N-central Reviews

A must have as a RMM solution for any MSP.

Comments: Easy to use and learn. A must have for our clients where time is of the essence when an incident occurs where downtime is business threatening.

Pros:

The ability to automate as much as possible is key in our business. Using maintenance scheduling is one of the most important features and was key to choosing this product over others.

Cons:

I wish there were more integrations with other industry software.

Alternatives Considered: Datto RMM

Reasons for Choosing N-central: Poor implementation and support was heading downhill since being sold a few years ago.

Switched From: ConnectWise Automate

Reasons for Switching to N-central: This was more established and had more features for our business between the two.

It may not be the best, but it's not worth switching.

Comments: It's better than many of the RMMs out there if you need good scripting and patch management. The Sentinel 1 integration was terrible and the backup integration is not great either.

Pros:

The automation policies you can create deploying software offer a lot of power and flexibility in terms of variables you can set by side and time scheduling.

Cons:

Take control is painful to use after using Connectwise Control. I've also had an open issue with the RPD protocol under Take Control that has been open for months unresolved.

Covid-19 - reduction of services applied after 5 years during a pandemic.

Comments: Over all they are very good at taking your money and over the years have been hard to communicate with. It’s all sales sales sales.

Pros:

Over the years this software has been hit and miss, we would spend a lot of time trying to get errors fixed. It was getting better, they also keep changing the sales rep that deals with me. When they call they talk about a different business and advise the customers name and customer to me. It’s happened twice!

Cons:

The biggest thing I didn’t like was when they removed remote control from my essential Licence’s. To make it worse it was done over the covid-19 pandemic. they are asking me to buy Licence’s and I have refused. We are social distancing and this has made it stressful for myself and my customers.

Reliable software for support, inventory, etc.

Comments: Having used N-Central for over two years now, I can say with confidence that we get our money's worth out of it. There are numerous features that should meet the needs of most IT professionals. For desktop support, asset management, machine information and patch management, N-Central is top notch. We've been utilizing it more and more in different areas as time passes.

Pros:

We use this for remote support moreso than anything. Overall, that's where we get the most bang for our buck. Very reliable in that regard, with little to no input needed from the end user. Also works well for inventory purposes, along with seeing the stats on a certain machine, what programs are installed, etc. The reporting features are also a big plus!

Cons:

Occasionally we have issues installing it on Windows 11 machines, but as time passes, that seems to be happening less and less. Another issue is being able to automatically deploy software to computers. It's a great feature, unless said software is over 100mb. That's been an issue in the past and I wish they would raise that limit.

Alternatives Considered: TeamViewer Remote and Splashtop

Reasons for Choosing N-central: Wasn't a fan of constantly having to login and give a code for Zoho to start a support session.

Switched From: Zoho Assist

Reasons for Switching to N-central: Great pricing, more features.

Powerful RMM Tool, Reporting Can Be Improved

Comments: Overall, we have been very happy with the product. It does require some investment in configuration, but that investment allows for a very powerful product. I have been extremely impressed with N-Central management's willingness to help ensure our deployment is successful.

Pros:

N-Central is very powerful and customizable. Configuration is very granular and allows experienced administrators to configure almost limitless monitoring. N-Central staff has gone above and beyond what was expected to make sure our deployment is successful.

Cons:

Reporting could be improved. The reporting interface is very basic and requires a separate Microsoft Windows SQL server to use. From speaking with contacts at N-Central, this system is planned to be replaced in the very near future.

Alternatives Considered: ConnectWise Automate

Reasons for Choosing N-central: After being sold to a venture capital firm, Kaseya support had been lacking. Additionally, the product improvements began to suffer at that time.

Switched From: Kaseya VSA

Reasons for Switching to N-central: N-Central proved to be a much more customizable product than Automate. Our previous experience with ConnectWise support led to skepticism about the level of support that would be provided.

