How ButterflyMX Scales Property Access Control Operations 400% With Canopy

When Joe Boyle first joined ButterflyMX five years ago, he was motivated by a simple frustration. In the buildings in which he lived, traditional intercom systems and building access technology didn't work very well. Joe saw how ButterflyMX was innovating on this problem — working to make property access simple. Today, as Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Boyle leads technology operations for a company that has transformed from managing 5,000 buildings to over 20,000 — a 400% growth trajectory that required adopting a new approach to how they monitor and manage connected devices at scale.

In this recent discussion with Canopy's VP of Customer Success Nathan Rowe, Boyle and ButterflyMX Systems Engineer Manager Robert Zigman shared the inside story of how they've leveraged remote monitoring and management ([[RMM]]) to grow operations without growing headcount, while delivering seamless property access control across diverse environments — from large mulitfamily buildings and condo buildings to specialized installations like Salon Suites and the American School for the Deaf, where residents use American Sign Language through the mobile app to communicate with visitors.

When Homegrown Solutions Hit Their Limits

ButterflyMX's early approach to device management embodied the scrappy startup spirit. "In the early days, our legacy devices ran on Microsoft platform exclusively, and during that startup phase, we were operating from a single Windows Server virtual machine that was our deployment server," Zigman explains. "We built our own automation tool using PowerShell, which allowed us to execute scripts and deploy packages on remote devices using the native PowerShell remoting protocol, all through a VPN that served as our dedicated service network."

This DIY approach worked until it didn't. 

"This setup worked surprisingly well for a limited number of devices, but as our fleet grew, it became increasingly complex and error-prone to manage," Zigman notes. "We had no user interface. Everything was done through the console, which wasn't user-friendly."

The team attempted to evolve their solution, developing their own RMM tool using AWS building blocks. As Zigman describes it: "What started as a lightweight solution for remote execution, deployment jobs, and automated provisioning quickly demanded more and more features to be a broader platform — covering inventory, configuration management, data collection, warehouse automation. Eventually, requirements outgrew what our small dev team could realistically maintain and develop further."

The Decision: Build vs. Buy Analysis

Faced with explosive growth, ButterflyMX's leadership team, including Boyle and the CTO, conducted a thorough evaluation of whether to continue building internally or adopt a third-party solution. Four key factors drove their decision to choose Canopy:

Time to Value: "Canopy offered immediate capabilities for device monitoring, diagnostics fleet management, reducing time to deploy compared to what we were doing previously," Boyle explains.

Feature Set & Scalability: The mature, extensible platform covered critical needs including remote device health checks, performance monitoring, and firmware management capabilities that would have required significant internal development resources.

Operational Focus: "By leveraging Canopy, the team here can stay focused on core product performance improvements and customer experience, rather than diverting my engineering resources to build and maintain infrastructure tooling."

Total Cost of Ownership: When weighing ongoing licensing costs against long-term engineering and operational expenses, Canopy proved a better choice given ButterflyMX's scale and use at more than 20,000 buildings.

Managing Complexity: Multi-Platform Device Management

One of ButterflyMX's unique challenges involves managing two distinct technology stacks. Their legacy smart intercoms run on Microsoft platforms, while newer products operate on Linux — requiring completely different management approaches.

"On Windows, we use a base default image which was flashed in the factory or warehouse, containing minimal configuration, critical drivers, and OS optimizations," Zigman details. "From there, we follow what I call a 'micropatching model' — deploying changes and packages on-the-go with the main app running in the background."

For Linux devices, the approach is different. "We use firmware-based OTA updates. All critical changes are baked into an image and deployed. On these devices, OTA bootloader is handling OEM firmware and image updates — similar to software updates for smartphones."

The key advantage of Canopy? "Both systems rely on Canopy for deployments, observability and control," Zigman emphasizes. "The best part: Canopy supports both approaches to remote management — being platform independent, Windows or Linux — experience is seamless with unified UI/UX that's simple enough for Support to use effectively."

