The MSP part of N-able N-central has evolved over the years. They have been trying to move from professional or network server and desktop licensing to make it more comprehensive. With professional nodes, you should be able to deploy agents to any device regardless of size for management purposes. It was previously expensive and tedious to manage different licenses. Since all devices require management, separating and making servers and network devices more expensive was inefficient. They implemented a node process so there could be one standard pricing for everything.
Team Manager Fiber & Backhaul Solutions Center & South at Telenet BVBA
Real User
Top 20
2025-06-26T14:43:14Z
Jun 26, 2025
There are areas in N-able N-central that could be improved. We always started it from the basic purpose of monitoring hardware, where vendors such as HP and Dell try to sell their own services which monitor and provide a dashboard, which is their logic. They want to make their own recurring revenue on that. We notice that SNMP has had a good run and still sometimes is used, but it's becoming an issue to maintain the same capabilities because HP makes it unreliable or even removes certain features that we used to be able to validate redundant array of independent disks. Our service that has been running for 15-20 years suddenly is not working anymore because HP decided in generation 10 plus and above, or generation 10 hardware in servers, storage controllers particularly, they just didn't put the SNMP OIDs anymore. We are now following that market change or business change in hardware monitoring and the future is Redfish, REST API, IPMI type of monitoring with the REST API and Redfish being most common. We have to do the effort ourselves because Enable is not really strategically going there because I assume there's not much money to make to improve that or to convince customers to start with their product. That issue could be better if they would be more prepared for that change and give us customers more tools, preconfigured, pre-available custom services for Redfish, REST API, where we just have to put a few items username, password and address and some dots and commas, but that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, which we are doing at the moment. We are using HP iLO commandlets and REST APIs for Aruba. Dell is making it very hard to monitor their hardware. If it has an iDRAC, I can manage it and monitor it, but if it's something that's less common or due to the portfolio, they have done a good job at not exposing information about health. We would just want to have a red or a green dot that indicates if this device is healthy or not healthy. Since nobody's investing in SNMP because it's a liability in security, they should invest in making a REST API and preferably also do the work on making it easy to pull or push information. That's something that the industry in general and Enable in particular could do a significant job to help us monitor.
Senior System Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Top 20
2025-02-05T11:35:00Z
Feb 5, 2025
One of my personal challenges with N-able N-central is the monitoring of services for server hardware. The industry has moved towards Redfish for out-of-band and in-band monitoring, yet N-able N-central still relies on older protocols like SNMP. This shift causes services to give false positives, false negatives, or become misconfigured. I believe N-able N-central should invest in a Redfish client for integration and provide a baseline of industry-standard services like HP iLO, iDRAC, and others, enabling easier configuration and implementation.
Senior Manager, Cloud at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
2024-11-20T14:52:00Z
Nov 20, 2024
They have AI on their roadmap. It's about how to leverage AI to make recommendations about device maintenance, recommendations for areas, such as certain ports to close, and recommendations on antivirus configuration or patching. Involving AI in the platform could improve it further.
N-central has limited mobile device management (MDM) support, specifically for Android devices. This limitation affected a deal with a client who had numerous Android devices to manage. It would be beneficial if N-central could expand its MDM support to include Android devices.
Team Manager Fiber & Backhaul Solutions Center & South at Telenet BVBA
Real User
Top 20
2023-08-09T11:32:48Z
Aug 9, 2023
There is room for improvement in the development of custom monitoring services. This is important because not all products are easy to monitor, and it can be difficult to determine which monitoring solution to use. For example, do you need to use SNMP? SNMP traps? Or can you get the information you need from the API? So, N-able N-central could be improved by making it easier to develop custom monitoring services for a wider range of products.
Senior Security at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Real User
2023-02-28T14:01:34Z
Feb 28, 2023
The support from our direct team is very good, but the support from their day-to-day ongoing help desk isn't that good. They have still got some work to do on that, but they have been focusing on that a lot over the last number of years. So, it has gotten a lot better than it was. In terms of features, I don't have any input at this time. I only use it twice a month to do a quick update of data.
