Kaseya has announced new and forthcoming enhancements to its portfolio of IT management solutions, including a series of integrations designed to connect those systems more closely.
The company described those changes, as well as the strategic thinking behind them, during a two-hour online presentation this morning, some two weeks after Kaseya’s 2020 Connect IT conference was originally scheduled to take place. That event has been postponed until August in response to distancing mandates aimed at limiting the spread of COVID-19.
New to VSA, Kaseya’s RMM solution, is a network topology visualization feature that automatically discovers and then displays connections between Windows, Mac, and Linux endpoints as well as routers, switches, and firewalls. Technicians will be able to view details about any item on a network map and remote into them, run scripts against them, or perform other administrative actions.
“One click to bring up quick view, a second click to actually remote control right to the machine,” said Mike Puglia, Kaseya’s chief customer marketing officer, during a keynote this morning.
New automated remediation functionality linking VSA and BMS, Kaseya’s PSA application, lets users define workflow rules that execute automatically whenever a particular type of ticket gets created.
“I can run a set of scripts without having to do it myself, and can solve the problem and close the ticket and bill for it too,” Puglia says, adding that the upshot is greater efficiency. “If I can cut 10, 20, 30% of my Level 1 issues that just drive everybody on the service desk crazy because they keep doing the manual things, we can free up their day and they can have more productive time.”
A further integration involving VSA allows it to synchronize data automatically with BDR software from Kaseya’s Unitrends MSP unit. “If I get an alarm in backup, that alarm automatically comes into my RMM,” Puglia says. “Why should I get an alarm from my endpoint management system and an alarm for my backup system?”
New to Unitrends as well are conditional alerts that let users specify when they do and don’t wish to be notified about backup failures and other issues. “You might not want an alert every single time something happens,” Puglia observes. Alternatively, a technician might only wish to receive notice when one problem happens a set number of times, like a backup process that fails three times in a row.
“We’ll bring all those alerts together and then notify you when we hit a threshold, rather than just getting all day deluged with alerts about workstations that you don’t particularly care about,” Puglia says.
Also on the Unitrends roadmap is a “Unified Backup Portal” that will let technicians manage appliance and direct-to-cloud backups, as well as Microsoft Office 365 backups conducted via software from Kaseya’s Spanning unit, through a single interface.
Automated Windows image search functionality that will allow companies to search through virtual machine snapshots remotely will arrive soon as well. “You don’t have to mount the backup to be able to search,” Puglia says. “You’ll just be able to search for it online and it’ll automatically look through all of those images.”
A further integration involving Unitrends, available now, automatically adds details about backups to Kaseya’s IT Glue documentation platform. “It will record all of the servers that are being backed up, all of the backup appliances, [and] how much is being backed up so that I no longer have to wonder what it is or go read reports,” Puglia says.
A new “suggested documentation” feature involving IT Glue, meanwhile, automatically draws on data in that system to propose remediation measures for newly filed tickets in BMS. “If it’s a low disk error, it can pull up all kinds of information about how to solve low disk areas,” Puglia explains. “We’re trying to help give more information to solve tickets, remediate them faster, be more productive.”
New integration with VSA lets IT Glue users run scripts, remote into machines, and take other administrative actions without exiting the IT Glue interface. “Normally documentation is static,” Puglia says. “We’ve changed that. Now I can actually do things with the documentation.”
Coming soon too both to IT Glue and the MyGlue end user password management system is a folder-level configuration feature that will let users assign common policies to related passwords simultaneously. “You can get as fine-grained as you want, like you can today, but you can bring it up a level and just protect a whole folder,” Puglia observes.
A planned enhancement discussed today will allow MSPs to enroll groups of end users in MyGlue at once rather than create accounts for them individually.
Due shortly as well is an extension that will let technicians open their IT Glue password vault from within the Chrome browser, and a similar feature for the Kaseya Fusion mobile app. “If I’m on the road, I’m on my mobile phone, I hit the button, I get access to all of my passwords,” Puglia says.
Headed to Network Detective, the assessment tool from Kaseya’s RapidFire Tools unit, is a Microsoft cloud assessment module that will remotely and automatically perform a risk evaluation of an end user’s Azure Active Directory, SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and Teams deployments. “You don’t have to have access to the network, you don’t have to go to the customer’s environment, you don’t have to VPN in,” Puglia notes, adding that the system will produce a security report and management plan automatically based on what it observes.
The capabilities disclosed today are the latest manifestations of what’s now a quarterly research and development cycle across all of Kaseya’s holdings. Other, previously announced updates added in recent months include a self-healing remediation tool for the Unitrends platform, work-from-home assessment functionality for Network Detective, dark web monitoring functionality for Spanning’s Office 365 backup product, and a new identity and access management tool for Kaseya’s ID Agent unit.
Deep, “workflow integrations” within IT Complete, the product suite Kaseya is promoting more heavily this year, are a core part of the company’s competitive differentiation strategy. Such “workflow integrations” make MSPs more productive and profitable by reducing “the space between” systems, according to Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola during a keynote this morning.
“The space between is the time it takes for a technician to switch tasks, shift the function, retrieve a new password, look up new information, orient to a new interface, try to find some documentation from somewhere,” Voccola said. “It’s manual and it’s hard and it takes up about 50% of what a multifunctional technician does.”
