ManageEngine Endpoint Central Reviews

We primarily use ManageEngine Endpoint Central for patch management. We still have around 300 servers, all of them Windows. The monthly maintenance, as well as the installation of security patches from time to time, is done by Endpoint Central. Whenever there is a security patch, we push it through Endpoint Central or conduct monthly maintenance on every last Saturday of the month.

The GUI of Endpoint Central is very user-friendly, which simplifies the process of training new users. The tabs are clearly visible and intuitive, allowing users to understand their functions without difficulty. 

Additionally, the patch management feature is effective and allows us to see what new patches are available and which machines are affected, making it easy to target specific machines and deploy patches with just a few clicks.

I am using ManageEngine Endpoint Central for managing all the endpoints, such as application push, device configuration, policies, device patching, Windows patching, and third-party application patching.

ManageEngine Endpoint Central has significantly simplified my device management practices. Previously, installing something on 400 devices was quite challenging, but ManageEngine Endpoint Central has made this process much faster and easier. 

Additionally, the remote support capabilities are easy to use. The system misconfiguration part of vulnerability management is quite good, providing detailed insights into endpoint misconfigurations.

It is basically an endpoint management solution. It is used for endpoint configuration and life cycle management of an endpoint. It helps you to manage the entire cycle of a machine, which includes patch management, security updates, configuration settings, and user configuration settings. It helps you with application delivery, application patching, and application removal. It provides you with all of that. It also gives you the keys to log onto the machine remotely and run commands via PowerShell script or a remote command capability.

It is a pretty in-depth product. It supports macOS and Linux. They also offer MDM now. So, you can do mobile device management, and they've got new plugins for security modeling for identifying caesar-based vulnerabilities and patch remediation. They give you configuration management tools to allow you to see if your web services are configured properly or even configured at all. It does network scanning and network vulnerability assessments, port audits, software audits, software metering, and software licensing. It is pretty in-depth.

In terms of its version, there is an ongoing update with the product. I started with version 7 or 8, and it is probably at version 11 now. They are on-prem and cloud versions of it.

It is pretty intuitive when it comes to where and how you need to do things. A lot of already preconfigured templates and settings are available to you. It is beneficial where you don't have to go through or do post configuration. A lot of applications have a tendency of being very end-user-heavy. For example, with System Center Config Manager, which is a Microsoft product, if you're not an engineer and you don't understand that product, you're probably not going anywhere with it, whereas with ManageEngine, you can bring some junior-level tech support. Because it does have scalability, you can assign roles to users whether they are junior help desk support engineers or senior engineers. You can also have reporting and inventory metrics that are only available to management. It provides a role-based granularity to all these key capabilities, and it makes it very easy for even non-technical people to run a program. It is based on web technologies, and a browser is all you need to really use to get to it. Obviously, you'd want to secure that web access down, but you do have role capabilities.

We have two main use cases of Desktop Central. The first is patching, because we want to keep our systems secure. We install Microsoft security updates using ManageEngine Desktop Central every month. The second case is to deploy applications. We want to install applications to the machines from a central location. Also, we want to give access to users so they can install whatever applications they need using the self-service portal option. When there is a common application used by many users, we publish it to the self-service portal so users can install it themselves instead of contacting local IT. Those are our two main use cases of ManageEngine, but we also use it for other tasks, such as remote connection. Our local IT uses two products: ManageEngine Desktop Central and TeamViewer. We use both to connect to the remote machines. 

We have the on-premise version, but we are looking to move forward to the cloud version once they start supporting data migration—at the moment, they don't support it. 

One of the benefits of Desktop Central is it made the provisioning process simpler because now we have a provisioning package. We have around 1,500 laptops at the moment and all these PCs were provisioned by a provisioning package. In the provisioning package, we have integrated every aspect of renaming, deploying applications, patching, etc., so we simply execute the provisioning package and as soon as it's executed, it will install the management agent. Once the agent is installed, it will take care of all the tasks, so we don't have to sit in front of the computer to prepare the machine. This really helps us to provision the PC quickly with our agent. 

Now, we are going to do a PC refresh. It's a big project for next year. We are going to replace all of our PCs—1,500 PCs—with a new one, for all the users, so we have big requirements for ManageEngine. ManageEngine does a lot of scripting work in the backend—including renaming the computer according to our conventions, distributing applications, patching—so when we prepare the machine, we want everything to be installed and ready to give to the user. We don't want to wait or take more time, so we've now combined ManageEngine with Microsoft's Autopilot and Intune to provision the PCs. PC provisioning is made easier with ManageEngine. 

Another benefit is we have the option to pilot updates with some machines before distributing them to production, and this can be completely automated. We don't have to create said task every time for testing and deployment, so once we scope it, it relieves the time we spend each month deploying patches. It regularly runs in our schedule with the reboot options. We give reboot notifications in a user-friendly manner to employees, with the option to postpone the reboot. This relieves the time that we spend with end users since it's user-friendly. 

My primary use case is patching. We primarily use it for patching servers and endpoints.

For Endpoint Central, as an end-user system, we set automatic deployment from Friday. If, for any reason, there are instances that are missed, we check every day from 07:00 AM to 05:00 PM. We don't need to submit automatic deployment, so it's still part of my deployment process. 

We set up a test server. Once we are okay with the patch that they need to test, they approve it, and then it applies to production.

We used Microsoft. So, for asset processing reports and things like that, we had to move to ManageEngine. They changed the name to Endpoint Central. So, it's like that in terms of being much better and having more functionality as a product.

We use ManageEngine Endpoint Central for patch updates for computers. We push updates to endpoints using the server manager within ManageEngine. It also allows us to connect to computers remotely to address problems.

It has improved our patch management significantly because it centrally controls every update file that can be downloaded or pushed to computers. It has saved a lot of time for our IT department. Before using ManageEngine, it would take a lot of time, but now it has reduced the time and the number of team members required for these tasks. There is a cost saving.

I am certified for two of the modules of ManageEngine. I am a certified associate for AD Manager Plus (Active Directory Management) and I also have the certification for Desktop Central. Desktop Central is a management module used to manage devices and services from one location.  

To manage a large number of users and devices and push upgrades and patches, we need a solution that allows us to do that in an efficient way. We can do this with Microsoft Active Directory. That would be our primary use case for this solution. There are other things that we do with it.   

If we want to track an incident more closely to do some root-cause analysis, Desktop Central can help us with this.  

If I have a large group or area of a company that extends into EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) and APAC (Asia-Pacific) and maybe LATAM (Latin America) that is on Windows 7 and I want to upgrade multiple devices to Windows 10, I can plan for these upgrades and do them simultaneously. Desktop Central has certain use cases within IT, Ops, and DevSecOps (security as a part of software development and IT operations) roles. Using these you can build a DevSecOps pipeline using Desktop Central.  

In the case of a well-formed pipeline, the Ops is given the liberty to do the releases rather than having to get IT involved at multiple locations. With minimal help, the Ops can do the releases, they just have to define the release and the release goes out smoothly without any IT intervention. The automation process can be built out this way to give technical control to non-technical users. We built our own platform for doing that from scratch Java based. But the technology matured and there are more options available from vendors to solve these issues. We chose to deploy Desktop Centeral as our dedicated solution.  

It has greatly simplified updating and patching within our systems.  

We are using ManageEngine Endpoint Central primarily for desktop management. It allows us to deploy patches, manage antivirus, control endpoints like DLP, and more.

The most valuable feature to me is the vulnerability management. It also has effective patch management capabilities.