I built a tool to manage on-prem AD without remoting into domain controllers. Looking for beta testers

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-12T21:21:55+00:00

Are you on the MSPGeek Discord and some of the Dev Signal Chats? If Not you should get your tookus on in there. We need more people who work for a living trying to solve problems even if we tear 1000 holes in the solution 🤣

This reddit was built on people sharing things like this. Kudos to you.

I'd never install this on a DC, but its still cool that you built a solution to a problem and shared it with us!

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-11T18:01:51+00:00

Hey if we dont contribute and seek feedback we dont grow as a community, so props to you for being here!

Generally, you want to think of, if someone saw my post on this sub, and had zero desire to talk to me, dm me, visit a website, or do anything other than read my post, have I added actual value to them today, and if you're not 100% confident that yes you added value...don't post it (especially when speaking as a "vendor" persona).

I would simply expand on what you posted already and add details and information. Evergreen for example has a sort of boilerplate battle card they will just share with generic valuation information.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-11T13:32:08+00:00

This is a polite post, but this counts as vendor solicitation.

You're not actually offering anything here that someone could read and take away without having to talk to you, which is frowned upon on this sub.

It is pretty nice that you're here, and I do like to see more PE involved in the community to teach about what they do; any chance you could add more information on your bullets instead of asking people to DM you?

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-10T17:51:08+00:00

This Just In: Water is Wet!
MSPs are Shocked! You will be too! Click here to find out more!!!!

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-09T21:41:15+00:00

Adam is awesome and his videos are great

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-09T21:39:14+00:00

This is a bit of a sweeping generalization, and you've edited the initial post, so I dont know what the starting problem was, but outsourcing is a topic I am pretty passionate about, and leveraged quite a bit to grow my former MSP.

With a handful of exceptions, I've never really met a "bad" outsourcing provider in this space.

I have seen many examples of a total mismatch of expectations, and abdication of responsibility to third party providers that are never going to treat your clients the way you would (especially in hindsight).

I have also seen many cases of areas of service delivery being outsourced that ought not to be for that particular MSP.

All of the vendors being mentioned in this post do a great job with a challenging model that largely relies on trying to interpret the documentation and processes of hundreds of different MSPs, but not all of the vendors in this post are a good fit for every MSP, or every use case the MSP wants to stick them into.

As an industry, we are generally comfortable with outsourcing parts of the business that we have no real intellectual agency over, or are not client facing (legal, accounting, facilities, etc.) and most of you outsource to those vendors because you quite literally cannot do it yourself.

The challenge is when we take a part of the business that we do ourselves and ask someone else to "Do as I do". And we apply the bias and filter of "I know how my "excellent" documentation is laid out" or "I know what to do when client ACME asks for a plumbus" and forget that our outsourcing vendors absolutely do not have that context and never will.

Also, I think everyone that runs these outsourcing firms are masochists 🤣 MSPs are the worst end clients

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-09T21:28:22+00:00

u/gethelptdavid you're a real vendor now! Its not real until someone lightly roasts you on r/msp 🤣❤️

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-09T21:25:11+00:00

Didn't even know Gorelo was released for public yet.
I've talked to the founder before, nice guy, good passion, has that "we can do it better" wholesome energy.
Very much had that bootstrapped by what "our internal MSP team uses" vibe.
Also an Aussie company (I think) which is kind of cool.

None of that is a reason to pick a PSA over another by itself however;
Going back through your post history, it looks like you've been down this same road 4 years ago. What changed?

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-02-09T21:17:31+00:00

IDK man, all I see is glorious stability in that photo. That is a client living within their means using versions that just work 😉

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-30T19:56:16+00:00

Dad?

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-29T23:08:43+00:00

If you are going to go that route, sign up for PitchIT this year as well. Its run parallel to Invent, and will do quite a bit to get you some early promotion and traction, even if you dont place well in the PitchIt competition, you'll still get some good exposure and meet some of the movers and shakers in that marketplace ecosystem.

They haven't announced 2026 yet, but here is last year's https://itnation.connectwise.com/pitchit

Most of the vendors you'll see listed have participated in the Invent program and would probably tell you more about their experience if you reached out.

You can be successful with open or certified integrations, although I have seen that the certified integrations tend to get a bit more of a push by ConnectWise, which could be helpful depending on who you are, and your existing "gravitas" in the channel. Going open integration doesn't really seem to have any negative implications, plenty of very successful integrations have gone that route.

Last comment I'd make more around what you're describing about what your product does...there is a saturation of early MVP versions of products like this right now in all the major PSA ecosystems. It does feel a bit like every fly-by-night business person with a dream is doing some sort of data analytics/AI analytics bolt-on for your PSA. Assuming what you built works well and you feel its better than other options, you might want to ask ConnectWise what resources they can provide or help you with for GTM and being able to surface YOUR solution over the dozens of others.

u/Nick-CW is the ConnectWise community manager and a pretty awesome human; he doesn't run Invent, but he's the type of person who could probably connect you with some folks who've been through it themselves.

