One of the technologies gaining a lot of traction with managed service providers (MSPs) these days are documentation management platforms that automate much of the manual labor associated with keeping track of configurations. Now those platforms are being integrated with professional services automation (PSA) platforms to create a mechanism through which MSP can more holistically manage operations. Liongard, the provider of the documentation management platform dubbed Roar, has integrated its software with PSA and remote monitoring and management (RMM) software from ConnectWise.
The goal is to provide MSPs with a unified platform spanning everything from automatically discovering changes made to any platform being managed, to creating the job tickets required to direct a technician to remediate any issue that an MSP might need to address, says Liongard COO Vincent Tran.
While competition between providers of documentation management systems is fierce, Tran says Liongard has an advantage in that it makes use of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data formats to create tiny files that contain all the configuration data. “It’s only few kilobytes in size,” says Tran.
Liongard then layers a Roar documentation management platform on top of those JSON files that produce chronological snapshots that detect any time there has been an unauthorized change made to a configuration, regardless of whether the device or application being monitored resides on-premise or in the cloud.
The integration with ConnectWise enables ticket synchronization between the two MSP platforms as well as auto-validation of configuration changes against closed ConnectWise tickets. Billing across the two platforms has also been integrated.
In general, savvy MSPs are slowly but surely embracing higher levels of automation to reduce labor costs that remain their biggest expense. Without that level of automation, many MSPs are also starting to realize their business simply won’t scale. The challenge many of them face is not so much mastering automation platforms, but rather overcoming the inertia within their organization that results in a manual process continuing to persist for no better reason than that’s the way the technicians across the organization have always done something.
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