Comments on: Kaseya Monitoring Sucks

By: Bill Gilbert

Bill Gilbert — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:18:36 +0000

Not to add to the Kaseya bash fest, but be careful. their support is the worst of any of the companies we deal with including HP which is really saying something. Weeks can go by before a ticket is responded to, you can sit on hold for support for several hours with no status updates or anything. When they do respond to online support they provide a terse answer that does not address the problem and then close the ticket. The only way we get any sort of response is to raise our support request through our sales person who sends it to the director. As an MSP if we treated our customers that way we would no longer be in business. Until they fix their support I would not recommend purchasing their product.

By: Declan

Declan — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:51:01 +0000

Hi Guys,

I’m trying the Kaseya Product at the moment, we are a solution provider to small companies and I’m looking for a product to meet their needs. I have looked at other products such as level platforms, heroix etc. From a budgetary and business models the kaseya appears to resemble closet what Im looking for.

Technically though I have to ensure it will do what it’s supposed to. I dont want my techs flooded with useless information which eventually they will ignore .. and then miss something crucial.

I do agree with SNMP being issues and also the Remote control is pretty poor.. it’s much too slow. But to be fair most of these products don’t seem to be built for MSP’s.. to date kaseya seems the closest I’ve found.

As i’m just demoing the product at the moment I’m trying to get some overall research to see how others find it in production but I’m having some difficulty getting info.

Any pointers/comments would be great.

By: andrew

andrew — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:15:23 +0000

You are right that in the latest version of Kaseya ActiveX is not required anymore and the user can download and run an executable. My mistake. However remote assistance is still garbage because the remote user needs local administrator rights to run. Instead of fixing this, the Kaseya programmers put this in the web interface:

“Attention standard users! Administrator privileges are required to request remote assistance.
On Vista, right mouse click on Internet Explorer and start it by choosing the menu selection Run As Administrator.
On all other systems, be sure you are logged in as a user with administrator privileges.”

I read this as “We are too lazy to fix our broken code. Kaseya remote assistance will not work in all cases, so keep your fingers crossed.” How hard is it to fix this? Not very:

The RealVNC server program (winvnc4.exe) that is included in the Kaseya remote assistance agent listens on port 5900. This can run as a limited user. RealVNC picks up its settings from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/RealVNC/WinVNC4, but it also accepts a wealth of command-line options (try winvnc4.exe -h). So it is as simple as changing your script/code that starts winvnc.exe, but it is easier to write a warning that says “administrator privileges are required”.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:02:15 +0000

anon: dont tell me “they are great” on monitoring until you address at least one of the issues i’ve listed above. otherwise, you make yourself sound like a very uninformed person (which i am assuming is why you posted anonymously in the first place).

if anyone has actual solutions for me, i’m all ears. im not here to bash kaseya for the hell of it. i have work to do, and i would honestly love to know how other msps have been dealing with these issues.

By: anon

anon — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 01:20:22 +0000

Shows that there are myths. Remote Control utilizes 5 different methods and activex is not necessary. A url link can be clicked to direct download a dll that initiates the connection.

On monitoring, they are great. They listen and have opened up monitoring to unlimited events and alarms. If you are a shoddy msp you will flood the system with millions of events in minutes but as I understand it they are going to add some protections for those situations. They do listen.

By: andrew

andrew — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:16:56 +0000

Their remote assistance is a joke too. It works fine if you’re trying to remote to a machine that has the agent already installed, but if it doesn’t you will be explaining to the user how to install an ActiveX control. Good luck with that. Also installing the activeX control will not work unless the user is a local administrator… I ran into someone who wasn’t and they needed my help. I wasn’t able to help them thanks to Kaysea.

Why not just do what everyone else does and have the user download an executable? Because the programmers are half-wits who have never tried to remotely assist a user using their own code. Who the hell uses activeX anymore? Use GoToAssist or PCHelpware instead, they know what they’re doing when it comes to remote assistance. If you’re going to implement a feature in your product do it right or don’t do it at all.