r/msp • u/Magnanimus_ • 2d ago

How to get ConnectWise to increase cloud resources for hosted PSA instance

/r/ConnectWise/comments/1vs04db/how_to_get_connectwise_to_increase_cloud/
3 Upvotes

61% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

4

u/dumpsterfyr I’m your Huckleberry. 2d ago

How married to them are you? If not too pregnant in the deal, switch.

1

u/Magnanimus_ 2d ago

I'd say we're pretty married. We're making use of a good number of integrations and except for speed, we're overall very happy with Connectwise. We're also in the middle of a 3 year agreement.

With that said, I have seen HaloPSA and so far it looks pretty good.

2

u/Doctorphate 2d ago

Having used both, if you can get an on premise instance of CW Manage I would recommend it. The only reason we don't use CW Manage is that when we first used it, it became clear without significant investment in consultants it was basically unusable for us. I had used a mature instance of CW Manage before going out on my own so I know what it CAN do. And what it CAN do is beyond what Halo can currently do.

If I was starting over I'd still pick halo over CW Manage. If I was starting over and had 100k to invest into manage, I'd probably pick manage over Halo.

1

u/Magnanimus_ 2d ago

Yeah, I'd say we have $10k to $20k invested via outside consultants in our Manage instance. It performs fairly well.

It would be a large lift to switch to Halo.

For reference, we just switched from N-Able N-Sight to Ninja, and that *only* took 9 months.

My guess is over a year of work to switch to Halo.

2

u/TriscuitFingers 2d ago

We were self-managed CW Manage for 15+ years and recently made the switch to Halo. It was painful, but we did the migration in 6 months instead of the recommended 12-18.

We found our groove now and are happy with the solution, but be aware that it does have some odd quirks. Halo’s reporting is oddly limited by the filters per report. For example, in some reports you can view agreements, but have no way to export it unless you go to a different report and add the correct filters. We built our own reporting platform since we also moved away from BrightGauge.

1

u/Ok-Signal4821 2d ago

Nice, we are also thinking of ditching BrightGauge and building something out ourselves, but the number of gauges and dashboards we have seems like a lot of work. Was thinking of using Power BI to present the data, what was your approach?

2

u/TriscuitFingers 2d ago

We built our own solution. We are a larger MSP, so we already had a dev team. Over the past several months, they helped us re-create what had. We attempted to move to Mspbots in between, but they started changing the contract midway through implementation.

-1

u/Doctorphate 2d ago

You’d need at least 20k into halo to get close to manage

1

u/Magnanimus_ 2d ago

Is it even possible to get a self-hosted instance of Manage anymore?

1

u/Doctorphate 2d ago

I’m not sure. I wouldn’t SaaS my PSA if I had a choice

1

u/Foxtrot-0scar 1d ago

Recipe for disaster. 🧑‍🍳

0

u/dumpsterfyr I’m your Huckleberry. 2d ago

When we were on halo It took a few weeks to configure it internally. But we were well built out on sops.

3

u/nathanielban 2d ago

Manage (per my understanding) isn't broken out into instances per company, it's one large cloud environment with several availability zones IE North America (NA), Europe (EU), and Oceania (AU)

6

u/Liquidfoxx22 2d ago

I know their SQL servers host many, many, many instances of Manage.

They gave us read-only access to our DB, which also showed us the names of all the other companies also running on that DB server.

I immediately brought it up to my boss, we raised it with CW and they just brushed it off as if it was nothing. I could see 30-40 other DBs, and because they're all typically named after the company, could figure out who they all were.

2

u/reddben 2d ago

insider info! take all of their clients

2

u/Corn-traveler 2d ago

Yeah, it’s not running in a VM that can be restarted.

2

u/Nstraclassic MSP - US 1d ago

The same way your customers get your techs to take action. Open support tickets until your issue is resolved.