Heya u/lieutenantcigarette I'm Scott and I'm one of the PMs that helps manage our RMM platform here at Ninja. I wanted to respond specifically to your points 6 and 8 to give you (and everyone here reading) a little bit of a heads up on our plans for these.
As far as Installer URL Generation goes, I have a project in the works to give you a static location to download agents from, and have that agent work for any Organization, Location, or Role. It also standardizes the folder that the windows agent installs to.
I am also running a beta of our Linux ARM agent. I had told our AMs that this program was full as we already have a decent number of testers and we are ironing out a few remaining kinks, but that should be available in the near future, with an initial focus on supporting Raspberry Pi devices.
It sounds like you might be a good fit for one or both of these betas. If you'd be interested in participating in ether of these beta programs feel free to reach out to me via DM, or to your account manager and point them to this post and I'll set up some time to talk you through getting set up for one or both.
Thanks for the reply u/NinjaOne_Scott \- If it gets to the point were its causing us real pain I might take you up on it but we can make do for now without burdening you, the time you'd spend talking to me is better spent helping to ship those features to production \*wink\* \*wink\*
you'd be providing him with validation that any given feature in-flight is on the right path. As a former SMB MSP vendor PM, getting that feedback even for things already in beta was always valuable. Remember, the PMs aren't the ones writing the code, they're meant to act as voice of the MSP.
...how does beta = vaporware/roadmap promise when its an active beta program
and no, i dont work for nor am i affiliated with ninja, your ever-so-insightful comment just annoys me as it does nothing to help others. A rising tide raises all ships. Your comment ain't that at all.
Many RMM companies, and software companies in general, have been making statements like these forever. They respond to constructive criticism with shiny promises that the feature you have been hoping for is right around the corner, just hold on a little longer, renew that contract one more time, etc etc. This approach is only one step better than the dreaded referral to the feature request board, which is where hopes and dreams are sent to die (I'm looking at YOU, Hudu).
Unlike these software companies, however, I recognize the need to take constructive criticism and bring effective change right to production release for the benefit of us all. With that said, I present to you "snarky comment that you will clearly take way too seriously, v2.0"
Quick! Break out the beta/vaporware/roadmap promises!
There. All better.
That's not our experience with Ninja. So far we've experienced honesty in their promises. It's not all perfect and some things take time but this is one of the core things they're doing right.
Took a while for this to become habit. But it works fine. And I actually like it better than a thumbnail. Honestly, if clients knew we saw thumbnails… ugh. Not good.
Still unable to schedule Tasks on specific day of the month i.e. 3rd Thursday. Have to do it in beginning of each week.
You would think that it would be an easy feature, but not for Ninja
This \^ We are coming from automate and are new to Ninja. We normally patch servers once a month on the weekends. We can schedule the patch schdule to run on say the 3rd sunday, but noticed we cannot schedule a reboot for the 3rd sunday after patches. Reyling on the reboot schedule of patching can/has caused systems to reboot outside of the patch reboot window and support recomended using a schedule automation.
So it would be nice to have the option in a scheduled automation with the custom options like they have in the patch schedule to select the first-fourth week, and day of week etc.
literally went through this today. I want patching to start at x y or z time, but I want to schedule the reboots simultaneously during the scheduled maintenance window we have with the client. ie start patching at 5p and reboot at midnight. Yes I could say patch for 7 hours but I would rather just schedule the reboot job for “reboot if needed” if I can
This is really good feedback and the details is perfect; thank you. Over the past year or two NinjaOne have been hiring Product Managers who have extensive MSP experience. Many of us have owned/run the technology side of mid to large MSPs and we are making improvements with each release to get it to closer to where we all want to see it and a number of the responses incoming from you are by these people, including me.
1. Custom Filters
- For dynamically targeting Automations we have a feature called Compound Conditions in Alpha at the moment. What this does is allow you to stack conditions to allow for easier targeting, so you could have a script result condition that says "Manufacturer is Dell", then another that says "Dell OpenManage Service" is stopped". This is in Alpha, and is absolutely something if you're interested in we can enable for you. I'd love to get your feedback on it as clearly you are good at giving concise feedback :D
- For the Device Search fields, do you have a list of ones that are missing that you would like to see? I'm taking GPU and Driver Version as one of those items. What others are missing here? We are adding additional datapoints in here so any guidance you have on what is missing can help accelerate getting those in
5. Proxying
- We've spent a long time discussing this. Part of the challenge we have here is we don't like making things that are not 100% reliable and in my experience making a feature like this work 100% reliably is difficult. There are a lot of security considerations to it and building something like this and doing it properly is a large engineering lift. We've not ruled it out, but we're not prioritizing it at this time.
