What is our primary use case?
They are providing our RMM and PSA tools, as an all-in-one solution tool for MSPs. I am internal IT, but the same concept applies.
I am an internal IT manager for a company which has about 250 staff between Australia and India. I came from an MSP, so I knew the way an MSP can help us run, e.g., how you can use different monitoring tools to cut down on management of endpoints and having to go through all those processes manually when you can just use tools to automate them.
How has it helped my organization?
There is a lack of a need for hiring additional staff because Atera does all the leg work, where you would have traditionally employed something like a Level 1 technician.
As internal IT, I only use remote monitoring management (RMM) because I have no use for contract billing tickets. A lot of our staff, being the primary points of contact, just come to me directly. They all have my mobile number and email address. I did try to have them use the help desk through Atera, but they used to just CC me on the email. I gave up on that idea. So, it is purely remote monitoring management for me, which cuts down a bit on the management of the platform for me, so I don't need to worry about the other side of it. Within the RMM set, I use pretty much everything, either on a daily basis or on an as-needed basis.
There are a lot fewer hardware replacements. Once people migrated from old style hard disks over to SSDs, you have things like hard disks filling up faster. So, I run a script to clear out all the waste, e.g., all the temporary files and downloads. A lot of our business runs through a custom web application that we built. This involves people downloading a lot of PDFs and Excel files, and not just having them sitting in folders. With Atera, I can just go through and clean the temporary files out.
I manage our entire operations. I have one staff member overseas on the ground who is a Level 1 technician in India. However, I know of other companies similar size to ours where they have IT teams in Australia with four to five staff. If you are paying everyone $80,000 dollars a year AUD and subtract four of those, that is a straight away quarter of a million dollars a year in savings from not having those extra bodies.
Patching has hands down saved us time. We do not have to worry about patching computers constantly. Any that miss their patch schedule, I can do with three clicks from the management pane in the portal. The biggest time savings is getting computers patched and keeping them up-to-date. It is one of those things that can fly under the radar in internal IT setups, where you just let Windows look after itself, but it doesn't unfortunately work that way. Going off my previous experience, I would have spent three to four hours a week patching a business of our size. Currently, I spend about 10 minutes a week.
What is most valuable?
- Automated Patchings
- Remote Access
I use TeamViewer on Atera, which integrates with Atera, but it also comes with another remote access tool named Splashtop that is included in your monthly fee. Sometimes, TeamViewer doesn't start up with a PC or something like that. As long as the Atera agent started, I have never found Splashtop to be inaccessible. I wouldn't need more than one hand to count how many times Atera hasn't started with the PC in the last five years. I always have remote access to a PC if I'm out and about, like I am now. I can jump in on my phone. Normally, I carry an iPad with me if I am going out on weekends.
The main features that I use in terms of remote access and management of endpoints are mainly updates, scripting, and cleaning up disks. I will just run a script in the background and let it do its thing.
Scripting is something that I am setting aside more time to familiarize myself with. One example this week, I was asked by management to just see when a staff member is logging in and out of their PC, because these are remote workers and the global pandemic sent a lot of people home. The belief is that 97% to 98% of staff will perform equal to whatever they will do in the office, but there are a few who will sometimes fall a bit short. So, this is a query, "Are they actually there working?" I had a script loaded into Atera and ran it against that PC within about 30 minutes, then it just outputted all the time that they had logged in and out.
That sort of capability as an IT manager is great. Obviously, a lot of people will say, "Don't use technology to manage performance. You should be using KPIs and whatnot." But, we have found throughout COVID-19, everyone having to work from home, and repeated lockdowns here in Australia that we actually do need tools. Measuring performance is just not as simple when you're in an office, and that is why I am starting to investigate additional options within Atera to provide feedback to management.
Atera is very simple to use. The current interface is fine and usable. I have no issues with it. It is responsive, fast, and snappy. I am not left twiddling my thumbs waiting for a device just to load.
What needs improvement?
There is a new version of the interface coming out. I have been asking for a new version for a while. While the interface is nice, I guess the developer thinks one way and the user thinks another. So, I think the interface is getting a big overhaul. This is what they have mentioned in their webinars and stuff. It is in beta, but I'm not on the beta program, so I haven't seen it. I can't really complain about the old interface, but now that I have heard there is a new one coming, all I want is the new one.
The one thing that could do with improvement is the reporting. This is from someone who worked in an MSP, where I would want to run a report and be able to just present that to a client. Reports are fine for internal use, where they never leave your company. However, if I was an MSP, I would probably want a little bit more information or the ability to customize some of it without having to edit PDFs.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Atera for just over five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability has been fine. I have only had one bad experience with it. That was solved in less than 24 hours by Atera. There was a bug, where it would just keep expanding log files. The bug had occurred a month earlier, and the log files just took that long to grow before I noticed them. Fixing it was as simple as installing the latest version of the agent over the top of it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I don't know how far you could take it as an MSP. For internal IT, you can break it out into many subcomponents or subcompanies. I use regions to manage mine, so I have an Australia region and India region. All the Australian PCs are in the Australian one and all the PCs overseas are in the India one. That is how you manage it internally. You could very easily scale up to thousands of endpoints. There will be a point where it might become harder to manage.
