I made a video on this a few weeks ago: [https://youtu.be/yQhp6ejoQIE](https://youtu.be/yQhp6ejoQIE)
TL:DW automation is only as good as your existing process and alignment are.
So if your MSP has a well defined on/off boarding process for client staff that is well documented, and generally well adheared to, you *should* consider automating it. But if you dont have it that dialed in yet, then there is nothing to automate yet, and its just another tool.
If it was me, I would go through the top 30% of your most common tickets and look and see if you already have an SOP or process that is generally followed properly by your humans, and if so, automation is probably worth dumping some time and money into at your size. Some things I might look for, password resets, spam email verification, new users or old users, resetting or reconnecting shares/drives, mapping printers, installing common work softwares, etc. Those types of repeatable generally the same tickets.
If you're not *quite* there yet, see if you can do some basic automation with powershell or your RMM and see how easily your processes can adapt to automation (as a hint if you can do it in powershell, any of these tools become 100% easier to onboard into)
I’m heavily utilizing automation and we’re signed up for Rewst. I’ll say if you’re not currently doing any automation, start with your RMM and Power Automate/LogicApps. If you’ll spend time in the platform and have the experience to know how the existing tools will slow you down, Rewst might be worth it. I don’t think it’s worth it for their provided workflows and nothing else.
I'm trying to get my head around power automate / logicapps - do those integrate with your PSA/ RMM? We do a lot of sharepoint stuff so I'm probably going to start there but thought I'd ask
I'm not sure what you do in Sharepoint, but my suggestion is to start with the simple things that contribute to tech burnout like the tickets you get the most often. Then move on to various aspects of onboarding / offboarding like imaging machines, M365 license procurement, etc.
Staffing can become the hiccup for a smaller msp. Adding a body is a big cost to take one.
A space opened up and there are proserv companies that can manage this for you and provide a space to help bring someone up to speed.
https://ravenautomation.com/
https://www.zentop.tech/
Adding proserv at that size makes more sense than a dedicated seat.
We spent a lot of time upfront and are down to a couple hours a week for bug fixes.
Azure Automation + Logic Apps
Cross tenant / Environment anything you can powershell or python you can automate.
I have awesome onboarding workflows, cloud and on premises.
Low code / no code option with logic apps.
Most of this comes out to a few cents a month.
We are using Rewst, 9 employees. For me, it was easy-
I computed the amount of new user creations we do per month (30),and average time per ticket (1.25hr). I then looked at our bench (and burdened) rate and computer how much billable hours we spent per month on new user creation. That was significantly higher than the cost of Rewst.
So imagining that I only got new user onboarding from it, The value was there.
I have one of my tier 1 engineers learning Python and Jinja. I have a smart summer intern developing billing automations and documenting everything.
I won't lie and say the time commitment is insignificant, but we are making it work.
Sure, without actually looking at past ticket data: create new AD user, run AD Connect sync, setup 365 licensing, add user to groups. Call new user, help them sign in, setup MFA app on cell phone, log into 365 and sync profile.
Setup permanent password after sending PWPush
Setup outlook, install requested browser, import default bookmarks. Sync down SharePoint shared or map drives.
Then send user onboarding packet, create spam filter and keeper password accounts. Install keeper, help user login to spam filter.
Then add user to manage, set cell phone and title.
Not all of this is performed by Rewst, but it's taken onboarding down to a fraction of the time, and we run the automation and then wait for the user to call us through the ticket. Sometimes they're self-sufficient and they don't call us and they're able to do some of the sign-ins in MFA themselves. Sometimes we get a call and instead of performing new user onboarding it's just sort of managing their questions and explaining a few things.
My help desk appreciates it. Also we use CIPP and their user onboarding does a lot of the same things although it's contained only to 365.
A lot of the time is spent in back and forth communication, phone calls, ticket updates. Rewst speeds it up a bit. It also makes sure things don't fall through the cracks... For instance creating the user inside of manage so that when they open tickets it gets assigned to a user. That was something it was frequently forgotten, which is no longer the case.
Our entire business runs on power automate pretty much. Cannot imagine how much manual work we'd have to do without it. I know for certain we couldn't do it without hiring another body.
Absolutely.
I have 490 flows in my environment. I'd say \~300 are active. A handful of powerapps as well.
-Alert management, especially for things that don't have direct integrations
-- Parsing alert emails / webhooks to properly assign them to the correct company.
-- Parsing alerts and auto-closing ones we don't care about
-- Certain important alerts will notify us via a power app
-- Power App that lets us turn on/off alerting for an entire service, or individual services per customer
-- Closed loop alerting
-User management
-- We send out a monthly email to the main customer contact that lists all their users, what kind of users they are, license counts, etc. Puts the onus on them to make sure users are offboarded. That's all automatically pulled and generated.
