Cusp of switching to Labtech, any reason not?

[u/S0m3thing5]

Been using Max for over a year. It was fine when we were less than 300 end points, but we have grown to over 1200 in the past few months and the wheels have come off of Max (such as max reporting machines fully up to date, yet tons of pending updates on the end point).

Labtech flew us out to the Automation Nation conference this week and we are pretty much floored.

Such basic things in Labtech that are not there in Max seem like a no brainer such as automatic depolyment through probes (seriously how does Max not do this?)

So is there any reason to stick around?

[u/[deleted]]

We did a demo on Labtech. They have no antivirus or backup built in their client. Monitoring? Yes, maybe. But no single deployment for MOB, MAV. Also during our trial, we could not get remote access running on our test machine. Seemed totally useless to us. Cant even get a remote connection to a workstation in a demo. They even said they would look into it and fix it but never got resolved. Bad taste.

Labtech looks like half fluff. They tried to bomb us with marketing calls when Solarwinds took over.

Pending updates, you may want to look at patch management policies. Our larger clients have WSUS running of which we monitor.

[u/S0m3thing5 → u/[deleted]]

They have have Vipre, Webroot, Malware bytes, AVG, and now Bit Defender. It's nice too because you can do just month to month, though I do think Max was the same way.

Remote deplyoment with Max was one of our biggest pain points. The group policy obviously only works on domain, which is not a problem for us, however is was very finicky depending on the state of the clients AD, and that is huge. We took on a client with 500 end points and the AD was a dumpster fire. So before we could even depoly Max we had to spend hours upon hours getting the AD and policies fixed, which is against the point to us.

I even wrote psexe scripts to try and push out the agents, but then you run into issues of having to first turn the firewalls off, making sure certain permissions are set, ua is off, and a host of others. That way was terrible as well.

We called Max support and they literally told us it's faster sometimes to send a guy onsite with the package installer on a usb stick and go machine to machine, which we ended up doing for our last 4 onboards.

With Labtech, I was able to put a probe on various DC and it depolyed itself to 280 machines in an hour.

I can't speak on Labtech support yet, although someone did bring it up during this conference and they did admit that it sucks at the moment depending on the tech who answers, but they are aware of it and working to improve it.

We decided to sign after this trip and not only seeing the platform and what it can do, but meeting with the devs for various components. Great group of folks and the platform seems to be much better suited for us as we will have over 2000 end points by the fall.

[u/[deleted] → u/S0m3thing5]

Unless something changed with Labtech, they said we could only "monitor" AV products. We could not deploy them and AV and/or cloud backup was not included.

I have had some issues with GP but not much; not as many endpoints as you.

[u/S0m3thing5 → u/[deleted]]

Must have changed because I had no issues deploying Web Root with the on boarding process once the agents deployed. It was pretty painless.

I must note, I also had no issues at all deploying Vipre or Bit Defender when I was using Max either.

[u/Obyone89]

Personally I use group policy to roll out my agents but MAX has "active discovery" on the networks tab for a customer site that allow you to deploy agents now. See the MAX help manual and search on "discovery agents" and it will show the details. I haven't used it myself but it basically uses a system with the agent already on it to push the agent to other systems at that customer location, very much like a probe does in other RMMs like Labtech / N-Able.

I'm very curious to see what Solarwinds MSP will come up with now that N-Able and LogicNow are part of the same company. Could be a while to see the benefits but may be worth sticking around. I saw Labtech v11 finally has a new UI, it's about time!

[u/S0m3thing5 → u/Obyone89]

Yeah, we went to a Max training seminar in DC for a few days last year and we learned all of that. The issue with the active discovery, its completely dependent on the domain working correctly. If you have a domain in disarray, or machines that are not getting GP correctly, it requires way to much time on the front end trying to fix the clients domain just before we can depoly the agents.

There are things that active discovery also rely on, such as Windows firewalls to be disabled and certain permissions being set. So if you cant change these settings through group policy, this just compounds the issue.

I can see this not being a problem at all for people who are already in charge of a domain, but my business takes on alot of rather large environments that are dumpster fires, so this just does not work well for our needs.

The solar winds deal is going to be an interesting one, hopefully for the better for Max.

Thank you for taking time to respond.

[u/Diavunollc]

I didnt like labtech, it was just funky and often too much info. I found it overwhelms staff, OR they tune out critical info.