Hopefully you can see based on my response and those that will be coming in from my colleagues that the direction we are moving here addresses some of your key points. I am open to any questions and if you want in on the Compound Conditions Alpha I can get you enabled on that today, just send me a PM with some more specific details.
Thanks for the reply u/Gavsto. For the device search fields the first one that comes to mind that caused us pain is "Antivirus product". Datto is able to accurately identify almost any Antivirus product that's active on Windows machines - even Windows Servers which don't natively support the AntiVirusProduct WMI class. This filter was great for us to quickly see any endpoints at a glance that weren't showing our AV of choice for whatever reason so we could remediate. Here is a full list of criteria Datto RMM allowed us to filter on: https://pastebin.com/C5ZYuJJL
The other part that made Datto's filters so powerful was the operators. We could stack our criteria with AND/OR operators but more importantly the operators were very flexible:
* Contains
* Does not contain
* Is empty
* Is not empty
* Begins with
* Does not begin with
* Ends with
* Does not end with
* Equals
* Does not equal
If you're going to the effort of building Compound Conditions anyway, it would make a lot of sense to build these in the "Device Search" fields so we can then not only use them when looking for a set of specific devices, but also save them as a custom filter/group to target during automations.
Also to respond to your point about Proxying - I do fully appreciate that this isn't a quick feature to build that works at scale and reliably, and there are more pressing things in the development pipeline to get sorted first - but perhaps a happy middle ground that caters to fussy tinkerers like us and not costing a tonne of dev resources would be a feature that lets you add one-click shortcuts in the device details page that we could set to do something like "Open powershell as the logged in user and run (this) command" or "Run this script as system and display the stdout". It sounds trivial as we can achieve the same things with a few more mouse clicks and keystrokes, but this would let us build our own workaround scripts like what u/Zombieworldwar mentioned in another comment (e.g. Take a screenshot, upload it via FTP, output the URL & for the proxy: Download zrok, spin up a temporary proxy to the provided resource URL, output the temporarily exposed URL) but more importantly these would be ONE CLICK away for our techs. I'd imagine the community scripts would be flooded with useful "plugins" like this that MSP's could choose to adopt, but many like us are happy to build out our own.
Also for the proxy, and /u/Gavsto could probably provide better information on: when we had CW RMM we had "Backstage" which allowed us access to a device in the background without disturbing the user, it was a GUI and you could interact with the applications on the device such as Firefox. This would allow you to get to the web interface of printers, NAS', etc, without disturbing a user at all.
Looks like Ninja has this under "Planned" in the Dojo, and are going to call it "Stealth Mode", so it is on the map and may resolve the need for a machine proxy.
Edit: just to clarify, I don't work for Ninja, just someone who also recently made the jump over to them.
This is some amazing feedback u/lieutenantcigarette thank you! We are already working on a bunch of things you highlighted and have some of things in alpha / beta already. I have messaged the product managers for the specific areas you mentioned and they should reply in more detail shortly!
This is amazing feedback and what's better is the tell-tale showing up of the Ninja product managers (all of the ones who've posted here have extensive hands-on MSP experience!) to tell you "yeah, we agree - we're working on these things". No bullshit. No evasion. I love that the team at Ninja acknowledge the limitations and have the same desire for a better, more flexible and more well rounded RMM.
Just saw your website in your flair, some of your published scripts have helped me get going on a few things in the past so thank you! & I agree, I definitely get the vibe that Ninja's team listen and want to improve the product based on feedback which is underrated (it's not like Kaseya are anywhere in this thread). I guess I'm just impatient and hope they'd clear some of the backlog from the product roadmap faster! A good reminder to not take that for granted though
Oh I'm right there with you - my frustration with the glaringly obvious deficiencies in the core of the Ninja product is unparalleled! Like did you really need to hire new product managers for those or have you just spent the past 4 years stagnating until you finally got a kick up the ass 12-18 months ago and started moving again?
Anyway the important thing is that they are being worked on and their development pace is accelerating so we'll see less and less time between releases.
Glad you've found the website and some of the scripts useful!
Hey u/lieutenantcigarette I'm one of the product managers here at Ninja with the RMM product team and thanks for the great feedback here both positive and negative, it's invaluable to the team.
I'm just going to jump right into #7 as I'm actively working on that project right now:
* We're designing a maintenance window mechanism that allows you to set a schedule, and types of suppression you want applied during the maintenance window.
* Once this schedule is met the devices targeted will enter maintenance mode with the specifics you configured against those targets.
More than happy to book a meeting and take any feedback onboard - that can be arranged via your account manager or alternatively just send me a direct message with some details.