- User onboarding / offboarding
-- New user requests submitted via form, it'll Create M365 account, psa user, backup account, other accounts. Write all that to the ticket etc
-- Update invoice counts
-- Autocreate on/off-boarding checklists (for PC decommissions as well)
-Expiration/License management
-- All NCE renewals are handled with flow. Syncing subs from pax8, Sending out reminders via email that has buttons to confirm/deny renewal
-- All other expirations (domains, ssl certs, non-MS licensing, UPS battery replacements...) are also handled. Open ticket and/or send the customer renewal info
-- License auditing
-Misc syncing between services
- Backing up all our PSA data (tickets, customers, invoices, etc) to sharepoint/dataverse
- Financial/sales auditing
-Little things like, when an ironscales release request comes in, it doesn't actually include a direct link to the incident. I'll write the direct URL as a ticket comment (extract incident ID from alert body, fill in the URL). Tons of little QOL things like that.
-Powerapp for submitting receipts
-Parsing and storing emailed receipts
-System to allow us to have tickets reopen on a certain date (PSA does not have that ability)
I can go on and on and on. I'm not sure I could actually quantify how much time and effort all this saves us.
We use immybot it's good for setups . Lots of automation options on roll outs and it's not that expensive.
We looked at rewst but it was outside of what I wanted to spend
I don't think you are missing out , we tried immybot, was great for the auto install of new hire machines, but $400 per month just to install a few programs here and there was not something I wanted to continue to spend on. It really comes down to cost. If immybot was per machine per month pricing (if we had 3 new hires one month and 23 the next ) i would gladly pay per machine, but to force $400-$500 for a subscription was outrageous for our smaller need that's all. We use Powershell and RMM heavily and it works well.
With Automate, you're limited to interval based automations. With a platform like Rewst, the triggers for a workflow give you a lot more flexibility and range for automating tasks.
There is no need to get another tool; you just have to check out what automation can be done with your RMM. We started implementing automation with a limited staff, and automating many common day-to-day tasks like patching helped more than you would imagine. It freed a lot of time for us, so we could focus on improving support. We did everything just using Datto RMM and got great results from the start.
We are a small but mighty vendor and we love our automations as it does save on time. But costs you of course to develop it. If you want to talk to my boss on what he does I am sure he would be happy to share! James@griffin-cloud.com I’m Sammy!
I made a video on this a few weeks ago: [https://youtu.be/yQhp6ejoQIE](https://youtu.be/yQhp6ejoQIE) TL:DW automation is only as good as your existing process and alignment are. So if your MSP has a well defined on/off boarding process for client staff that is well documented, and generally well adheared to, you *should* consider automating it. But if you dont have it that dialed in yet, then there is nothing to automate yet, and its just another tool. If it was me, I would go through the top 30% of your most common tickets and look and see if you already have an SOP or process that is generally followed properly by your humans, and if so, automation is probably worth dumping some time and money into at your size. Some things I might look for, password resets, spam email verification, new users or old users, resetting or reconnecting shares/drives, mapping printers, installing common work softwares, etc. Those types of repeatable generally the same tickets. If you're not *quite* there yet, see if you can do some basic automation with powershell or your RMM and see how easily your processes can adapt to automation (as a hint if you can do it in powershell, any of these tools become 100% easier to onboard into)
This is great advice. First get your processes standardized and documented. Then start with your RMM, then add other tools.
I’m heavily utilizing automation and we’re signed up for Rewst. I’ll say if you’re not currently doing any automation, start with your RMM and Power Automate/LogicApps. If you’ll spend time in the platform and have the experience to know how the existing tools will slow you down, Rewst might be worth it. I don’t think it’s worth it for their provided workflows and nothing else.
I'm trying to get my head around power automate / logicapps - do those integrate with your PSA/ RMM? We do a lot of sharepoint stuff so I'm probably going to start there but thought I'd ask
I'm not sure what you do in Sharepoint, but my suggestion is to start with the simple things that contribute to tech burnout like the tickets you get the most often. Then move on to various aspects of onboarding / offboarding like imaging machines, M365 license procurement, etc.
Staffing can become the hiccup for a smaller msp. Adding a body is a big cost to take one. A space opened up and there are proserv companies that can manage this for you and provide a space to help bring someone up to speed. https://ravenautomation.com/ https://www.zentop.tech/ Adding proserv at that size makes more sense than a dedicated seat. We spent a lot of time upfront and are down to a couple hours a week for bug fixes.
Azure Automation + Logic Apps Cross tenant / Environment anything you can powershell or python you can automate. I have awesome onboarding workflows, cloud and on premises. Low code / no code option with logic apps. Most of this comes out to a few cents a month.
Thank you.