It cost us a client

Comments: After months of back and forth with support we finally figured out what the issue was and was never issued a refund and they refused to release of from our contract after that ghastly experince.

Pros:

Nothing much, the interface was terrible.

Cons:

The monitoring agent broke our customer's network

N-Central: Yes, there is a learning curve!

Comments: I have dealt with N-Central for many years and have repaired badly set up systems and worked it up from scratch. It is a complex beast, but every hour you devote to the program is worth it, you can automate many day to day actions, not just patch management... worth every penny but you have to put the time into it, period!

Pros:

It has a ton of out of the box monitors. With customization there is almost nothing you cannot monitor. WMI, SNMP, it is all there.

Cons:

It is hard to understand for the average system administrator to set up. It also is NOISY, out of the box it will overwhelm you with alerts, it takes a lot of work to reduce the noise, but it is worth it!

N-Central is a great tool in a bad package

Comments: Love that I can drop a probe on a clients network and scan and find all devices in that network. The remote agent is great, allows me to remote into any device easily if it has the agent on it. Monitoring is fine, but no real dashboards, and it is about 10 to 20 minutes behind. If you are watching the dashboard and see a device is offline, you are already 20 minutes late. It's not the prettiest, but it does a good job.

Pros:

Remote agent feature is great. Software inventory and license monitoring is great. Once you learn it, it works great.

Cons:

Dashboard for monitoring is not real time. Steep learning curve. Very counter-intuitive on instructions. Figuring out thresholds for alerting can be difficult.

Great RMM Tool

Pros:

I really like all of the functionality and the user interface is very intuitive to use and powerful.

Cons:

There have been a few bugs we've dealt with in the past with automated tasks, but otherwise none.

API is not fully fledged and needs more attention

Comments: Overall a good RMM tool

Pros:

Efficient RMM tool. Feature rich and mostly easy to use.

Cons:

Limited reporting functionalities. The API is also very limited. Specifically when it comes to 1) Tickets- if two tickets are created for the same issue only one is displayed 2)Cannot get details about notification profiles and many more They need to give more attention to the API module and Reporting functionalities

After using it for 3 years, N-Able was a frustrating experience

Comments: Easier control of our client's PCs, and easy management of thousands of devices. Increased efficiency in the office.

Pros:

N-Able/N-Central gives you the ability to remote control devices and perform scripts and tasks without disrupting the end user. Additionally, you can deploy antivirus, schedule installations for off-hours, and many other useful tools.

Cons:

They claim Mac monitoring support, yet it isn't updated to stay compatible with newer Mac OS's. Also, scripts on Macs were unreliable, and many features that applied to PCs are missing. Not just a couple, but most. It seems like you can only do SMTP monitoring on the mac, at least in the version I used which was 9.5. Also, the support was really poor. It took days to get to resolution on critical alerts or monitoring issues. Also, I want to warn any potential buyer that when N_able performs agent updates, it's possible to lose all of the connectivity of your agents. This happened to us, and it took 3 days for support to help us with it. We had a backup, thankfully, and eventually they pushed out a hotfix to allow that update to work. I also had the on-premise server, but we had no way to log into the server or monitor it in any way. It was a Linux server. But, it was our server - we owned it. The risk of failure seemed much too large for a system built on an OS that we don't know very well. Finally, the sales tactics are incredibly strong. Every time you talk to your account manager, which feels like it's weekly, you get pushed into watching a demo, and they don't really leave you alone.

It works well most of the time, however...

Comments: SolarWinds is turning into a VERY large company. This is great as they get the cash flow to perform R&D and bring some interesting products and tools to the table, HOWEVER, this means they are reaching the point where one hand is not talking to another, products are becoming "designed by committee" and other issues that can be resolved with improved internal communication.

Pros:

Working for an MSP this is a very feature-rich product for remote control, remote monitoring, deploying and monitoring Anti-Virus, and some backup features (However I DO NOT recommenced the ArcServe-based product.)

