Datto Remote Monitoring is a little more robust compared to Automate. Datto has components that let you audit inventory and stuff like that. You can see which customer had which device or what devices haven't been rebooted within the last 30 days. It lets you access and run scripts on any device across the whole site.
For example, I had to do updates for a credit union on the first Sunday of every month, so I created an MSI script, added that to a component, and ran that component across all the devices. It updates every device instead of requiring me to each one manually. I can also access the Splashtop agent through Datto, go to the command line, and do it that way, which takes only an hour or two.
If you make the component, you can save it to Datto. Once you save it, you can go to that particular site, check the component list, click that one, click the site, check the site off, and send. You can set it up to send you an alert if it fails. If you don't want to build your own components, you can use the ones Datto provides you. Every month, the component store updates with different components, like removing passwords, Kaspersky removal, BitDefender removal, etc.
I also like how Datto integrates seamlessly with the Autotask ticketing system. It was simple to get it configured. They implemented something within Datto to where you could go straight to the RMM management console and pick up the ticket associated with a particular device or the history of tickets that was involved with that device. You could add a device to a ticket by clicking on the device within the ticket unless a person sent the ticket for somebody else, like if an administrator sent the ticket for one of their users there. But, a lot of the time, when the users send a ticket in, they send it from the device that has the issue. Within the ticket, we can click the actual device that was in there.
Sometimes we have some downtime when Datto is doing updates. Maybe it's because of the cloud service they use. I'm not sure if they're going through AWS or Azure or what. That's happened, but the outages have been few and far between. But sometimes, we kind of needed it when it happened because it gave us a valid excuse to take a break.
I've been using Datto Remote Monitoring for the past four years.
I think Datto is a good fit for any environment. It definitely works for small businesses. At my other company, we had probably over 100 clients from different companies. Some of them were bigger than others. We had some mom-and-pop operations with a five-user office. Another one had 70 employees, but some had 200. We had clients in New York and Italy that probably had over 1,000.
I had to deal with Datto support a few times because their Concord platform was down. I've also called with questions about how to do something. The tech support was very fast, especially when you do an online chat. If you call, you might have to wait for like two minutes. When you use the chat, they'll respond right away. If there is a Datto outage or something like that, you can find out quickly. They get right back to you with a message like, "Oh yeah. We apologize for the inconvenience. We've just about finished running updates," or, "Yeah, we are aware that this went down, and we have our engineers working on getting this figured out."
We used N-able during my first year at the company, but then we switched to Datto. That was good for me because I never really got used to N-able. If it were the other way around— if I were more accustomed to ConnectWise — it would probably be the same conversation. I'd be like, "Oh yeah, ConnectWise this, ConnectWise is that." You have the automation, and then you have the Manage tool portion, which is like Autotask. It's like a ticketing system, except it's very different, and it's a little bit more robust. That makes it a little more challenging to understand. You can add this, or you can do that. I'm learning new stuff every day. They were like, "Well, Jamalle, you know you can do this." I'm like, "Oh no, I didn't know that."
But once I got it down, I'm sure I could utilize ConnectWise like I'm supposed to. But I will say Datto was a lot simpler. I think ConnectWise might have them beat in terms of automation, except their scripting system is funny. They have their own scripting engine within ConnectWise Automate. With Datto, you could decide what script you wanted to put in, like PowerShell, Command Line, Python, and Ruby. You could even use JavaScript, which we didn't use because we mainly were providing a lot of Microsoft solutions, so we tried to stick to the Microsoft platform. We have Mac customers here, but they still had to adhere to Microsoft policies when connecting to the networks, accessing Windows servers, and different things like that.
Datto made it easier to utilize different things where sometimes you didn't even have to get on the computer. It's the same with ConnectWise. You can just run a script and call the customer back to tell them everything is fine. You didn't have to get on the computer, and the whole thing took like two minutes. It probably takes you longer to fill out the ticket than it does to help the customer.
Setting up Datto was pretty straightforward. I can't remember if I had a hard time when we first installed it, but I don't think so. We were using a different ticketing system outside of Autotask at the time. To maintain and manage the solution, we have around eight techs. Four of them are on the help desk, and we have a couple on-site. Then we have the Level Twos doing projects or dealing with escalation.
I'd give Datto RMM a nine out of 10. It's one of the top solutions that I've seen so far. Then again, I haven't dealt with too many. If you talk to me in two years, I might have something better to say about ConnectWise.