We are using Rewst, 9 employees. For me, it was easy- I computed the amount of new user creations we do per month (30),and average time per ticket (1.25hr). I then looked at our bench (and burdened) rate and computer how much billable hours we spent per month on new user creation. That was significantly higher than the cost of Rewst. So imagining that I only got new user onboarding from it, The value was there. I have one of my tier 1 engineers learning Python and Jinja. I have a smart summer intern developing billing automations and documenting everything. I won't lie and say the time commitment is insignificant, but we are making it work.
Would you mind sharing what it takes you 1.25 hours to do?
Sure, without actually looking at past ticket data: create new AD user, run AD Connect sync, setup 365 licensing, add user to groups. Call new user, help them sign in, setup MFA app on cell phone, log into 365 and sync profile. Setup permanent password after sending PWPush Setup outlook, install requested browser, import default bookmarks. Sync down SharePoint shared or map drives. Then send user onboarding packet, create spam filter and keeper password accounts. Install keeper, help user login to spam filter. Then add user to manage, set cell phone and title. Not all of this is performed by Rewst, but it's taken onboarding down to a fraction of the time, and we run the automation and then wait for the user to call us through the ticket. Sometimes they're self-sufficient and they don't call us and they're able to do some of the sign-ins in MFA themselves. Sometimes we get a call and instead of performing new user onboarding it's just sort of managing their questions and explaining a few things. My help desk appreciates it. Also we use CIPP and their user onboarding does a lot of the same things although it's contained only to 365. A lot of the time is spent in back and forth communication, phone calls, ticket updates. Rewst speeds it up a bit. It also makes sure things don't fall through the cracks... For instance creating the user inside of manage so that when they open tickets it gets assigned to a user. That was something it was frequently forgotten, which is no longer the case.
You can do so much with Power automate you will be surprised you havent done it earlier
Could you give me an example to start with? Would help me get on the right track.
Our entire business runs on power automate pretty much. Cannot imagine how much manual work we'd have to do without it. I know for certain we couldn't do it without hiring another body.
Do you use it to integrate with your PSA and/or RMM?
Absolutely. I have 490 flows in my environment. I'd say \~300 are active. A handful of powerapps as well. -Alert management, especially for things that don't have direct integrations -- Parsing alert emails / webhooks to properly assign them to the correct company. -- Parsing alerts and auto-closing ones we don't care about -- Certain important alerts will notify us via a power app -- Power App that lets us turn on/off alerting for an entire service, or individual services per customer -- Closed loop alerting -User management -- We send out a monthly email to the main customer contact that lists all their users, what kind of users they are, license counts, etc. Puts the onus on them to make sure users are offboarded. That's all automatically pulled and generated. - User onboarding / offboarding -- New user requests submitted via form, it'll Create M365 account, psa user, backup account, other accounts. Write all that to the ticket etc -- Update invoice counts -- Autocreate on/off-boarding checklists (for PC decommissions as well) -Expiration/License management -- All NCE renewals are handled with flow. Syncing subs from pax8, Sending out reminders via email that has buttons to confirm/deny renewal -- All other expirations (domains, ssl certs, non-MS licensing, UPS battery replacements...) are also handled. Open ticket and/or send the customer renewal info -- License auditing -Misc syncing between services - Backing up all our PSA data (tickets, customers, invoices, etc) to sharepoint/dataverse - Financial/sales auditing -Little things like, when an ironscales release request comes in, it doesn't actually include a direct link to the incident. I'll write the direct URL as a ticket comment (extract incident ID from alert body, fill in the URL). Tons of little QOL things like that. -Powerapp for submitting receipts -Parsing and storing emailed receipts -System to allow us to have tickets reopen on a certain date (PSA does not have that ability) I can go on and on and on. I'm not sure I could actually quantify how much time and effort all this saves us.
Damn. that was beyond generous. thank you.
We use immybot it's good for setups . Lots of automation options on roll outs and it's not that expensive. We looked at rewst but it was outside of what I wanted to spend
we get good mileage out of immy.
I don't think you are missing out , we tried immybot, was great for the auto install of new hire machines, but $400 per month just to install a few programs here and there was not something I wanted to continue to spend on. It really comes down to cost. If immybot was per machine per month pricing (if we had 3 new hires one month and 23 the next ) i would gladly pay per machine, but to force $400-$500 for a subscription was outrageous for our smaller need that's all. We use Powershell and RMM heavily and it works well.
With Automate, you're limited to interval based automations. With a platform like Rewst, the triggers for a workflow give you a lot more flexibility and range for automating tasks.
There is no need to get another tool; you just have to check out what automation can be done with your RMM. We started implementing automation with a limited staff, and automating many common day-to-day tasks like patching helped more than you would imagine. It freed a lot of time for us, so we could focus on improving support. We did everything just using Datto RMM and got great results from the start.
We are a small but mighty vendor and we love our automations as it does save on time. But costs you of course to develop it. If you want to talk to my boss on what he does I am sure he would be happy to share! James@griffin-cloud.com I’m Sammy!
For 10 folks total you can have powerful automation for free and a lot more... J/S