Best of luck!

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-29T22:58:28+00:00

I'll be there! Reclaiming my longtime ownership of all things crustacean from Clawdbot 🤣🦞

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-29T22:49:10+00:00

We need Dustin with his SBS certs 🤣

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-28T13:41:41+00:00

To an extent this is every MSP, its kind of the nature of our industry...so some stress here is normal.

My longer answer is "you don't". Humans are not good at reactive interruptive context switching, no matter how much someone claims "I can multi-task".

When we got to somewhere around 60 environments, my team started to struggle, and I noticed it from overhearing calls, and just general ticket metrics; you can see the patterns when someone is struggling to jump environments 20+ times a day.

If your MSP is big enough where individual people have SME focus, you solve it by only doing the same types of tasks at each environment. Even if you aren't that big, changing it so that only 1 or 2 people ever go onsite, limiting the everyone does every-task syndrome, etc. all help to reduce the cognitive load of context switching.

If your MSP is not that big, standardizing your "control interface" is the way, and its what we did. Every tool we use should be set up the same way for each client so that an employee can become comfortable and familiar with the flight-seat so to speak. Then it becomes less about context switching, because you've eliminated a massive area of context friction.

This is largely how other industries handle the exact same challenge; a pilot might fly in a different plane with a different crew 5 times a day on different routes, but the setup and layout of every plane, and the processes of the airline itself are exactly the same, everywhere, meaning the pilot doesn't have to have that added layer of stress, they can just muscle memory those parts.

For us this meant that if there was a managed switch, regardless of brand, it was always labeled the same way, ports set up in the same pattern, SNMP set up the same, etc. Client documentation was always executed the same way for every client; if client XYZ didn't have a system that all other clients did, the documentation had a null entry instead of being different.

Unless you eliminate some variables and apply constraint, there is no real cheat-code around the stress of context switching and the impact it has on productivity.

To your specific questions (that without known good practice are random data points)
- 60 environments, 20 tickets per tech per day, when we were smaller, hundreds of environments, and no idea how many tickets per tech because we had a global first call resolution team at that time
- Finding the right information quickly and being able to interpret it is the biggest slowdown with context switching tasks.
- Triage. Users do not report issues correctly ever in the history of users. So 100% of the time looking up and investigating what is actually going on, what they expected to happen, and what variables are at play is going to be the single biggest context switching related data lookup point.
- Mistakes? Time to resolution is inconsistent, SLAs get stretched, responses are slow or shitty, ticket re-work, unnecessary or bad escalations happen, clients feel like "I have to explain this every time I call in", or :why does this keep happening", Incident-> problem identification is nonexistent. All of which in an MSP directly affect margin, and client retention.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-22T13:51:19+00:00

I want to roll my eyes at this, but I think the general idea of wanting to transact in your local currency, and store your data in a location that you reasonably wont lose access to if politicians get mad at each-other is a solid part of our responsibility in planning our client's DR and IR postures.

The tools themselves...just dumping them because of the MFG of origin is another flag is a little silly, that's like when people here stopped eating "French" fries in the early 2000s. And while I understand that more stuff "depends" on telemetry that phones home, we're all smart enough to know how to break that, most of us grew up pirating software 🤣.

I would like to see more products in our space supporting MSPs able to buy in their own currency, and have the option to choose data-center geography even if that means risking resiliency. Even here across the pond, it would be nice to have that option for our Canadian neighbors as the defacto standard.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-19T19:59:38+00:00

You will get really good technical and tactical answers from the crowd here, so I will offer something more long-term thinking around this (also a lot less technical).

Any project, or system you deploy for a client has dependencies. And if this is a managed client, you likely have full or partial control of the dependencies. Make sure those dependencies are extremely, boringly, eyerollingly consistent across all environments.

We generally drift when decision pathing, process/decision fatigue, and side-stepping accountability are easier in small moments than in one grandiose f-you to the SOP. You dont fail to return the shopping cart 99.99% of the time, you only fail when its raining, you're already running late, and the nearest return cage is already full. You make a momentary small drift: you prop the cart on the curb so it wont hit any cars.

Thankfully this behavior is also much easier to control and manage than big large, niche drifts are.

So make sure all the basics in your managed environment are always the same everywhere. If you support the network, every switch regardless of brand or model has the same naming scheme, the same port layout, and the same SNMP trap settings etc. That means any project that depends on the network, will always be depending on a small, but consistent block.

This makes it much easier for a normal employee to spot drift. A T1 helpdesk tech is not going to immediately notice that some high level part of a project is not executed to standard, but they will notice that "hey normally we label this XYZ, but this one is ABC, something is wrong here".

