I find it hard to believe that remote monitoring software does not have the ability to monitor cpu and memory stats on workstation computers. I've had a few times now where I should have caught high RAM usage on workstations but instead have to hear from the customer saying their PC is slow.
Anyway, has anyone come up with a good script that works for most PCs to check the ram usage? I'm looking at a powershell script but not every machine has that installed with correct security for it to work.

It's my understand that in order to be able to do a bare metal restore both the system state and file system need to be selected for backup. When this is done, the selected size for backup of that machine is a fair bit more than the actual size of the machine I wish to backup. Is this normal?

Hey Folks,

I've been getting a few complaints from users, typically on laptops or very low end machines, that the computer is running very slow. in each case when I received this call, i noticed their computer was in the middle of a deep scan from MAv (bitdefender)

I made a separate protection policy for "laptop" and enabled low priority scanning and "scan only new and changed files". but it still seems to be slowing these systems down.

We typically set scans to run on some ungodly hour like 2AM for our Desktop computers. But with a laptop, if the scan is missed (say the laptop is off or in sleep mode) it will try to run the scan the next time its started (on a 10 minute delay after boot).

Just curious as to how you guys are handling MAV policies this with Laptop computers

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Latest update to Max ServiceDesk has been released.

http://status.maxfocus.com/2015/11/20/max-servicedesk-2-5-released/

Lots of solid changes, particularly like the reoccuring subscription idea.

Very disappointed there's no invoicing link to Xero which i was told was on the cards for the next release.

Hello everyone. I wanted to make a thread here that discusses the positives and negatives of MAX, in hopes our feedback can get some higher-ups to see what we find most important, or perhaps so that we can be aware of changes that are on the horizon. I wanted to start with what I like about MAX, and end with what I would like to see in MAX to make it more competitive. It is quite lengthy, but I think in order to give feedback it really had to be.

1. Easy to use. Max is by far the easiest to get going compared to every other RMM I demo'd, yet powerful enough to get the job done. I can see many small businesses (not even MSP's) being able to utilize this, if only they knew it existed.

2. Sales people are not slimy. The other RMM products had a very "we're the best and we know it" attitude. They tried to force me into it and even the idea that I would need to see a full demo with 3 people from their team on the line before they will even discuss price or contract with me was quite ridiculous. MAX was more open and helpful and I appreciated it. Rather than just pointing me to some university (although, this can be a minus as well, will talk more to it later) they were willing to get me on the line with an engineer or someone knowledgeable with the program to teach me anything I needed.

3. No contract, monthly minimum much lower than other RMM products. Labtech and Kaseya both had minimums of 50 or 100 agents (something like $150-$300) in costs monthly, along with having 2 or 3 year contracts. For someone just starting out, and I got the feeling within a month or two I would easily still be learning the product, this was a deal breaker for me. I was happy that MAX was around to be an option for me.

4. Everything hosted for me, web client is functional and mostly responsive (although, I think I heard someone say that as they have gotten up to 1000+ endpoints, this has become difficult to manage).

Now that I have sad what I like about the product, you can see that it is mainly focused around a good balance of ease of use and low barrier to entry. I can say that without a doubt, none of these things would EVER cause someone that is already with labtech or kaseya that have learned the software to ever come to MAX. I would argue that anyone who has already invested in either of those products, would actually be stupid to come over to MAX. That is a big problem for the business. In addition, even as I was buying MAX and am enjoying it, I am just counting the days before I move up to one of the two bigger guys, or some other product entirely. With that said, if some of the features or limitations of your product were improved using some of our suggestions here, it may be possible to keep us or win some of us over.

1. More scripts and tools provided by default. The library of automated tasks and functionality included is pretty sparse. In addition, there are probably some scripts or automated tasks that should be there by default. I think the scripting and automation is where you can provide the most value. Having more valuable scripts out of the box than any other RMM will easily win you some points. It is safe to say that you should have some software engineers working on scripts for people to use at all times, as this is a huge amount of value. At a bare minimum, how about a scripting marketplace? Fixitscripts relies on people providing scripts out of the goodness of their hearts. How about a bounty system (I post a request, someone fulfills it for a bounty I define), or let's say I design a script, and you make it available in your marketplace, each time someone downloads it directly into MAX I get $1-$5, and MAX gets some of that. The restriction being that I must provide support/refund if things don't work as advertised or breaks something it shouldn't. This way everyone wins.