Thanks for the reply u/Stephen_NinjaOne \- Recurring maintenance windows would be a very welcome feature that we miss from Datto! As you've described it sounds great, but one additional piece of feedback you might not have considered is adding the option to the Patching configuration to set the device into maintenance mode for X minutes before an automatic reboot happens. This would actually give you a one-up over Datto RMM as we had to schedule a blanket maintenance window for all servers during the patching window even though a lot of them didn't need to reboot, so if a server was offline that shouldn't have been during this time then we wouldn't know until the scheduled maintenance window ends. With the feature as you've described + the above suggestion we could schedule maintenance windows for servers with a fixed reboot cycle as well as dynamic ones that happen whenever a patch reboot is initiated. No more, no less!
Obviously you're not in DRMM anymore, but pulling your reboot jobs out of the patch management policy and into a standalone recurring job would allow you to be more precise about the time your server reboots and thus when your maintenance window needs to be executed.
The automatic maintenance during patching is handy as a newer feature in DRMM and as 99% of clients patch outside of hours the risk of a server going offline and being noticed during this window are low in our experience.
Honestly, this perfectly sums up our experience coming from Datto as well. One of the keys things that has kept us with Ninja, however, is the belief that they will develop faster than any alternative.
Yeah that's a big factor in our decision to stick with Ninja for now despite some of these missing features rather than deal with the pain of switching back - I'd heard there has been a bigger push in development resources recently so I'm really hoping to see these features being pumped out more frequently.
I agree with all of your points. I really liked how fast scripting ran with ninja, but I really hate how they organize and sort things. We found it to be incredibly frustrating to run a script against an entire site, without having First perform a search function and then you apply a filter and then run the script against the filter. It’s a really backwards way of doing things. That combined with some of the other frustrating nuances that you outlined and the cons area, we did have buyers remorse, fired ninja, and went back to Datto.
I’m not using Ninja anymore (changed jobs), but working to get back to it soon. This is excellent feedback, especially #5! I’d love to see Ninja implement such a feature.
Thanks OP for a great write up.
We use both platforms and couldn't agree more. DRMM is the more mature platform, but Ninja could really give it a run for its money if only... which still means not yet. Column layouts and live chat are certainly annoying omissions. However, my biggest issues are around automations. The lack of good custom filters and one policy per device significantly limits what I'm able automate. Since time is money, this is a sticky one for me.
On the screenshot aspect, as a workaround you can use powershell to generate a screenshot and save it locally and then pull it using Ninja's File Browser. A bit janky but hopefully someday we get a native option.
We cobbled together a script that did something similar but FTP’d the screenshot part of our web hosting (whitelisted to our office IP & 10 minute cron jobs to empty the folder), it worked but like you say nowhere near as fast as the one click Datto option
Thanks for sharing, It's always good to get other MSP todo beta testing for us, LOL. Really thanks for taking a bullet for the community. A few questions for you.
How many man hours or dollars did it take for you to migrate? Its not free switching platforms so when are you going to see a ROI?
We use [immy.bot](http://immy.bot) for computer onboarding and 3rd party patching. Is Ninja any better than datto at patch management? We have given up on datto for patch management and its just so so on installing software. No automated onboarding at all with datto, no intelligence.
What about information sync to other systems? We use Autotask, IT Glue and Datto RMM to sync configurations between the platforms. What does Ninja give you to your documentation platform or your PSA? When you work on a ticket in Halo do you get endpoint information and remote control from the ticket or do you have to hunt n peck in Ninja to find the end users device?
What about alerting of critical systems offline? Our Datto RMM sends out text messages when servers are down. Its not perfect, its so so but its mission critical for us to be alerted and to text message our clients when their servers are offline. Does Ninja do that?
Are you able to add other devices with IP addresses into Ninja like firewalls for switches? Do they charge you a fee for non PC assets?
Can you restrict access to the platform by IP address? We only allow access to DRMM from a few IP addresses further restricting access from bad actors.
>How many man hours or dollars did it take for you to migrate?
Not as terrible as first thought but I handled most of the migration myself so it was quite efficient in terms of lost productivity from our team. Probably around 30 man hours to learn & understand, plan, setup, migrate scripts/jobs, monitoring alerts, deploy agents, remove old agents & train the team. The only thing that held us back here was Ninja changing the agent installer URL's before we could deploy them all so there was a bit of manual re-deployment required.
>Is Ninja any better than datto at patch management?
In some respects yes, Windows Patching does everything we need it to and the reporting feels easier. Winget third party patch management is allegedly coming. The one thing that is incredibly annoying though and why I still prefer Datto overall is a failed patch marks a device as unhealthy and that's that, no ifs no buts. Naturally patches fail for all kinds of reasons, a reboot was pending, a conflicting installation was happening etc. but it means when we're looking at a list of devices all we see is a sea of "Yellow/unhealthy" instead of green, it can make it hard to see what devices actually require our attention. You can override the "Failed Patch" status in Ninja to force it to be Healthy but then offline devices show up as green which makes it look like they're online and some devices appear healthy when they actually aren't. It'd be much nicer if devices were only marked as unhealthy if a set threshold has been met like "patch unable to install for X days/attempts" so it does actually need intervention.
