As a product manager, conferences are incredible opportunities to talk to customers and partners face-to-face. This year’s Kaseya Connect certainly delivered, as hundreds of our Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners descended on Las Vegas to learn, network, and party a little with their peers. I expected to come back with great ideas, real world feedback, and feature requests from our partners. I did not anticipate what happened next: Damian Stalls from Fluid Networks came to the OpenDNS booth to meet the team and told us about the Kaseya automated deployment and monitoring scripts he had built for Umbrella. I was thrilled when Damian offered to talk after the conference and share his automations with the community.
Fluid Networks is an MSP headquartered in Southern California with a national customer base. They deploy Umbrella to every managed service customer as a standardized process. Damian describes Umbrella as “ a critical layer of assured security for us and our clients. We deploy it for all customers and don’t charge extra for it. Deploying Umbrella is important to ensure that our customers are protected and to free us up from having to waste time on remediating malware.” Damian added that he has been tracking threats like CryptoLocker but “none of our customers were encrypted and that’s one great proof point of its value.”
Damian also talked about the importance of automation to their business and to their customers. “Our goal is to be as automated as possible. We have a standing order for the team: If you have to do the same thing 3 or more times manually, raise your hand and get it automated. The last thing we want is our engineers wasting time doing something manually while our customers are waiting for something to get fixed.” This focus on automation not only helps make an MSP more efficient, but also improves customer satisfaction.
Since coming back from Kaseya Connect, Damian has posted his script along with SQL changes and instructions on Kaseya’s knowledge exchange. Besides deploying the Umbrella Roaming Agent, the script adds monitoring and automated tests to verify that customers are being protected. The script automatically runs the Umbrella diagnostic tool in the background and parses the results to verify that the agent is running and applying policy. In the rare event that it does encounter an issue, the script will automatically re-deploy the agent using customer specific parameters stored in Kaseya and test again. Furthermore, if a customer adds a new managed end-point, the script will automatically deploy the Umbrella agent to ensure consistent protection. The success or failure of the automations create tickets to help an MSP track automations performed and be alerted of any issues. Damian also included instructions on how to set up monitors for the roaming agent.
Take a look at Damian’s automations here.
Have your own RMM automations for Umbrella? We’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment below.
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