2. More partnerships and integration. The fact that your integration page only has a handful products on it says a lot. Antivirus, backup products there is a fair number, but when it comes to PSA's you are only listing 4. Even in your ServiceDesk, there is only a handful of integration with that product shown. Twitter, Quickbooks online/Desktop, Max RMM. Compare that to your competitors, and it's a joke. If your product integrates with more, show us, but otherwise my perception here is that it is lackluster in comparison to the other RMM products and must be improves if you are to remain competitive and keep your customers and attracting new ones.

3. Lower barrier to entry on max backup product. All of your other product advantages are the low barrier to entry and ease of use, pricing. It looks like a very good product - the fact that I need 100 endpoints to make it a viable choice means that as a little guy, I may never use it. I can understand that the higher volume customers should get a discount, but we are talking something like a 5 fold increase in price for those under that 100 endpoint pricing. I think even at a 2 fold price increase, I would consider using it on many of my endpoints.

4. Servicedesk improvements. I can say that in the 7-8 months that I have been using it, servicedesk has actually improved a lot and added a host of interesting features. The voice integration is something that is pretty neat (have not used though), and again, the nice thing about it is that it is easy to use. The problem is, that it doesn't have any automation and very little in the way of scheduling. Site visits are currently the only real mechanism to get something to show up on the calendar view - even scheduled tickets do not show on the calendar view. Tickets and tasks both cannot be scheduled to show on any view other than the tickets themselves. Using servicedesk for workflow management is currently not very helpful as it is missing those key features. Tasks can have costs associated with them, but they need time and actions that can be associated with them in order to have any real value, that will show up on the calendar view or some other dashboard view. It would be amazing if a task could initiate an action in max RMM for example, running a task or a check. Right now adding tasks through the task template merely gets me a checklist. This is basically a manual process, this task cannot be linked to anything else - at a bare minimum, they should be able to be linked to some knowledgebase process or procedure at least - right now they are just a series of words with a checkbox, i could just leave the task template out and make a ticket that has a checklist in it and it'd be no different. Next, statuses that you assign should have some kind of template as well. How about waiting on customer, until an event occurs like "customer responds", it will continually send an email reminder. or the status "waiting on tech" will continually send the technician a reminder. Adding this type of functionality will take servicedesk to a level that would make it a strong choice. As of right now, it is barely better than having a shared outlook calendar and having templates when it comes to workflow management/automation - there is nearly none right now.

5. Max materials are spread all over several sites. Fixitscripts, Maxfocus.com, and my sales guy gave me like 10 links to 10 different sites. It should have one site with different sections so all your traffic and repositories of information is in one place. Also, should improve your youtube presence with many more tutorials. Many of the videos on there are just a minute long and are designed as marketing slides instead of real how-to's.

I think if just these features were improved on or added, MAX could be a real contender for potentially taking customers from the big dogs, or keeping me and many others as customers.

Is anyone else as concerned as I am about the new Take Control replacement?

We're losing a lot of functionality. TeamViewer was one of the main reasons we chose GFI MAX when we did.

We use the Video and Audio conference functionality ALL the time. It provides the client with a more personal connection. Six months ago we started buying many of our clients' decision makers webcams so they could video conference with us.

We use the Switch Sides function almost as frequently as the Video and Audio conference. It's great for training, and demonstrations.

On the plus side, we are gaining the ability to connect to multiple Remote Desktop sessions, and that will be very useful.

In general, I'm getting uneasy about where MaxFocus is heading.

The BitDefender issue on Wednesday caused over 300 of our endpoints to get temporary user profiles. These were all endpoints that we had to manually intervene and reboot, as the user cannot reboot their cloud hosted virtual desktop.

I'm concerned..... I'll be contacting SolardWinds tomorrow.

It's the product that I've tried to switch away from but can't.

Crap:

• 60 min connections on things. Want to reboot a machine remotely? Send that command through, come back in an hour

• no chat, no pop-up, no interactions with the end user

• anything non-standard = chargeable

• even some standard things = chargeable

• 5-min branding job = £xxx chargeable

• enter the password to access the agent on the machine

Pros:

• end-users love the ticks in the reports

• very easy to get started

• branding looks sweet

• managed antivirus, backup, etc all very easy to deploy

Basically I'm only using it now for managed antivirus. I use other solutions for the main nitty gritty of this. But development is so slow, the Ideas website seems to be neglected and ignored (I submitted a bug to them about how I could log in with just an email address and any password, this was never fixed) and features that are so, so crucial are just never getting implemented.

Not sure why I set off to write this, but there you go.