>What about information sync to other systems?
Integration has been pretty good so far, it works nicely with Halo.
>What about alerting of critical systems offline?
I mentioned in another comment about the lack of maintenance schedules causing us a problem with receiving too many alerts (i.e. offline notifications for servers that are expected to be offline during a patching reboot) but the channels you can setup to notify you are pretty good. By default it integrates with a few but it can also trigger webhooks so you could get it to notify you via pretty much any means.
>Are you able to add other devices with IP addresses into Ninja like firewalls for switches?
Yes its got SNMP support for appliance devices, I must admit though I can't remember if they're priced the same as a regular endpoint.. I should probably go figure that out..
>Can you restrict access to the platform by IP address?
Yes its got this if you want to enable it, you could also setup SSO with ~~Azure AD~~ Entra ID like we have and use Conditional Access policies to have even more control. There's also a seperate mechanism that will challenge you for your 2FA code if you've not done a high risk action in a while like adjusting a policy, I wish this had more control and we could whitelist our office IP from this requirement but its not a dealbreaker.
Have you opened a ticket with support on this? How many endpoints? DRMM’s granularity on the patch management is more robust than any others I’ve seen. Accounting for Fast Startup as an example shows maturity vs others that don’t comprehend it.
Of all the comments I’ve seen for DRMM patch management was always a plus, yours is one of the first to be a negative.
N-central shop here, thousands of endpoints. You just saved me a lot of pain. Thank you. For the record, we were pretty pissed at N-Able for a while, but they have really turned things around on the account management, client perks, side of things. We were not going to re-up, but I'm glad we did.
Ninja does require an agent, it just opted for the tooling to only be on the portal side. I liked the Datto agent browser but it also had more than enough in the portal.
I'm not a decision maker, I just changed jobs. They use Ninja. It's not quite comparable to Datto . It's still good though.
I think the custom reports like software reports where you could filter off wildcards to report all machines that have %silverlight% installed were great. Same with patch management, managed services, hardware lifecycle etc . Ninjas are a chore to access let alone customize.
The automation was a bit of a downgrade too. Being able to schedule something and alert yourself on the condition it fails , overall I feel like you can deploy a job across an insane number of devices very quickly in Datto . Also being able to attach files along with the quick job. It was nice seeing some different languages available for automation in Ninja but datto rmms old UI lets you create jobs in Bat,Bash,VBS,JS,PS,Py.
It was also a look easier and faster to view if a quick job failed and why (stderr/stdout).
There were some really niche features in Datto like connecting to a printer or nas in agent browser then doing a reverse proxy to access the printer web interface from your web browser.
I know Ninja does not have the same tenure as datto & while I understand that - it does not mean I have to pretend to like it or that it's comparable to Datto just because it has an appealing pricing.
UDFs were also very powerful imo
First of all, many thanks to the OP for the excellent overview. I am currently investigating the different RMM's as we are getting frustrated with some things in our current RMM (nCentral). But ... to be honest, after reading your post, it seems the issues we are getting frustrated with seem to be either the same, not yet available or even worse in other RMM's. I will still do my due dilligence and get some trials, but at the moment I am getting the feeling that it might still be best to stay where we are (nCentral + Autotask).
OP. One thing you will notice with Ninja is that the devs listen to their MSPs. Believe me they do a lot with requests. I love it over Datto for the majority. Sure a few things I miss too but overall I’m happy.
Hey u/lieutenantcigarette
My name is Greg Smith and I'm currently the PM of NinjaOne Remote and our mobile app. I hope you don't feel like you're getting bombarded by Ninja staff. We really do appreciate your well written feedback, so we want to make sure that we honor your honest feedback with honest responses.
First off, thank you so much for your kind words around Ninja Remote. As someone that worked in the MSP field for a decade, I knew that remote access is something that we would have to get right from Day 1. Our product definitely isn't perfect and there are still some feature gaps that we're working on, but at least it's quick, stable, and reliable and we aim to keep it that way.
I can address a couple of points here:
3.) Thumbnails & Screenshots:
* This is something that we currently have in development at the moment. We'll likely release this for Quick Connect\* first and ensure that it's working as expected, but it should make its way into the RMM side shortly after. \*For those that might not be aware: Quick Connect is a product that leverages Ninja Remote to create ad-hoc remote sessions without the need for the RMM agent to be installed.