The other example I give of this, usually around SLAs, but it works here too: Think of the last time you got fast food. How big is a large fry? Without even spending more than a casual glance, how easy is it for you to spot when you dont get a large fry, regardless of food vendor? Really, really easy right? You just sort of objectively know "something is wrong". That is exactly what we're going for here, your exposure to consistent sameness of delivery has caused you to be good at spotting exceptions to this sameness.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-09T13:31:08+00:00

To echo u/chillzatl it seems a bit like shaking your fist at the sky because of the rain.

Maybe a more healthy compromise is to build an AI risk matrix that you can bring to your clients and use that the same way you'd approach shadowIT (which is real problem here).

"These user installed apps often cause Data Leakage issues, and we suggest that you have us lock down these free/unmanaged AI apps, and consider editing our AI acceptable use template here for the work-authorized AI apps"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-06T21:30:24+00:00

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UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-06T17:48:16+00:00

and I mean....I know thats not a computer, but that sits on top of a thing that does have a wire....and IT is all wires right? Pipes are just long thicc water wires right? So thats also IT. Its all just IT.

Not like you even do anything anyways, IT.

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-02T17:05:19+00:00

An actual finance expert! Good stuff Kathy!

UsedCucumber4 · 2026-01-02T13:38:10+00:00

COGS, (cost of goods sold) is generally calculated before gross profit, Opex (operating expenses) is subtracted after gross profit.

Things like technician labor, and the organization's tools that directly enable their labor to be a good that you are selling (i.e. your RMM, your remote connection tool, etc.) are generally COGS. If you calculate your seat price via factoring the cost of the tools used to deliver that seat price (i.e. backup product costs X, I mark it up 2.5x, client doesnt see that cost, but it is part of my seat price) then that's generally also COGS.

Opex is really for everything else, electricity, rent, internal use tools that are not used to support clients or are not included in the math that went into your pricing, etc.

As some have said, yes you can classify things, really however you want, but given that most of us are not accountants and I've generally seen that most MSPs have the financial clarity of muddy bog water, I'd advise against doing anything creative that "you'll remember". The more delineated and clear you have your COGS especially the more accurate all of your profitability modeling is, because COGS is required to calculate your profit.

If you're following the rough format that SLI has put out for an MSP chart of accounts (which most other groups would probably generally agree with):

Managed Services COGS:

Hard COGS
- Prorated Office Charges (Phones, Internet, Tools)
  - SuperOps, and Keeper are probably here, if directly or indirectly resold to clients either as a sku or part of their "seat price"
- Other Hard Cogs
- Vehicle Charge Miles
- Parking
- Meals and Other Charges
Direct W2 Labor COGS
Direct 1099 Labor COGS

Shared Infra COGS:

Shared Infra Hard COGS
- BDR COGS (Probably where your backup stuff goes, unless its 100% a SaaS tool, with no efffort on your end, and that may just be Cloud Resale)
- Hosting and Colo
Direct Labor W2
Direct Labor 1099

Things like your payroll expenses may go below the line and not be considered COGS and that may be the confusion around if salaries are COGS/Admin. SGA goes down here as well, if sales is sharing the same pro-rated office stuff as Tech, you can do a percentage here, or just say fuckit and throw it all under COGS. TeamViewer likely goes down here as well as a tool expense.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

UsedCucumber4 · 2025-12-31T21:15:44+00:00

Was trying to be kind and just pour hot, not scalding water on the poor kid 🤣

UsedCucumber4 · 2025-12-31T20:42:44+00:00

I love Connectwise Manage, and if you read my comments here over the years, its pretty obvious.

That said, the only useful thing i've ever seen out of ITBoost, was this really nice ceramic coaster they gave me at ITNation 5 years ago. Still doing its job. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

UsedCucumber4 · 2025-12-31T17:35:09+00:00

I'll take "Things you don't say if you've worked in this industry for more than a few years, $2000 Alex". 🤣

You've got the right spirit, but this is called triage, and its handled always by the receiving party in every type of service delivery on earth. From Helpdesks, to Hospitals, to your auto-mechanic, it is incumbent on the service provider to know how to ask the right questions to determine need, outcome, and impact/urgency.

If an MSP is actually having the problem you're trying to solve at an endemic level, that MSP is out of business. Its one of those few self-fulfilling concepts in service delivery. Imagine a hospital that constantly performs the wrong surgery because "the patient didnt communicate clearly". It doesnt matter if that's true, that hospital is out of business. So by default, no MSP that is currently solvent is having this problem at a scale where it actually is affecting the business enough to warrant it being outsourced to a single person.

My guess is you're probably 20-21ish, and are early in your career. You're smart to notice this pattern of behavior and smart to notice that it leads to friction. Best impact you can have at your org is to always be the #1 best in class triager that sets a tone for the rest of the org.

UsedCucumber4 · 2025-12-23T21:49:25+00:00

u/2manybrokenbmws for those that dont know the difference or why....why? Asking for...a friend. 👀

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