With so many different types of remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms and tools on the market, it can be difficult to know which capabilities or features are most important. In this post, we look at the most important things an RMM tool should offer to help your business increase uptime. The top aspects of an RMM platform you should consider when evaluating a new RMM solution: 

1. The ability to monitor device health in real-time.
2. Complete and centralized control over all your devices.
3. The ability to automate support and routine maintenance tasks.
4. A mechanism to measure uptime improvement.

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1. Ability to Monitor Device Health in Real-Time

When evaluating various RMM platforms, it’s important to keep your overall business objective in mind: improving uptime (or availability). Some businesses measure this as an uptime percentage over time, while others prioritize support metrics like the number of open support tickets or the mean time to resolution (MTTR). Whatever metric your business uses, the key to improving uptime always starts with issue detection. Often, the largest variable driving downtime (see equation below) is the time it takes for a business to just realize a device is down, not the time it spends in the support queue or the time it takes to restore device health. To learn more about the top 5 causes of machine downtime, click here. 

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So, when evaluating an RMM tool, the first aspect you should consider is its ability to proactively monitor the health status of your device fleet and report issues to your team in real-time. However, just reporting an issue is not enough. Based on our research, ~65% of downtime for smart hardware devices is driven by one of five potential issues:

1. Configuration Issues
2. Network Issues
3. Software App Issues
4. Power Failures
5. Operating System Issues

With so many possible root causes of downtime, a simple “online/offline” ping is no longer enough information for your Support Team. Today’s complex hardware solutions demand more granular answers when a “red light” appears on a dashboard. They not only need to know exactly when an issue happens but also the details behind the root cause. 

What does this mean when evaluating an RMM tool? It means an RMM must always be connected to and reporting vital health information about a device. It should have the ability to tell you exactly what is wrong, how long it has been happening, and why it went wrong. Without this baseline data, your team’s ability to improve uptime will be very limited. 

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2. Centralized Control Over a Device and its Components

Now that we have covered the “time to issue detection” aspect of reducing downtime, we need to discuss how RMM tools should help users resolve these issues. An RMM tool needs to provide remote control over the connected device to enable resolutions. Without remote control, your Support Team will need to engage a customer or onsite technician to restore the device. 

Many RMM tools try to solve this by just offering remote desktops, but remote access alone is not a reliable or scalable solution. Users need a way to solve problems in the field with bulk commands (1-to-many) vs. sessions on a single device (1-to-1). An RMM should also offer cross-operating system actions and management capabilities. Asset management functions like operating system tracking, location management, and configuration management are also key control aspects you will need to find in an RMM.

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3. Automating Support and Routine Maintenance Tasks

Next, let's explore the importance of robust task automation in any RMM tool. For Support and Engineering teams managing hundreds of devices, it's vital to efficiently handle large volumes of support tickets. Without effective automation, these teams risk being overwhelmed by "ticket fatigue," which can negatively impact customer service.

Well-designed RMM solutions should be able to automate 15-25% of the basic tasks handled by Support Teams every day. This includes automating processes such as issue detection and alerting, initial triage classification, software or device reboots, and manual data entry, thereby reducing the workload on your Support Team.

Automation can also be used to streamline processes like onboarding, provisioning, and managing the configuration lifecycle of deployed devices. Leveraging automation can reduce the time taken to deploy a new device by up to three times, saving time for Engineering and Technical Teams who handle these tasks. 

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4. Measuring Performance Improvement over Time

Why is having reporting and analytics so important? Investing in or switching RMM tools requires a lot of time and effort from your team. To justify retraining your team on a new tool or the implementation time and effort, you must know that the tool will create value. 

Typically Support Managers use two common metrics: 

1. Number of tickets (or phone calls) over a period 
2. Average time to ticket resolution
3. Issue type 

A best-in-class RMM tool can help your Support Team measure so much more than just the amount and type of work completed. It can track metrics like:

1. Uptime (or availability) over historical time periods
2. Issues by type, region, impacted devices, etc.
3. Issue auto-recovery percentage
4. Number of automatic steps that replaced manual triage
5. Hours per week saved from automation

With this kind of reporting and analytics, you’ll clearly see how your RMM works for you, and scaling your deployment does not mean scaling your support personnel. This kind of granular results measurement is necessary to be able to quantify the value impact on your business operations and customer experience. 

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Conclusion

Evaluating different RMM tools can be a complex process given how many different sets of stakeholders inside an organization are involved (e.g., Product, Engineering, Support, Customer Success, etc.). Finding the right solution that delivers the most value for your business will require choosing an RMM tool that covers real-time monitoring, centralized control, automated support tasks, and performance analytics. With these core RMM capabilities covered, your team, devices, and customers will be in good hands. 

If you are part of a team overseeing a large network of smart devices and feel there are gaps in your remote management strategy, we would love to help provide some guidance. Please reach out to us at info@goCanopy.com with the subject line “Free Strategy Session” to schedule a call with one of our technical subject matter experts. During these sessions we take an unbiased approach, focusing on better understanding your specific business requirements to be able to provide the most relevant advice.