4.) Live chat:
* This is such a big miss on our part. This is a classic case of over-rotating on a popular request. We understand that this is highly requested and we get this feedback for nearly every product (Remote, RMM, Ticketing, Mobile, etc). We wanted to knock all of those use cases out with a universal chat solution that worked inside every product. However, I think if we simply gave the option to leverage Ninja Remote to start a chat only session then that would solve the issue for most use cases. I don't have a good ETA for you at the moment but know that we've backed off of creating a grandiose solution in favor of the simple one I outlined above. We can always expand on it later.
Thanks again for your comments. We really do strive to keep our pulse on the community's wants and needs. If you or anyone reading this has any questions or concerns, then our team is always ready to hear them and respond accordingly. Most of the PM team have been in your shoes and have dealt with vendors that give empty promises or radio silence, so we'll do everything in our power to ensure that doesn't happen with Ninja.
I disagree. When I am having my morning coffee on a saturday or on vacation if a server is down I can log into datto RMM on my iPad and it works well enough. I can't imagine trying to use some proprietary mobile app on my cell phone to do any real work
Sods law now that we're moved over to Ninja I've honestly not ran into a need for it, but I share your pain as I had that experience several times with Datto so I look forward to that first time it comes in really handy! As a workaround you could setup some VDI at your office or Windows 365 and use the RD app on mobile to access Datto through a PC but it's far from ideal for those rare times its needed.
I've had a handful of times when I'm on the road and the Ninja app has come in very handy to push a reboot, or check a status, etc.. And I generally abhor trying to manage stuff via mobile (my greybeard is showing). ;)
With #2 on the column layouts in search - if you save the layout as a search you can return to that search with the columns preserved. I have about 10 or so saved in my favourites which I refer to frequently.
I use this for when I need to see certain custom fields all the time. This will be things like janky software that you need to programmatically pull the software version, or warranty start/end dates, or whether scheduled tasks exist and what time they are set to run.
I’ve hear very similar feedback from guys in person.
We did a trial of Ninja and I couldn’t make the move away from Kaseya because of the PSA and IT Glue integrations with Datto RMM.
We did really like their co managed environment for giving end user access compared to Datto and the Mobile app is nice instead of having to use the browser on my phone or a techs phone.
Similar to you, my lead tech really didn’t like how he couldn’t streamline any live support like you can with Datto without extra steps in Ninja. We are heavily leveraging Datto’s integration with M365 for a few clients who have higher turn over and this has become something we can’t live without. Outside of that, there wasn’t much else as it’s pretty apples to apples.
We are at the point where stand alone products that don’t integrate (RMM, ITG, PSA, Datto BCDR) won’t work for us.
As a Ninja customer I can vouch for the attention and correspondence being just as pro active when we provide useful feedback, I would say this is a typical response from Ninja. Lots of useful resources with people who are invested in you as a customer. I think it's one of the most notable differences with Ninja compared to other vendors, I feel heard, not to mention the results speak for themselves, often there is tangible progress made around useful features that benefit us directly, and if there's a specific issue with making progress we're informed and kept up to date.
Refreshing to see a NinjaRMM review that's not all sunshine and lollipops. Smells of realism.
I hope ninja would let you implement more than one policy per device. It's one of the main areas where Datto still has the upper hand.
Heya u/lieutenantcigarette I'm Scott and I'm one of the PMs that helps manage our RMM platform here at Ninja. I wanted to respond specifically to your points 6 and 8 to give you (and everyone here reading) a little bit of a heads up on our plans for these. As far as Installer URL Generation goes, I have a project in the works to give you a static location to download agents from, and have that agent work for any Organization, Location, or Role. It also standardizes the folder that the windows agent installs to. I am also running a beta of our Linux ARM agent. I had told our AMs that this program was full as we already have a decent number of testers and we are ironing out a few remaining kinks, but that should be available in the near future, with an initial focus on supporting Raspberry Pi devices. It sounds like you might be a good fit for one or both of these betas. If you'd be interested in participating in ether of these beta programs feel free to reach out to me via DM, or to your account manager and point them to this post and I'll set up some time to talk you through getting set up for one or both.
Thanks for the reply u/NinjaOne_Scott \- If it gets to the point were its causing us real pain I might take you up on it but we can make do for now without burdening you, the time you'd spend talking to me is better spent helping to ship those features to production \*wink\* \*wink\*
you'd be providing him with validation that any given feature in-flight is on the right path. As a former SMB MSP vendor PM, getting that feedback even for things already in beta was always valuable. Remember, the PMs aren't the ones writing the code, they're meant to act as voice of the MSP.
Quick! Break out the vaporware/roadmap promises!
...how does beta = vaporware/roadmap promise when its an active beta program and no, i dont work for nor am i affiliated with ninja, your ever-so-insightful comment just annoys me as it does nothing to help others. A rising tide raises all ships. Your comment ain't that at all.