We do have about 250 staff in the field on iOS devices who don't realistically need an Atera agent.
We are looking at about 370 endpoints total. We have another company overseas who also uses Atera, and they have about 50 endpoints. So across three companies, I have three Atera instances, where I manage two and assist with the third. I set it all up for them, and said, "It is now your baby." They are actually a company full of developers, so endpoint management is not their thing. They look after themselves. I very rarely have to assist with anything there. In terms of ease of use, that is how good it is. You can give it to people who are not good with IT.
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support is great. They are pretty responsive. Being in Australia, the time zones are very off. For example, it is 4PM here. I have no idea what time it would be in the United States or Israel. While I have no idea what time it is there, I can generally get support. Normally, if I am having a problem, it's early in the morning, then I might have to wait for about 5 to 10 minutes before I can get someone on chat. I really only need to use chat support.
Occasionally, I will see something on the community groups, and I can tag their staff. This is really a great aspect of their company. They're having to own up to their shortcomings. If anyone points something out, they will say, "Yep, we're going to work to fix this." Atera's support is very professional from a technical point of view as well as for overall management of the business.
Atera has definitely reduced frustrations that we experienced before we started using it. Originally. the product was not as polished, going back five years. A lot of the years, we were crying out for certain features to get delivered or there wasn't a lot of transparency. Over the last two years, or maybe a little bit before that, they went to this rapid release model, where you get a new feature and bug fixes every three to four weeks. That responsiveness alone has kept me with the product.
There was one other aspect of their responsiveness where a lot of other vendors were really slow to the party. There was a large-scale hack in the US, where an MSP was compromised. I don't know all the details, but a junior technician had their login credentials stolen by a hacking group who logged in and encrypted a lot of governmental departments. That alone prompted Atera to enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all logins. It wasn't something where you opted in; it was mandatory. A lot of people sort of resisted, and said, "I don't want that. Why should I have it, I have the company's password?" On all of the forums that we are in, I tend to answer them, saying, "If you were my MSP and I heard that you had declined this, I would drop you instantly." The fact that you are not being charged for it, it's included, and it's going to be rolled out in less than a week, that sort of responsiveness is just invaluable. That is what keeps me looped in: their responsiveness, openness, transparency, and the speed at which they can adapt to the shifting market.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The company did have SolarWinds N-able N-central. That was through an MSP. We are still partners with them, but because of the licensing costs involved in N-able N-central, we just don't want to use it. It is quite a bulky, heavy agent compared to Atera, which is half a megabyte download. The N-able N-central one was about 22 megabytes the last time that I downloaded it about a month ago. It installs like 10 different applications. Whereas, Atera installed itself and Splashtop, and Splashtop updates itself.
Sometimes a user will call up, and say, "My computer's slow." I go in, restart the N-able N-central agent, and they will say, "Oh my computer sped up." So, I'm not a big fan of it. If I had to look at alternatives, it wouldn't even be a consideration.
N-able N-central had more options for more features, but those features are also quite buggy. We never actually even used a lot of them. So, the ability to deploy Office 365 users from N-able N-central sounds great. However, in the end, it is easy just to log into Office 365 and create the user or do a virus script. A lot of the features that were being released were just not useful.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was easy. I created an account with a trial that had instant setup. You retain all that if you move to being a paid customer, so you don't have to redo it.
Creating the account and deploying it to 100 endpoints takes maybe an hour or two. if you had no idea what you were doing. You will probably be like, "How do I set up a customer?" and, "What information do I need?" There is a logical way you have to structure any RMM tool. If you know how to do that, you will be done and live in an hour, checking patch statuses on all your endpoints.
There is an MSI that you can script to run silently. You can copy both the endpoints and load them back, if you want to. Once it is installed, it runs silently. It is lightweight, hardly using any system resources. Once you have switched that on, you are in the web interface, and then management of the endpoints is really quite simple. You don't even have to click into it because you can run plenty of management tasks directly from where you can see all your endpoints. You can run automations, scripts, and do all that sort of stuff. So, it is very simple to use.
Then deployment of the old agent was a little different from how it is now. I prefer the newer version. With the old version, you had the ability to mass deploy in a domain environment. With the new version, you get one tiny file, which is half a megabyte, and it runs silently. I just send people the link now if I need to deploy it to a PC overseas. I am like, "Here, download this and install it. Let me know when it's done." That is what they do. I just find it, assign it to the right area of Atera, jump in remotely, and start configuring.
