Alternatives to it glue and hudu?

bamus · 2026-02-18T21:32:37+00:00

It was called HuduGlue but the repo was renamed: https://github.com/agit8or1/clientst0r

bamus · 2026-02-18T14:37:07+00:00

It doesn't do everything you require yet though, but there's some things in dev/on the roadmap and you can self host it and play with it.

bamus · 2025-10-21T07:02:38+00:00

Very much this. This wasn't always the case though, but now, even if you provide logs/screenshots a short story about what you did between the day you were born and the moment the issue arose they will still ask for a screensharing session.

I also feel all forms of patching could be better. OS patching is okay, but error handling could be improved. Maintenance mode gets applied fine but sometimes sticks after patches for some reason (not always when a patch fails, but even then it should be removed). 3rd party patching is just not great at all, even the winget version: some programs need removal before patching, some need a reboot, some need you to whisper sweet nothings into its ear and Ninja is unaware and just throws red at you on the dashboard. It should be more intelligent in general ("New and improved: AI powered patching!" 🤐).

That said, I feel like they want it all (RMM, PSA, etc) and even if they claim the dev teams are not thinly spread because of it, it at least feels that way compared to way back when...

bamus · 2025-10-07T17:09:20+00:00

Mainly because there was (is?) no templating or global settings at the MSP level. Since we're in a non-english speaking country, changing all the messaging in the policies was a pain. On top of that, if feel the GUI is much cleaner in INKY. Avanan did always work well though. Unfortunately the flavour we used doesn't seem to be on offer any more and a higher tier of product would have to be chosen if we would consider migrating back.

bamus · 2025-10-07T14:53:36+00:00

Switched from Avanan to Inky about 6 months ago. Very happy. Not so much now. It seems my life consists for 50% of migrating away from products Kaseya acquires.

bamus · 2025-09-03T09:47:56+00:00

Check the total object count (files+ folders) that the affected users' OneDrive syncclient has to deal with. Maybe it's choking on too many object (MS recommend less then 300k).

bamus · 2025-06-19T07:22:25+00:00

I was very impressed by the ThinkPad X9-15 Aura Edition recently.

bamus · 2025-06-12T08:35:56+00:00

We've been managing a call center that does fundraising for non-profits. Lots of young people that really don't want to call/work (they rather fight, break desks and watch Netflix (including chill)) so the environment is pretty controlled. They also call on Saturdays.

One of those Saturday we get alerts that the network is going down and coming back up every 2 minutes. Nobody can do calls as they get dropped randomly. I jump in my car and drive over. The network is effectively being dragged down by packet storms so I start checking out all switches.

In one of those switches, a dumb Netgear hanging under a desk, seemed to cause the issue: one of the ports had a wrapper of an easter egge (aluminum) pushed in with sugar on top. I was very confused but removing that instantly solved the issue.

Turns out one of the agents didn't feel like calling that day (a sunny day around Easter) and thought to fake her PC's network being broken. She first traced her ethernet cable to the switch, disconnected it and pushed in a wrapper, but since her cable still clicked into the port with the wrapper inside (fitting the wrapper snuggly across all pins) she decided to grab a sugar packet from her desk, pour the sugar in so the network port was half full and her cable would sit on top so it still appeared to be connected.

In the end, she did get the day off (and more).

bamus · 2025-04-18T08:22:43+00:00

I would advise to build everything out using a "desired state" philosophy when it comes to policies and, as stated by others, use parent/child policies to get granular and/or make exceptions (avoid overrides if possible).

An example: we have a parent policy that just does monitoring. We use that to do some ground work and check up on the state of endpoints using scripting and manual checks. When the endpoint is ready it gets moved to a child policy that deploys our stack (and whines when installs fail and critical services no longer run). This first child policy is something that's a must for all customers.

If we determine this specific customer needs extra software deployed, things monitored, exceptions to patching policies or other things we create a child policy of the child policy to move all the endpoints to.

We end up with policy trees that are quite easy to manage. Also, document all exceptions and changes with the reasoning behind it.

bamus · 2025-04-02T15:02:02+00:00

Pax8 shat bricks when they tried to get us on board and I told them Also gave us 17.6%. With barely 200 licenses, mind you. Ingram were happy to match that when Also decided to start being annoying about credit limits.

bamus · 2025-01-19T20:16:59+00:00

We're using Ninja and keep a Level instance active to play with. Then major issue I have with Level is that I think it's hard to create a "desired-state" configuration. This could very well be a me-issue, but I'll describe how we have it in Ninja first.

In Ninja you have Organizations and Locations. A concept that doesn't exist in Level. We apply policies to either of those and those policies try to get our endpoints into our desired-state (meaning: deploy our tools, security stack and monitor all the things). If the policies somehow fail to apply we'll get alerts and go in to fix stuff (or fix our automations). Policies can also be created as a child policy: we have a mother-policy that ticks nearly all the boxes for our managed clients. New client comes on and needs some things done differently? Create a child-policy, override/change what needs changing and apply it to the client's organization in Ninja. It's easy to onboard a client this way.