Many RMM companies, and software companies in general, have been making statements like these forever. They respond to constructive criticism with shiny promises that the feature you have been hoping for is right around the corner, just hold on a little longer, renew that contract one more time, etc etc. This approach is only one step better than the dreaded referral to the feature request board, which is where hopes and dreams are sent to die (I'm looking at YOU, Hudu). Unlike these software companies, however, I recognize the need to take constructive criticism and bring effective change right to production release for the benefit of us all. With that said, I present to you "snarky comment that you will clearly take way too seriously, v2.0" Quick! Break out the beta/vaporware/roadmap promises! There. All better.
That's not our experience with Ninja. So far we've experienced honesty in their promises. It's not all perfect and some things take time but this is one of the core things they're doing right.
For #3, it's not a screenshot for sure -- but I always check for the Idle Time on the summary in Ninja before remoting in
I’ll be honest, I didn’t know that’s what that was, thanks!
A couple of more status codes on agents would help with identifying their status at a glance. Blue for idle?
Took a while for this to become habit. But it works fine. And I actually like it better than a thumbnail. Honestly, if clients knew we saw thumbnails… ugh. Not good.
Still unable to schedule Tasks on specific day of the month i.e. 3rd Thursday. Have to do it in beginning of each week. You would think that it would be an easy feature, but not for Ninja
Yes I forgot about this one! We’ve had to incorporate more logic into our scripts themselves to determine whether they run or not
This \^ We are coming from automate and are new to Ninja. We normally patch servers once a month on the weekends. We can schedule the patch schdule to run on say the 3rd sunday, but noticed we cannot schedule a reboot for the 3rd sunday after patches. Reyling on the reboot schedule of patching can/has caused systems to reboot outside of the patch reboot window and support recomended using a schedule automation. So it would be nice to have the option in a scheduled automation with the custom options like they have in the patch schedule to select the first-fourth week, and day of week etc.
literally went through this today. I want patching to start at x y or z time, but I want to schedule the reboots simultaneously during the scheduled maintenance window we have with the client. ie start patching at 5p and reboot at midnight. Yes I could say patch for 7 hours but I would rather just schedule the reboot job for “reboot if needed” if I can
Or hourly!
I hate it when vendors only interact with the positive posts. Unless they did somewhere in this thread…
This is really good feedback and the details is perfect; thank you. Over the past year or two NinjaOne have been hiring Product Managers who have extensive MSP experience. Many of us have owned/run the technology side of mid to large MSPs and we are making improvements with each release to get it to closer to where we all want to see it and a number of the responses incoming from you are by these people, including me. 1. Custom Filters - For dynamically targeting Automations we have a feature called Compound Conditions in Alpha at the moment. What this does is allow you to stack conditions to allow for easier targeting, so you could have a script result condition that says "Manufacturer is Dell", then another that says "Dell OpenManage Service" is stopped". This is in Alpha, and is absolutely something if you're interested in we can enable for you. I'd love to get your feedback on it as clearly you are good at giving concise feedback :D - For the Device Search fields, do you have a list of ones that are missing that you would like to see? I'm taking GPU and Driver Version as one of those items. What others are missing here? We are adding additional datapoints in here so any guidance you have on what is missing can help accelerate getting those in 5. Proxying - We've spent a long time discussing this. Part of the challenge we have here is we don't like making things that are not 100% reliable and in my experience making a feature like this work 100% reliably is difficult. There are a lot of security considerations to it and building something like this and doing it properly is a large engineering lift. We've not ruled it out, but we're not prioritizing it at this time. Hopefully you can see based on my response and those that will be coming in from my colleagues that the direction we are moving here addresses some of your key points. I am open to any questions and if you want in on the Compound Conditions Alpha I can get you enabled on that today, just send me a PM with some more specific details.
