What to Look for When Switching RMM Platforms

Throughout the lifetime of your MSP business, it’s very likely that at some point you’re going to need to change your remote monitoring and management platform, either because your business has outgrown your existing platform or because your current solution—for one reason or another—doesn’t meet your current needs. Either way, this is not something to take lightly—switching RMM platforms can be a massive upheaval. This is, after all, something totally embedded in your day-to-day business processes.

With this blog we’ll break things down into key stages and offer advice on how you can effectively manage the process to help ensure you get the right results for your business needs.

What is it you actually need?

The first thing is to consider what it is you actually need. This may sound obvious but unless you’re methodical here you could miss something critical. Start by looking at your functional needs. Here are three key steps to help you analyze and understand your existing usage requirements:

  • Identify what features in your previous platform are still required (if applicable)
  • Identify what issues were present in your previous platform and mark them as issues to overcome with your new platform
  • Identify the must-haves, nice-to-haves, and things you can manage without at a stretch—this goes for key features as well as process requirements

This will enable you to build out detailed functional requirements and set priority levels. Once you’ve done this you can start to look at whether you have specific customer-level needs.

• Establish device count by type

Not all RMMs suit all environments. Some are better for smaller MSP businesses and others can scale to larger MSPs and provide greater scope and flexibility. This metric will be core to your search for a new vendor.

• List all clients/sites to be deployed

This way you can identify and create a list of complex clients—or clients with special restrictions, such as security needs. When you start talking to vendors, this can be invaluable to help them understand the range of challenges your MSP business faces.

Matching your needs against the market

You’re now comfortably at the stage where you can start looking for and talking to vendors as you’ll be able to match your needs against the RMM platforms on the market. You should even be able to build up a short list of platforms that meet your technical requirements.

Once you start to build a list of vendors, there’s another level you need to look at: how will the supplier work with you? A good solution provider should work with you as a partner, and should be on hand to make the transition to their platform as seamless as possible for you. Any deployment is going to be lacking if the provider is not working with you to create a plan based on your requirements for:

  • Security
  • Server location
  • Redundancy/backups
  • Size/performance based on your deployment size
  • Network capacity

They should also discuss how they plan to support your migration to the new RMM platform.

On top of this, few platforms work as an ideal fit for your business straight out of the box. You’ll want to look at how your selected vendors are going to assist you with customizing their product so it really fits in and integrates into your business.

Choosing the right platform and managing the transition process correctly is critical. Switching platforms to something that isn’t going to completely fulfill your needs is simply going to lead to you being dissatisfied—and potentially even result in needing to change systems again.

SolarWinds® N‑central and RMM are all-in-one remote monitoring, management, and automation platforms that help get the job done quickly and profitably, providing users with a better way to monitor, manage, support, and interact with their customers. Over the past 20 years we have listened to thousands of MSPs and continue to improve the system to make IT service delivery easier.

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