What about the implementation team?
I deployed it myself.
After the initial account creation and verification, a lot of guys from Atera reached out and said, "Will you sign up for a trial? Do you want to book some time so I can run you through it?" There was no pressure. It wasn't like a sales call where you start getting hounded by Atera, "Sign up. Sign up. Sign up." For me, that was really good because I'm not a big fan of pushy people.
We deployed it very easily. Where a lot of traditional IT teams might have someone whose sole job it is to keep things patched or cleaning up hard disks, this prevents us from hiring additional staff. So, it makes sense from a business point of view.
What was our ROI?
I have gone from getting three to five users off of a PC to five to seven years. Two extra years on hardware is a massive financial benefit to the business. If we averaged that out, we have about 120 actual desktops, not including laptops. I spend about $1,500 per desktop, so that is $150,000 every three to five years that I have now taken out. If you divide that by five, you get $30,000 a year. If you take it up to seven years, that is about $210,000 in savings.
There is another additional savings from an internal standpoint. We would normally be managed by an MSP, and now we are not, where we might have previously paid $150 per endpoint to an MSP. Five years ago, we had about 100 endpoints at $150 each. It was $15,000 a month in just management fees for just the agent, which was SolarWinds enabled at the time. All of the costs were because I had per agent licensing from SolarWinds.
A big driving factor for choosing Atera was the cost per technician. Just having to pay for myself and one other person, I am always going to come out ahead of an MSP using a per agent pricing model. The savings have been astronomical.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
As an internal IT, it's gold right there. It is money in the bank.
I was recently quoted a cut down price of about $8000 a month to manage it. I pointed out, "Even at 10% of your price, I'm still 100% ahead of where you are. I pay $80." Then, they came back and said, "We can do $800." It was at that point that I realized there was some price gouging happening. I'm just not interested in if your selling point is 1000% markup. There's no competition there.
It comes with unlimited devices, so the fixed price cost is taken out of my budget. So, I'm all good.
If it was even slightly more expensive, I would still be onboard. Even as it stands, I am looking to upgrade my subscription from the $80 a month package to the $130 a month package. It is still great value. That value proposition is really there.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
When I came onboard, there was nothing in place internally. So, I went to the market, sought out a few products, and ended up with Atera.
I looked at NinjaRMM. I think I might have even trialed it. I definitely trialed ConnectWise. Also, I looked at Datto RMM five years ago, which was getting pretty mixed reviews. A lot of people were saying you install the world and it delivers next to nothing.
NinjaRMM was the only other solution where I took a good look. When I worked out costs per input, it just wasn't worth it internally. It just lacked too many features. It didn't look polished enough, and I was going to spend years waiting on it to be polished. Atera has come ahead in leaps and bounds since then. It has gone from being a good-looking, nice product to becoming something that is very polished. I can't wait to see the UI, which should be absolutely fantastic.
Always check the quotes from vendors. Ultimately, you need to go to the market and check all these things out. In doing so, I honestly stumbled across Atera. It was a review site that took me to their website. I thought this looked interesting. So, I had two quotes on my desk for thousands of dollars per month and this solution was $80 a month.
What other advice do I have?
It has been running for five years, so we are happy with Atera. It has a great pricing model and is a great product. It looks sharp and is responsive. It is the first tab that I open on my browser in the morning.
The best thing that you can do is start a trial, reach out to Atera, and see if they have time for a one-on-one to run you through the product. Also, ask for an extension on your trial because you get 14 days, and 14 days isn't enough to fully evaluate a major decision that will be the core background of your business.
I have done some automations in it. For example, if disks are filling up, I run a script straight away to clean up the disk. A lot of my automations are basic things like that, outside of the patching automation.
A lot of the automations are around that scripting side of things. When you set them up, I know they work very well. A lot of what I do is basic automation, patching, and disk cleanup. I also pull a couple of reports from an endpoint. That is about it.
A lot of the stuff which I really wanted has been delivered, like an SNMP template. So, you can just save one template and apply it to devices so you are not forever copying numbers and naming them. That has all been added and is being improved upon.
We use it across the board. Our three companies are all on Atera. We might be implementing the PSA model and ticketing system in one of the businesses, which is starting to grow quite rapidly. That would be the only increase in terms of usage. The only other way in which we would increase is if I needed another staff member eventually. Then, I would have to add them to my subscription, but that is not a big deal.
This solution should always come out ahead. Unless you have a client with a 100-plus seat who is demanding a dedicated resource, the value is always going to be there.
If it wasn't 10 (out of 10), I wouldn't have stuck with them for five years. If it isn't performing, you should replace it. You can't throw money against the wall, because it's kind of pointless.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.