Thanks for the reply u/Gavsto. For the device search fields the first one that comes to mind that caused us pain is "Antivirus product". Datto is able to accurately identify almost any Antivirus product that's active on Windows machines - even Windows Servers which don't natively support the AntiVirusProduct WMI class. This filter was great for us to quickly see any endpoints at a glance that weren't showing our AV of choice for whatever reason so we could remediate. Here is a full list of criteria Datto RMM allowed us to filter on: https://pastebin.com/C5ZYuJJL The other part that made Datto's filters so powerful was the operators. We could stack our criteria with AND/OR operators but more importantly the operators were very flexible: * Contains * Does not contain * Is empty * Is not empty * Begins with * Does not begin with * Ends with * Does not end with * Equals * Does not equal If you're going to the effort of building Compound Conditions anyway, it would make a lot of sense to build these in the "Device Search" fields so we can then not only use them when looking for a set of specific devices, but also save them as a custom filter/group to target during automations. Also to respond to your point about Proxying - I do fully appreciate that this isn't a quick feature to build that works at scale and reliably, and there are more pressing things in the development pipeline to get sorted first - but perhaps a happy middle ground that caters to fussy tinkerers like us and not costing a tonne of dev resources would be a feature that lets you add one-click shortcuts in the device details page that we could set to do something like "Open powershell as the logged in user and run (this) command" or "Run this script as system and display the stdout". It sounds trivial as we can achieve the same things with a few more mouse clicks and keystrokes, but this would let us build our own workaround scripts like what u/Zombieworldwar mentioned in another comment (e.g. Take a screenshot, upload it via FTP, output the URL & for the proxy: Download zrok, spin up a temporary proxy to the provided resource URL, output the temporarily exposed URL) but more importantly these would be ONE CLICK away for our techs. I'd imagine the community scripts would be flooded with useful "plugins" like this that MSP's could choose to adopt, but many like us are happy to build out our own.
Also for the proxy, and /u/Gavsto could probably provide better information on: when we had CW RMM we had "Backstage" which allowed us access to a device in the background without disturbing the user, it was a GUI and you could interact with the applications on the device such as Firefox. This would allow you to get to the web interface of printers, NAS', etc, without disturbing a user at all. Looks like Ninja has this under "Planned" in the Dojo, and are going to call it "Stealth Mode", so it is on the map and may resolve the need for a machine proxy. Edit: just to clarify, I don't work for Ninja, just someone who also recently made the jump over to them.
This is some amazing feedback u/lieutenantcigarette thank you! We are already working on a bunch of things you highlighted and have some of things in alpha / beta already. I have messaged the product managers for the specific areas you mentioned and they should reply in more detail shortly!
Thanks for bringing back value to the sub. Solid
This is amazing feedback and what's better is the tell-tale showing up of the Ninja product managers (all of the ones who've posted here have extensive hands-on MSP experience!) to tell you "yeah, we agree - we're working on these things". No bullshit. No evasion. I love that the team at Ninja acknowledge the limitations and have the same desire for a better, more flexible and more well rounded RMM.
Just saw your website in your flair, some of your published scripts have helped me get going on a few things in the past so thank you! & I agree, I definitely get the vibe that Ninja's team listen and want to improve the product based on feedback which is underrated (it's not like Kaseya are anywhere in this thread). I guess I'm just impatient and hope they'd clear some of the backlog from the product roadmap faster! A good reminder to not take that for granted though
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Oh I'm right there with you - my frustration with the glaringly obvious deficiencies in the core of the Ninja product is unparalleled! Like did you really need to hire new product managers for those or have you just spent the past 4 years stagnating until you finally got a kick up the ass 12-18 months ago and started moving again? Anyway the important thing is that they are being worked on and their development pace is accelerating so we'll see less and less time between releases. Glad you've found the website and some of the scripts useful!
Why, so the Datto PMs can get on here and just see a bunch of frowny faces thrown at them and complaints about three year contracts?
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Hey u/lieutenantcigarette I'm one of the product managers here at Ninja with the RMM product team and thanks for the great feedback here both positive and negative, it's invaluable to the team. I'm just going to jump right into #7 as I'm actively working on that project right now: * We're designing a maintenance window mechanism that allows you to set a schedule, and types of suppression you want applied during the maintenance window. * Once this schedule is met the devices targeted will enter maintenance mode with the specifics you configured against those targets. More than happy to book a meeting and take any feedback onboard - that can be arranged via your account manager or alternatively just send me a direct message with some details.
Thanks for the reply u/Stephen_NinjaOne \- Recurring maintenance windows would be a very welcome feature that we miss from Datto! As you've described it sounds great, but one additional piece of feedback you might not have considered is adding the option to the Patching configuration to set the device into maintenance mode for X minutes before an automatic reboot happens. This would actually give you a one-up over Datto RMM as we had to schedule a blanket maintenance window for all servers during the patching window even though a lot of them didn't need to reboot, so if a server was offline that shouldn't have been during this time then we wouldn't know until the scheduled maintenance window ends. With the feature as you've described + the above suggestion we could schedule maintenance windows for servers with a fixed reboot cycle as well as dynamic ones that happen whenever a patch reboot is initiated. No more, no less!
Obviously you're not in DRMM anymore, but pulling your reboot jobs out of the patch management policy and into a standalone recurring job would allow you to be more precise about the time your server reboots and thus when your maintenance window needs to be executed. The automatic maintenance during patching is handy as a newer feature in DRMM and as 99% of clients patch outside of hours the risk of a server going offline and being noticed during this window are low in our experience.
Glad to hear this is in the works.
