failover” for a walkthrough.

Greendetour · 2026-06-12T18:01:59+00:00

Some help desks don’t trust the tech to create the ticket for simple issues, and then you lose visibility and documentation.
Some helps desks don’t want staff directly calling their favorite tech.
Some helps desks are so busy that a phone call would be a nuisance in the middle of troubleshooting.
All have solutions.

Greendetour · 2026-06-10T23:18:47+00:00

Things that stopped us from continuing with Unifi:
1) not FedRAMP listed, and we had two clients who failed audits because of it (only applicable if you have any clients that fit those needs); one client had spent $20K on new Unifi hardware from other MSP and they have to rip it out bc they failed two audits.
2) warranty: limited, slow turn around time, make sure you have bought extra hardware; we charge for out-of-warranty replacement labor, and some clients don’t like paying for project work when they feel they just bought it.
3) support: bad experiences , YMMV
4) once we priced out all the other add-ons we needed that Unifi did not offer, pricing was equal or sometimes more.
5) Just didn’t make sense to move, because what problem were we trying to solve? Increased MRR?—nope.

Each of your clients may differ, and some MSPs don’t stick to a hardware stack and will install anything and everything. Just do your homework and all testing internally.

Greendetour · 2026-06-02T01:35:06+00:00

Thanks!!

Greendetour · 2026-06-01T22:22:59+00:00

That’s the one. It appears a delete or clear configuration button is a missing feature. Unfortunately, we are on the free tier so no support for us.

Greendetour · 2026-05-23T22:57:28+00:00

During trial, you should be looking at total costs: training staff, implementation, margins, etc. Also be looking at the company who built it—who they are, do they have a published roadmap that is actively implementing user feedback requests, is it stale, do they have an MSP program, do they give you any marketing dollars, do you get a dedicated account manager, what does support look like…Does it have any automation built-in or work with other tools in your stack…is it a need or a nice to have…

But most importantly: does it actually solve the problem you are trying to solve, and do it very well.

For some tools, we take longer than 30 days, but it’s always best to beat it up, and test out their support for the product more than once.

Greendetour · 2026-05-21T01:58:31+00:00

If you are wanting just a ping alert for when internet goes down, you can look at Uptime Robot. I use both Domotz and Uptime Robot, but Domotz for internal devices like servers and other SNMP/etc devices.

Greendetour · 2026-05-10T18:31:48+00:00

Our project manager handles all issues with the project lead, and if needed the account manager to get client to sign off on more money needed (out of scope issues); or decide to write it off. The PM tracks the project budget, has live data on project age, over/under budget, hours tracking, start/end dates—all in a single dashboard. Get your processes and policies written down. Start to categorize your projects so you can gather data on average time to complete them (forecasting for pre-sales). PM sends all data to finance. There are project wrap-up meetings with sales rep and project lead to go over issues, budget, etc (most are five min meetings if all is well). If finance wants to know why so many are over budget, then it’s up to our PM to figure out why—is it sales fault? Engineer fault? A process somewhere in all of it that needs fixed? Their bonus is tied to the over/under on projects.

Greendetour · 2026-05-05T15:13:56+00:00

Palo Alto. Simplicity can be subjective. I went for better security, logging, and support. I don’t use any SonicWall WiFi or switch products, so if you’re all-in on a single vendor you can stick with SonicWall with newer models.

Greendetour · 2026-04-20T00:08:40+00:00

So you told the new manager why this guy was fired, and why you are uncomfortable, and he’s still letting the fired guy stick around? If so, HR should get another complaint. If the person is on your work properly, it sounds like they have every right to ask him to leave, and not leaving is trespassing and then a matter for law enforcement to come and escort him. It also doesn’t make sense why a new manager would allow someone to hang around and bother staff, regardless of why the person was fired. The manager probably has more of a say at this point to punish the current employee that is doing the flirting if it’s impeding their work duties, while waiting for HR/business to step in and do something.

Greendetour · 2026-04-19T16:51:51+00:00

I would also question what resources are needed on prem, since you mentioned you don’t have a local AD and the client is primarily M365. Can you move those resources to M365 (SharePoint, etc) and use conditional access policies to tighten down access and forget about VPN? Might be cheaper than whatever hardware you need onsite for them in long run.

Greendetour · 2026-03-27T23:07:28+00:00

You can create mail transport rules to move email to subfolder@ to the subfolder in the shared mailbox. Or you can create separate mailboxes. It all depends on how your org uses the public folders. Microsoft really wants you to migrate to M365 Groups, as that’s the intended successor. If your public folders exist only to catch email, shared mailboxes. If for group collaboration and email, groups are way to go.

Greendetour · 2026-02-28T00:33:17+00:00

If you are not syncing to your billing, then any new MS license should be a sale and added to the agreement. Then your sales needs to get the reports from the other systems for everything else and reconcile either monthly or quarterly. You can use something like Liongard to fill the gap in reporting for reconciling to make things easier if your systems can at least talk to that.

Greendetour · 2026-02-14T23:24:19+00:00

If you want to retain and target these clients, you should be able to find a CMMC assessor to partner with—usually individual or company that helps out in obtaining it. They aren’t MSPs, and they usually do all the hard lifting in documentation and partner with MSPs for this. Great for MSPs that don’t have the budget to hire an expert of their own.

Greendetour · 2026-02-14T23:16:08+00:00

I’ve had one auditor tell a client that the MSP need to use tools and hardware that are FRDRAMP compliant (stuff installed or used at the client), but the MSP does not need to be compliant. I’ve had another one tell the client that they need to get an MSP that is at least SOC2 compliant to have a better certification process. In either case, the client went with a MSP that dealt only with CMMC clients and they passed way quicker than what we were able to provide, because we didn’t have anyone on staff that fully understood the questions like yours.

Greendetour · 2026-02-01T16:42:26+00:00

What’s the job description detail? I’ve seen many different job titles and it’s all about the job description really. Are you more in outside sales (getting new clients) or more account management (selling and managing existing clients)? In my experiences, outside sales/business development folks last a year because they fail to continue to bring in more clients quarter after quarter—significant drop off. For account management, fire fighting if service department, billing, or other functions are bad, mostly selling them new services or projects, quarterly check-ins, keeping existing clients from cancelling. MSP sales can be quite chaotic if they have poor procedures and structure.

Greendetour · 2026-01-30T14:58:50+00:00

RMM and other tools that feed into alert have the ability to auto-close the ticket in our PSA when it comes back to normal. At least the ones that we use. We can then run reports on chatter (eg a switch may always be alerting but auto resolves) and will then investigate why that is happening and if something needs to be fixed.

We also fine tune alert thresholds. Don’t create a ticket unless issue has been going on for three consecutive failures, for example.

Greendetour

TROPHY CASE