In today's work-from-anywhere culture, remote monitoring and management take a central place. This is where tools like NinjaOne fit in.
NinjaOne is a powerful remote monitoring and management tool that comes with advanced security, automation, and scripting features to monitor remote devices and take the necessary actions for remediation. Read on as we talk about the features of NinjaOne followed by its benefits and limitations, so you can decide if this tool is the right fit for your organization.
NinjaOne Features
NinjaOne simplifies the process of remote monitoring with its advanced features, simplified views on a single pane of glass, and more. Here's a look at its important features.
- Multi-platform Endpoint Management A key feature of NinjaOne is the quick access it provides to Windows, Linux, Mac, VMware, and SNMP devices, right from NinjaOne's pane. This way, you don't have to switch tabs to fix issues, as you can remediate IT issues through this pane. More importantly, you don't interfere with employees' work or productivity while fixing any issue.
- Patch Management Downloading and installing patches for different applications and devices in your infrastructure is not easy, and NinjaOne can greatly ease this process for you. It stays on top of patches for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems and the applications that run on them, and automatically downloads and installs these patches as they become available. You can quickly configure the patches and manage their workflow in a granular manner. All this means your devices and applications are patched automatically with minimal effort from you. Needless to say, this feature can greatly enhance your security and reduce the time and effort it takes for manual checking and patching.
- Automation of Repetitive Tasks As an IT admin, you know that many IT tasks are highly repetitive. They are also mundane and can take up a lot of your time and effort, thereby leaving little time for other work. With NinjaOne, you can automate repetitive tasks to free up your time. Using a combination of scripts and automation configurations, you can get this tool to perform repetitive tasks. You can even deploy this automation at a pre-scheduled time or on demand, as the situation warrants. NinjaOne supports five powerful scripting languages: PowerShell, JavaScript, ShellScript, VBScript, and Batch.
- Comprehensive Monitoring NinjaOne offers comprehensive monitoring of your remote devices, and in the process identifies issues proactively. Based on the importance of issues and your preset configurations, it sends alerts to the respective employees. You can even create custom notifications and alerts, so you're always on top of the health and performance of your infrastructure, and the devices that connect to it.
- Service Desk A service desk makes it easy to assign and automate your IT workflow, and NinjaOne comes with a built-in service desk to improve ticket resolution performance. In particular, this feature combines the device, requestor, and information in a single window to provide complete visibility of an incident and its context. Such contextual information provides the assignee with the necessary information to close the ticket faster, while your organization can automate the ticket creation and resolution process. Its robust ticket automation rules provide alerts, ticket routing, and escalations as required, so the Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR) is consistently low.
- Documentation Providing contextual information can help your admins and technicians to better manage an environment, and this is where IT documentation will come in handy. NinjaOne comes with extensive IT documentation capabilities to document, standardize, and use the contextual information you need to manage IT environments.
- Asset Management NinjaOne makes it easy to track your assets and stay on top of new devices as they are added to your network. It automatically identifies new devices and maps them to the existing topology map, so a mere glance at the map can tell you more about a device and its likely dependencies. Besides mapping, NinjaOne also tracks inventory and usage, along with providing a detailed report about the health of your overall hardware, software, and subscriptions.
- Mobile App NinjaOne comes with a well-developed mobile app that enables you to stay on top of your infrastructure from anywhere in the world. You can even leverage this app to remediate issues on the go.
- Cloud Backup You can leverage NinjaOne's file and folder backup solution to make a copy of important documents in the cloud. This integrated cloud backup service not only protects your data but also brings down the associated costs of a breach. Furthermore, it also helps you to meet compliance requirements.
Thus, these are some of the important features of NinjaOne RMM. Next, let's see how these features can benefit your organization.
Benefits of NinjaOne to Your Organization
How do these features matter to you? What can your organization gain from using NinjaOne? Let's look at some of the benefits that come from NinjaOne.
Security
Security is a key consideration in any tool, given the many security breaches and ransomware incidents happening today. In 2021, NinjaOne stepped up its security capabilities after a competitor's ransomware incident. Here are some specific measures that NinjaOne has taken to beef up its security.
- Ninja's source code and web portal are routinely scanned for any injections and malicious code.
- Penetration testing is done by third parties at regular intervals.
- The agent management portal is hosted in a secure cloud environment with high encryption standards.
- All cloud assets, environments, and services use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) or 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) to prevent unauthorized access.
- Every year, an independent audit is done for SSAE18 SOC2 audits, and the results are given to customers on demand.
- Complies with all U.S. government cyber security standards like NIST, DFARS, and CMMC. This compliance comes in handy if you want to service federal or local governments.
Improved Efficiency
NinjaOne has a low management overhead, so your technicians can focus on other pressing issues. Likewise, it's also easy to implement and won't take up a ton of time and resources. All this translates to improved employee productivity and efficiency within your organization.