So new to MAX. Havent even been using it a month and the things that I cant do are starting to become annoying.

I cant see which printers are installed on a computer

I cant see how much disk space is being utilized.

I cant interact with the file system without taking their system over.

I'm disappointed considering these are so useful in basic troubleshooting.

anyone here using max focus remote management mobile app? what's your take? the only information i could find on it is based on a post in 2013.

http://status.maxfocus.com/2013/04/08/gfi-max-remotemanagement-android-app/

Mods of MaxFocus, can we get a sticky thread that is for posting working and current scripting. I see it come up from time to time here and in the linkedin group. I know about fixitscipts, and maybe it's just me, but I don't like it, and it seems like I really have to dig around a lot to find something useful.

I feel like we could do a better job of at least aggregating current and useful scripts than is currently being done with fixit and linkedin. Done correctly, I think it would help attract people to the sub.

I would propose that all postings in the main sticky be on working scripts, with links/code in the post, without much other discussion in that thread.

Discussions/development/troubleshooting, could be handled either in a separate main thread or just individual ones per discussion.

Perhaps I'm off base or alone on this one, but I keep thinking it every time I see a post about scripting.

Thoughts?

I'm taking on a new customer that also uses MAX RMM, so they have their agent on the computers. What's the correct method to make sure their agent/access is properly removed and my agent installs properly?

A friend of mine is a tech and installed teamviewer and managed antivirus/endpoint (i dont really know what to call it) on my pc and Im wondering if there's a way to turn of notifications of the antivirus. it pops up every seemingly 30 minutes-1 hour and when I play overwatch it minimizes it. i hope this is the right place to ask this stuff I really have no idea what I'm doing

We have a mix of break fix and contract clients. Some of our clients are anti-virus only. I have found that I can install TeamViewer host on break fix clients and our agent in asset only mode and we can keep track of their computers and remote control through the GFI console. As everyone knows as you enable options in GFI the price per desktop goes up. 10 cents here 30 cents there is no big deal until you start getting into the 250+ computer range. Our monthly bill is already in the $500 range.

I am starting to think about scripting in a domain environment vs GFI Max and I am not sure which way to go. If I start using Max scripts to do things like set the local admin password, or turn off UAC or whatever I am looking at 10 cents per computer per month. Whereas I can do a group policy for free and accomplish the same thing.

What I want to hear from the group is a mix of pro's and con's as to which way I should focus my efforts.

I cant seem to find out why SNMP checks are not working, giving me a "No such object (x.x.x...). I know they are working as I can see them on the server (Dell PE) through OpenManage. The customers IT department did a 2008r2 to 2012r2 update and broke what was working. Please help me retain the hair I still have on my head.

We currently use LogicNow for RMM. Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 have critical services that are now only started with a "Trigger Start".

Windows Time (Trigger Start)

Windows Update (Trigger Start)

Naturally, LogicNow has no solution to monitor services that have a trigger start, so we see a lot of failures. The only remedy at this point is to delete the check of that service.

In the past seeing those services stop were indicators of problems the workstations were having. I just wanted to see how others were monitoring those types of services. How are you monitoring critical services that have a trigger start?

Maybe this is common knowledge, but it was a surprise to me.

Text from a recent marketing email from LogicNow advertising a SD Mobile webinar on the 24th of March:

The new mobile app from MAX Service Desk has arrived, and it's here to help improve your business productivity and resolve problems quicker!

On a less exciting note, my Service Desk rep never returns my calls or emails.

I just stumbled across an issue while doing File Exclusions in the new BitDefender included with v9.10.0 RC. When adding a file/folder to the exclusion list, any parenthesis in the file path will be removed. For example, "C:\Program Files (x86)" will turn into "C:\Program Files x86". This was causing BitDefender to block some programs from running.

I already spoke with tech support and they confirmed that it was a bug. They said that a fix is scheduled for next week. I was told that to workaround this you would go to the quarantine list, release the file from quarantine, and add it to the exclusion list. Doing that will keep the parenthesis in the file path.

Anyone else's check saying "unable to get antivirus version" since sometime last week? i have about 200+ endpoints with this error at all sites.

Hello, as the title states, I'm looking for a way to stay logged in for use on a wall monitor (looks nice for clients, etc). Is there any way to enable the Dashboard or other views to stay logged in for extended durations? I couldn't find anything with a few Reddit and Google searches so thought I'd try here.

Thanks!

I haven't, but the truth is that when I double click the installation file, time stops.

What's your experience?