Monitoring to the max: Monitoring is the cornerstone of a managed services business. It’s what allows the MSP to deliver its services in a proactive manner and gain visibility into the customer’s environment. Monitoring also keeps trouble away, and, as a result, it’s what matters most to your clients. So don’t cut corners when it comes to this all-important service. For starters, make sure your RMM platform supports a broad range of operating systems. You want all your client devices covered. Also, an MSP should be able to see all devices at all customer locations in a single listing for ease of monitoring. MSPs need to have a level of control, too–including being able to set or customize thresholds for events that will trigger alerts sent to you and your technicians via email or SMS.

Core capabilities: At minimum, your RMM platform should meet your needs and those of your customers with the ability to automate routine IT tasks, monitor IP-enabled devices, remotely manage and control devices and provide detailed performance reporting. It should also support additional revenue-building services such as managed endpoint protection, backup and disaster recovery, auditing, and compliance and mobile device management.

Ease of administration: Taking a deeper dive, make sure your RMM platform also offers the value adds that will put ease of administration front and center for your team. For example, can you create automation policies using a drag-and-drop interface? How about PSA integration? Make sure your RMM solution works well with your PSA platform so that you can save time, close tickets faster and tackle projects with ease under a single pane of glass. In addition, regularly scheduled management activities in your RMM platform will ensure that your work is performed on task and in alliance with client business needs. Remote troubleshooting–for registration editing, printer management, command prompt execution and more–should also be executable without interrupting the end user. And when it comes to remote assistance, it’s important to be able to support end customers without the need for them to install the software ahead of time.

Flexibility for the win: Roughly 80% of the MSP marketplace is dominated by “responsive” customers who see IT as a cost and only call when they have a problem to be fixed. To reach this majority, an MSP needs to offer a flexible licensing model for trialing services rather than deploying full versions. This opens the door for customers not yet ready to adopt full-fledged managed services. Accordingly, it’s essential that your RMM platform supports this flexibility, with modularity that allows you to sell single solutions (like backup or antivirus) as managed services. This lets you bring more customers onto your dashboard and allows you to sell to customers of all IT maturity levels.

Reporting the right way: When everything is running smoothly–which it will be with the right RMM solution in play–then reporting serves as the important proof point for the work you’ve done, oftentimes in the background, for your customers. How much or how little reporting you choose to provide your clients with is up to you, and it may vary by customer. First,  you want to be able to offer both tactical and business-level reporting, including a look at long-term trends, to give your clients a perspective on what might lie ahead in their IT landscape. Second, it’s essential to be able to customize your reports according to clients’ unique business needs. Here’s where a drag-and-drop interface can make a difference with your RMM platform–allowing you to quickly pull in what you’d like to include or eliminate what you’d like to leave out. Lastly, an MSP should be able to run reports without worrying about the impact on the monitoring server.