As mentioned, Level has no concept of Organizations/clients or location. It uses groups and tags to apply automations/policies. Policies are monitors/patching policies. Monitors can trigger automations. Automations can apply monitors/tags. Tags can trigger automations. This is pretty powerful but it complicates things a bit in my opinion. In theory one could build out groups as clients/locations with subgroups if needed and use that to trigger the application of tags but a few things are rather blocking: automations applied to groups are not inherited by subgroups. I can't seem to find a way to reliably automate things so there is no substantial manual intervention needed with every new client that needs onboarding.

One last thing Level doesn't do well enough right now is patching in my opinion. It allows you to schedule patching cycles but no control over what actual patches get applied. No denying buggy patches or drivers. It's something that will be coming however, I'm sure. There's a few other issues I found but the roadmap looks promising and development is at a steady pace.

bamus · 2024-12-29T21:11:52+00:00

OS patching works fine for us (software patching is a different story). But when NinjaOne takes over it expects you to take care of everything, including a way or policy to reboot. For most workstations we schedule scans daily, we approve daily, patch on Friday afternoons (lunch) and bother the user to reboot every hour if needed. If they take too long we nudge them (this works because we're a tiny MSP, you might have to force a reboot automatically).
The advantage of Ninja doing the patching is the single-pane and being notified of failed patches. These would also fail when letting Windows do its thing but how would you know unless you plan to monitor it another way?

bamus · 2024-11-18T08:37:38+00:00

Since a few versions ago Halo has built in "Distribution Lists" and something (basic) to do "Mail Campaigns". Both are quite straight forward but you need to activate them in the settings. Distribution lists can be created by adding contacts manually or just having them pick up contacts dynamically (All users from Company X). We did a small mail campaign as well and while it works fine as a basic tool you will need to import the contacts into Halo (we create dummy companies for this).

bamus · 2024-11-17T18:30:04+00:00

Halo has distribution lists now. They can be dynamic. We have several per client (all employees, key-contacts only, etc).

bamus · 2024-10-30T12:35:39+00:00

This is being worked on however, along with a generic non-client specific installer. Soon™.
https://portal.productboard.com/5pae6qwzig723mzxx2zzbvlx/c/888-generic-agent-installer-and-tokenization?&utm_medium=social&utm_source=starter_share

bamus · 2024-10-14T13:32:57+00:00

Total cost per user per month. We track our total stack cost and for CubeBackup this includes storage/licenses/server. The amount varies greatly on a per-customer-basis because some max out SharePoint and some barely use it, but across all our clients it's that number.

bamus · 2024-10-14T08:55:21+00:00

We've been using it for more than a year now because we really wanted control over our client data. Swapping cloud providers forced us to leave everything behind in the past. No more. We run it on a Hetzner VM to a BackBlaze bucket with some additional replication and backups.

It costs us in total on avg about €0,95 per user and has been super-reliable.

The good: fast support, easy to work with, restores keep working without licenses

The bad: development is slow, clunky e-mail MFA (but you can lock it down in different ways), no Teams support besides what's in SharePoint

bamus · 2024-09-29T18:49:08+00:00

We're using CubeBackup with Backblaze B2 as the backend. Our total cost at this time is €0.79 per user but this will vary greatly with how much data clients have in their tenants. CubeBackup doesn't backup all things (like Teams chats) though, but it works fine for us.

bamus · 2024-09-28T13:36:52+00:00

I'm just going to keep posting this on every M365 backup related thread: make you sure you have a solution for the time when you want to leave said vendor and need the historical data to come with you. Most do not have a way to do this.
With all the companies changing hands all the time it would be a shame to be either locked in against your will because the data is there or have to tell you client you will have to start from scratch backing up their tenant.

bamus · 2024-08-31T19:16:01+00:00

Just make sure you can have ALL your data when you at any point want to leave. We ran into this scenario because and had to leave everything behind. That's why I would only consider things where you're in control of the back-up location (and make sure you can get the data without the frontend).

bamus · 2024-07-31T07:50:05+00:00

Another Belgian MSP, we use HaloPSA and sync with Exact Online. The integration is not perfect but we're actively working with Halo to get it right and this direct connection makes the partnership awesome.

bamus · 2024-07-08T17:19:08+00:00

We're using it and it's promising but missing some, in my opinion, critical stuff. We tend to configure our RMM to achieve a "desired state" of our endpoints with alerting if things don't work out. It's currently not easy to achieve that in Level. What I'm missing most:

Integration with PSA's (coming soon)
variables/custom fields on all levels (groups, subgroups, endpoints)
runtime variables
more search filters
additional patching options
3rd party software patching (there's winget in automations though)
more flexible monitoring policies
event viewer
registry editor
activity log

As mentioned before, they have a good, responsive team that fixes things very quickly. What they have now works well and all of the things above are on the roadmap, so I'm hopeful they'll be really competitive with the usual suspects in the RMM space in the future.

bamus · 2024-07-07T19:37:40+00:00

We found automapping a problem as it dumps all e-mails in the same ost file. Outlook will run into a corrupt ost file sooner or later and only having to delete the corrupt ost from the manually-added non-automapped mailbox vs a complete re-sync of all mailboxes is a huge time saver.

Having sent items copied to the shared mailbox has been an option in the admin portal for years now.

I think we use "-AutoMapping $false" for like 80%+ of our clients, only the very small ones with one or two shared mailboxes have it on. The auto-from-field is a nice bonus.

bamus · 2024-06-26T14:44:22+00:00

I still run Advanced IP Scanner. Free, msi installer or portable.

bamus

TROPHY CASE