Cons:

-Support has been very hit or miss and lately they have fallen into the "Miss" category -We had an issue where monitored services of a device were disappearing. After opening a ticket with SolarWinds support they informed me that the software cannot properly track how/why these services were disappearing from devices. This lead to at least 2 events where monitored hard drives were not longer being monitored, we were not made aware of it, the drives filled up, and services crashed -Product names keep being changed and we are not immediately made aware of it.

N-central is very useful for managing a large amount of Customer PCs

Comments: For the most part N-central helps me greatly in managing, backing up, and remotely logging into client PCs. if a few little kinks were ironed out of the system and previously mentioned patch management issue were resolved I would have no complaints at all. The on-boarding and setup process could possibly be made a little simpler with a default setup / template but that may be something that other users would not want depending on their configuration.

Pros:

N-central makes it easy to deploy a "probe" to one server on a domain and then with the correct credintials deploy the client to all of the rest of the domain connected PCs automatically(scary virus like automatically).

Cons:

I hate that every time I get all of the patches approved and working in the n-central patch management it seems i come back a week-month later and they have made an update that breaks the patch management and i am getting warnings that patches are not installing. If the patch management had default patch all / patch important things only profiles that worked 100% of the time i would be very satisfied with N-Central.

Best RMM Tool for MSP's!

Comments: Getting Solarwinds N-central setup can take some time if you want more than just out of the box. I recommend learning about all the features and functionality before engineering your N-central setup. Overall, another great product from Solarwinds!

Pros:

We switched over to Solarwinds N-central several year ago now and could not be happier. The web interface is filled with tons of features. It has helped us streamline our managed services processes. Their custom automation manager allows for us to create custom monitors and custom auto-heal actions for our monitors. The patch management feature is far superior compared to any other platform I have used. They are partnered with BitDefender offering an integrated AV solution providing a true complete RMM solution. Their remote connect tool called MSP Connect has been the best and smoothest tool I have used for remote access. The possibilities are endless with how you can configure and setup N-central.

Cons:

I have no complaints about Solarwinds N-central!

Good Product

Comments: Overall I would recommend the product as it has been very beneficial for our company. To get the full use of the product, you'll need to dedicate a resource to managing the platform so that they can learn the various ins/outs of the product.

Pros:

It's a good product once you get through the learning curve. The product admins are eager to make the product more effective and efficient at helping you manage your client's networks.

Cons:

Support is frustrating to deal with at the initial levels. If you can get past the L1 technicians in your support case, it is usually pretty good but it will take some work to get the case escalated. Product development is pretty slow as it often takes several releases that are 'coming' to make it into the product. And then the first iteration of the new feature usually isn't fully developed and will take another release or two to be fully functional.

Our RMM of choice, for a number of reasons

Pros:

Solarwinds has made their N-Central product one of our greatest tools as an MSP, the remote support, AV, and backup solutions being rolled into the central product make it a no-brainer for us to deploy the product to all of our managed devices, and for monitoring various hardware points via SNMP. One of the greatest strengths of the product is the ability for the monitoring API to get integrated with our ticketing solution to automatically generate tickets when monitored items flip from Good to Bad...

Cons:

While their API isn't bad, there's a number of features I would like to see added to it, mainly the ability to pull some information about clients, sites, maintenance windows and rules... Being able to manage/manipulate and otherwise work with those things would be of an even greater benefit.

NCentral: Expensive? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.

Comments: Efficiency of scale in being able to reliably manage thousands of endpoints and hundreds of servers has yielded immense ROI

Pros:

Very mature and stable solution that scales well and is a constantly evolving and growing product. Continually increasing levels of partner engagement to drive the development roadmap have begun to show how much value can be provided to the point where it is starting to stand head and shoulders above other RMM solutions. Incredible automation capability; if you can do it in powershell, you can wrap it into a custom service/monitoring point, along with a wide variety of native automation objects and logic flows.