N-able N-central could improve the remote access, my technicians have complained about it. They have used other free tools instead to compensate, such as TeamViewer. Additionally, when using remote access on the web, it is lacking reports.
N-able N-central is an all-encompassing IT management platform geared towards efficient network oversight. It offers comprehensive tools for monitoring and automation, which are crucial for managed services providers managing complex network environments.N-able N-central provides solutions tailored to IT management, offering remote connectivity, asset tracking, and integration with systems like CrowdStrike. Its single-pane interface supports extensive device monitoring, script execution, and...
The MSP part of N-able N-central has evolved over the years. They have been trying to move from professional or network server and desktop licensing to make it more comprehensive. With professional nodes, you should be able to deploy agents to any device regardless of size for management purposes. It was previously expensive and tedious to manage different licenses. Since all devices require management, separating and making servers and network devices more expensive was inefficient. They implemented a node process so there could be one standard pricing for everything.
There are areas in N-able N-central that could be improved. We always started it from the basic purpose of monitoring hardware, where vendors such as HP and Dell try to sell their own services which monitor and provide a dashboard, which is their logic. They want to make their own recurring revenue on that. We notice that SNMP has had a good run and still sometimes is used, but it's becoming an issue to maintain the same capabilities because HP makes it unreliable or even removes certain features that we used to be able to validate redundant array of independent disks. Our service that has been running for 15-20 years suddenly is not working anymore because HP decided in generation 10 plus and above, or generation 10 hardware in servers, storage controllers particularly, they just didn't put the SNMP OIDs anymore. We are now following that market change or business change in hardware monitoring and the future is Redfish, REST API, IPMI type of monitoring with the REST API and Redfish being most common. We have to do the effort ourselves because Enable is not really strategically going there because I assume there's not much money to make to improve that or to convince customers to start with their product. That issue could be better if they would be more prepared for that change and give us customers more tools, preconfigured, pre-available custom services for Redfish, REST API, where we just have to put a few items username, password and address and some dots and commas, but that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, which we are doing at the moment. We are using HP iLO commandlets and REST APIs for Aruba. Dell is making it very hard to monitor their hardware. If it has an iDRAC, I can manage it and monitor it, but if it's something that's less common or due to the portfolio, they have done a good job at not exposing information about health. We would just want to have a red or a green dot that indicates if this device is healthy or not healthy. Since nobody's investing in SNMP because it's a liability in security, they should invest in making a REST API and preferably also do the work on making it easy to pull or push information. That's something that the industry in general and Enable in particular could do a significant job to help us monitor.
One of my personal challenges with N-able N-central is the monitoring of services for server hardware. The industry has moved towards Redfish for out-of-band and in-band monitoring, yet N-able N-central still relies on older protocols like SNMP. This shift causes services to give false positives, false negatives, or become misconfigured. I believe N-able N-central should invest in a Redfish client for integration and provide a baseline of industry-standard services like HP iLO, iDRAC, and others, enabling easier configuration and implementation.
They have AI on their roadmap. It's about how to leverage AI to make recommendations about device maintenance, recommendations for areas, such as certain ports to close, and recommendations on antivirus configuration or patching. Involving AI in the platform could improve it further.
N-central has limited mobile device management (MDM) support, specifically for Android devices. This limitation affected a deal with a client who had numerous Android devices to manage. It would be beneficial if N-central could expand its MDM support to include Android devices.
The solution's overall integration should be improved.
There is room for improvement in the development of custom monitoring services. This is important because not all products are easy to monitor, and it can be difficult to determine which monitoring solution to use. For example, do you need to use SNMP? SNMP traps? Or can you get the information you need from the API? So, N-able N-central could be improved by making it easier to develop custom monitoring services for a wider range of products.
The support from our direct team is very good, but the support from their day-to-day ongoing help desk isn't that good. They have still got some work to do on that, but they have been focusing on that a lot over the last number of years. So, it has gotten a lot better than it was. In terms of features, I don't have any input at this time. I only use it twice a month to do a quick update of data.
The integration with other applications could be better.
N-able N-central could improve the remote access, my technicians have complained about it. They have used other free tools instead to compensate, such as TeamViewer. Additionally, when using remote access on the web, it is lacking reports.