Quick Remediation
With NinjaOne, you can quickly identify and remediate issues before they impact your larger organization. It quickly identifies common issues and even automates the remediation process of tier 1 tasks. For the more complex tasks, NinjaOne provides the necessary context and background information along with powerful IT tools to fix the issue.
Customer Support
NinjaOne offers excellent customer support to address your technical and non-technical questions quickly. In addition, there are many free training courses, extensive documentation, and well-developed videos to take you through some of the most common workflows and processes. Some of this content also has steps for troubleshooting frequently occurring issues.
Custom Branding
If you're a Managed Service Provider (MSP), you can use NinjaOne to create custom branding for your clients. What this essentially means is that you can have a customizable client portal, reports, and even a systray icon to showcase your customer's brand logo and name. Undoubtedly, such custom branding can save a lot of time and effort and, at the same time, meet your client's interests and expectations.
Reporting and Compliance
NinjaOne supports informed decision-making by providing all the pertinent information you need about your assets, tasks, employees, and customers' needs. It can even generate reports using custom templates or built-in ones to augment your decision-making process. These reports can come in handy for internal auditing and compliance as well.
Remote Support
As NinjaOne is cloud-based, it opens up new opportunities for your organization to provide remote support to both in-house and remote users. If you're a Managed Service provider, this flexibility can open new channels of revenue and can enhance the overall end-user service and experience you offer.
Integrations
NinjaOne integrates well with a ton of apps, and in the process, provides high levels of extensibility to your existing stack. A key benefit is that it natively integrates with many tools to provide a seamless end-user experience and usability.
In all, NinjaOne is a convenient tool for quickly and effectively identifying and remediating issues. That said, it's not ideal for all situations, and this is why we'll look at some limitations next.
Limitations of NinjaOne
Like any tool, NinjaOne also comes with certain limitations, and understanding them is essential to make an informed decision. Also, you'll have a better idea of where NinjaOne will fit into your overall infrastructure.
Some of the key limitations of NinjaOne are:
- Customization in reporting can be better.
- Splashtop features currently don't include support for multiple connections and a single configuration pane for all settings.
- The web portal can be better. At the time of writing this piece, there are a few features that aren't available. For example, you can't group devices for a unified view, can't rename each device, etc.
- It can provide more granularity in security policy implementation.
- The features are a lot fewer for Mac systems when compared to Windows. For example, remote file transfer and TeamViewer are not available for Mac at the time of writing this piece.
Now that you know the benefits and limitations, let's head to a final verdict.
Final Verdict
NinjaOne is a robust and comprehensive monitoring platform that can monitor different aspects of your network and provide the visibility and control you need to stay on top of its health and performance. More importantly, it provides rich insights and reports that can help with strategic decisions, budgeting, capacity planning, and more.
Another highlight of NinjaOne is its extensive documentation, good customer support, and vibrant community, all of which translate to an excellent end-user experience. It even has video tutorials and FAQs that can help users to improve their configurations or address any roadblocks easily.
NinjaOne also supports role-based access, and this can be super helpful if you're managing someone's IT assets on their behalf. It can work well for your own organization as well. Say, for example, you have someone from the sales or marketing teams who want to know the performance of your website. Instead of providing them overarching access, you can allow access to just a single report or to just the metrics that matter to them. This capability to prevent unauthorized access can greatly bring down the possibility of data breaches.
Plus, it's easy to use and supports remote monitoring and management. Its integration with the most popular tools and software suites also enhances its usage across different infrastructure and tech stacks.
In the last year, NinjaOne has focused extensively on enhancing its security capabilities, and they have become a good selling point for the company today. As a user or a managed service provider, you can be assured that the built-in security features can act as the first line of defense against a data breach.
Though there are limitations like the ones mentioned above, these are not show-stoppers and don't impede usability in any way. Most of these limitations are good to have, features that we can hope will be included in the company's roadmap for 2023 and beyond.
In all, NinjaOne is a robust and secure remote monitoring and management platform that can provide in-depth control and visibility into different parts of your network. Its many features ensure that it works well for organizations of all sizes, including managed service providers.
Before we end, let's take a quick look at the pricing.
Pricing
The pricing for NinjaOne is per device per month, and the cost depends on the number of devices you want to monitor and what other additional features you want to include. To get a good hang of the pricing, contact customer support for a custom quote.
In the meantime, you can also do a limited-time trial run for free to get a hands-on feel of the tool before deciding if it's a good buy for your organization.
Bottom Line
To conclude, NinjaOne is a comprehensive remote monitoring and management tool that comes with many advanced features to provide detailed visibility into your infrastructure and its working. Its seamless integrations, flexible pricing, and focus on security are some compelling reasons to try this product today.
For more reviews, browse www.ittsystems.com.