Cons:

Complexity of setup (which can also be a Pro for flexibility and being customize-able) The Support experience can definitely use a lot of improvement

Great platform, but not good for smaller MSPs

Comments: From a technical standpoint, this platform can't be beat. From a business standpoint, they are a nightmare. Whether or not it is a good fit for you will depend upon your business model and how you structure your contracts and billing.

Pros:

It does everything you can think of. Probably the premiere RMM solution on the market.

Cons:

The pricing and licensing model is terrible. Every added option has a cost. This makes it very difficult to cost price for taking on new customers. If you dynamically bill your clients, you will get a lot of calls about the volatility in billing due to Solarwinds billing you for so many options. It was way better when they were just N-Able and not owned by Solarwinds.

IT engineer review

Comments: Has helped me immensly as an IT engineer and allowed me to maintain and improve my environment

Pros:

Great control of an entire network. easy RDP tools and detailed stats. Great customised reports.big fan of the product as a whole and many functions to use within an IT industry

Cons:

difficult to implement at first. the support is good but i would like a more interactive support like calling in as the IM is abit tedious. the patch management needs to be simplified abit more. license compliance report is extremely confusing. Just an overall easier UI. Would be nice if you could integrate live graph monitoring to drill down into devices and IPs over a firewall etc. essentially you do have the NPM but that needs to be intergrated in nCentral then i would procure it. thus we can have a monitoring team and throw it on the screen. right now the alerts from SNMP is great but is difficult to drill into and shut down rogue devices etc

A solid RMM tool that represents a great value option

Comments: NCentral slots well into its place as our RMM and allows us to manage and monitor most of what we need for customers.

Pros:

Having come from one of the more expensive competitors in the RMM space, not only was I sold on NCentral's features and automation capabilities, but the pricing for perpetual licencing was quite attractive.

Cons:

Custom reporting requires expertise and may not be accessible to everyone. We also do need to use additional tools outside NCentral to get a full picture of Networks.

N-Central - a pretty great solution for MSPs!

Pros:

Single point of access for so many things. A lot of automation is available. Rules, Filters, Service Templates - they all make stuff really easy to deploy.

Cons:

LDAP filtering is less than optimal. No SAML SSO yet. Reporting is difficult and frustrating.

Great product, but some limitations

Comments: I have used many RMM tools over the years, and found that N-Central is a great product, but it has some limitations in that the remote control happens through a cloud service and not directly to the server, and configuring monitors to monitor logs doesnt work as expected or is not available.
Support is great and responsive and the staff know the product well.

Pros:

Nice interface with LOTS of features. Fast remote access with lots of control options.

Cons:

Sometimes the Take Control access intermittently doesnt work for no reason. Event logs and log parsing is difficult to configure and doesnt quite work as expected.

Support team give incorrect advise when upgrading causing an issue. Worst support ever!

Comments: monitoring

Pros:

when it works it does the job. agent communicate ok, prob does rest of work. 90% of the values in thresholds are correct

Cons:

Support pushed us into an upgrade, we followed full documentation and also confirmed functionality with them, then after failure they admitted that what they told us was incorrect and worst of all didn't help resolve. 2 weeks later and still not resolved.

Better front-end then back-end

Comments: Used on a daily basis for monitoring, very useful.

Pros:

Great tool for network monitoring, good at what it's built for.

Cons:

The back-end structure is horrible, adding indexes barely helps because new tables are added on a per-day basis instead of being merged all together with a date field for filtering (Looks like a bad case of textfile port to SQL, ridiculous and not so great for performance).

Very helpful tool for MSPs

Comments: So far so good. This product has been great to use as we are migrating to it

Pros:

I have only been using this tool for a few months. However I really like it. It seems to have more features and more reporting than other RMM tools we have used

Cons:

The only feature so far that I am not in love with is being able to use remote background like we were able to previously.