Automation That Scales: From Reactive to Proactive Support

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of ButterflyMX's implementation is their sophisticated automation framework, particularly their "Back Online" automation — what Zigman calls "Support's primary proactive support process."

Automated Root Cause Analysis

"In the past, we lacked real-time insight into individual devices' hardware and network KPIs," Zigman explains. "If a device experienced an outage or crash, we wouldn't know until we performed a manual system check — listing reachable devices and pulling system health logs, dumps, and configuration data. This process was done weekly or in response to a support ticket."

Now, with event-driven automation, they can react instantly: "The moment a device comes back online or sends a specific signal, depending on the event, we can automatically collect diagnostics, notify support, email the client, or even trigger remediation — like restarting services, reapplying the package installer, or even resetting the device to resolve hardware component issues."

Integration with Existing Systems

ButterflyMX's approach demonstrates the power of integrating RMM with existing infrastructure. Their automations connect seamlessly with ElasticSearch for log analysis and data correlation. "When an issue occurs — like a hardware component failure or some kind of important software process no longer running — our integration with ElasticSearch typically detects those events and then fires it off to Canopy to take action," Boyle describes.

This integration supports proactive management: "The goal is to resolve the issue proactively and often make sure our customers don't even know it's happening. Just try to get it done before they even realize there is a problem."

Measurable Impact: Scaling Without Proportional Growth

The results speak for themselves. According to Boyle: "The business has grown nearly 200% in device deployments... Support staffing didn't need to scale at that same rate, which was great for us and for them because they were able to do a lot and manage our fleet of devices in a way where they couldn't before."

This business benefit extends beyond headcount. "By automating device management and issue resolution, we've been able to scale operations without proportionally increasing headcount," Boyle notes. "This not only improves the customer experience — with faster issue resolution and more reliable service — but also reduces the need for [[on-site visits]]."

Custom Observability and KPIs

ButterflyMX has leveraged Canopy's flexibility to create custom dashboards and tracking mechanisms tailored to their specific needs. Using Canopy’s Leaf agent ([[Leaf]]) and the Leaf API, ButterflyMX is able to send event messages and KPIs. They are able to use Leaf to send data like  error codes, execution states, completion flags, feature flags, and more, all in real time back to Canopy.

"The feature I personally find most valuable is the cards, the widgets," Zigman explains. "By setting them up, I can view real-time data based on any parameter or query — and the fact that they also work as filters is absolutely ingenious. It allows me to customize our admin dashboard exactly how we want it so we can instantly identify which devices need patching."

The team has developed sophisticated data collection processes, including what Zigman calls their "SystemInfo process, a periodic CRON job that collects critical custom data — such as configuration details, feature flags, Device IDs, security policy, patch level, network information, ISP information, geolocation and other useful information. It sends this data through the Canopy event pipeline, populating our tables and dashboards with everything we need to track and monitor."

ButterflyMX Puts Customers First

For ButterflyMX, the partnership with Canopy has enabled them to maintain focus on their core mission while ensuring operational excellence. "One thing I wanted to mention is I think, with the help of Canopy, we've been able to focus on one of our core company values, which is putting our customer first, always," Boyle reflects. "By being able to proactively address issues before they reach the customer's visibility, it has definitely helped, and it's also nice because they don't even know we're doing it."

The company continues expanding their access control and security platform, recently launching security camerasthat are also monitored within Canopy. "I envision multiple iterations of device types for that," Boyle notes, highlighting how their RMM foundation supports continued innovation.

As Zigman summarizes: "Ultimately, Canopy helps us shift from reactive support to proactive management — delivering smarter, more reliable service to our customers and staying one step ahead of any potential issue. With Canopy, just like the name says, all our devices are under a single canopy tree: unified, protected, and always within reach."

Learn more about how ButterflyMX scaled their access control operations with Canopy in our ButterflyMX case study.