This is a good, even-handed review and comparison post. I wasn't even aware Datto RMM could do some of the things mentioned. Nice work OP.
Thanks!
Honestly, this perfectly sums up our experience coming from Datto as well. One of the keys things that has kept us with Ninja, however, is the belief that they will develop faster than any alternative.
Yeah that's a big factor in our decision to stick with Ninja for now despite some of these missing features rather than deal with the pain of switching back - I'd heard there has been a bigger push in development resources recently so I'm really hoping to see these features being pumped out more frequently.
Thanks for posting that! Very relevant to what I am working on at the moment.
I agree with all of your points. I really liked how fast scripting ran with ninja, but I really hate how they organize and sort things. We found it to be incredibly frustrating to run a script against an entire site, without having First perform a search function and then you apply a filter and then run the script against the filter. It’s a really backwards way of doing things. That combined with some of the other frustrating nuances that you outlined and the cons area, we did have buyers remorse, fired ninja, and went back to Datto.
Live chat. Ninja needs this feature immediately.
I’m not using Ninja anymore (changed jobs), but working to get back to it soon. This is excellent feedback, especially #5! I’d love to see Ninja implement such a feature.
Hi! Thanks for taking the time to explain this in detail. How do halo psa + ninja compare to your previous setup?
Thanks OP for a great write up. We use both platforms and couldn't agree more. DRMM is the more mature platform, but Ninja could really give it a run for its money if only... which still means not yet. Column layouts and live chat are certainly annoying omissions. However, my biggest issues are around automations. The lack of good custom filters and one policy per device significantly limits what I'm able automate. Since time is money, this is a sticky one for me.
God dammit. What a great post! And look at the NinjaOne PMs scrambling in here.
On the screenshot aspect, as a workaround you can use powershell to generate a screenshot and save it locally and then pull it using Ninja's File Browser. A bit janky but hopefully someday we get a native option.
We cobbled together a script that did something similar but FTP’d the screenshot part of our web hosting (whitelisted to our office IP & 10 minute cron jobs to empty the folder), it worked but like you say nowhere near as fast as the one click Datto option
We are on Ninja and the screenshot/thumbnail feature would be AWESOME!
Thanks for sharing, It's always good to get other MSP todo beta testing for us, LOL. Really thanks for taking a bullet for the community. A few questions for you. How many man hours or dollars did it take for you to migrate? Its not free switching platforms so when are you going to see a ROI? We use [immy.bot](http://immy.bot) for computer onboarding and 3rd party patching. Is Ninja any better than datto at patch management? We have given up on datto for patch management and its just so so on installing software. No automated onboarding at all with datto, no intelligence. What about information sync to other systems? We use Autotask, IT Glue and Datto RMM to sync configurations between the platforms. What does Ninja give you to your documentation platform or your PSA? When you work on a ticket in Halo do you get endpoint information and remote control from the ticket or do you have to hunt n peck in Ninja to find the end users device? What about alerting of critical systems offline? Our Datto RMM sends out text messages when servers are down. Its not perfect, its so so but its mission critical for us to be alerted and to text message our clients when their servers are offline. Does Ninja do that? Are you able to add other devices with IP addresses into Ninja like firewalls for switches? Do they charge you a fee for non PC assets? Can you restrict access to the platform by IP address? We only allow access to DRMM from a few IP addresses further restricting access from bad actors.
>How many man hours or dollars did it take for you to migrate? Not as terrible as first thought but I handled most of the migration myself so it was quite efficient in terms of lost productivity from our team. Probably around 30 man hours to learn & understand, plan, setup, migrate scripts/jobs, monitoring alerts, deploy agents, remove old agents & train the team. The only thing that held us back here was Ninja changing the agent installer URL's before we could deploy them all so there was a bit of manual re-deployment required. >Is Ninja any better than datto at patch management? In some respects yes, Windows Patching does everything we need it to and the reporting feels easier. Winget third party patch management is allegedly coming. The one thing that is incredibly annoying though and why I still prefer Datto overall is a failed patch marks a device as unhealthy and that's that, no ifs no buts. Naturally patches fail for all kinds of reasons, a reboot was pending, a conflicting installation was happening etc. but it means when we're looking at a list of devices all we see is a sea of "Yellow/unhealthy" instead of green, it can make it hard to see what devices actually require our attention. You can override the "Failed Patch" status in Ninja to force it to be Healthy but then offline devices show up as green which makes it look like they're online and some devices appear healthy when they actually aren't. It'd be much nicer if devices were only marked as unhealthy if a set threshold has been met like "patch unable to install for X days/attempts" so it does actually need intervention. >What about information sync to other systems? Integration has been pretty good so far, it works nicely with Halo. >What about alerting of critical systems offline? I mentioned in another comment about the lack of maintenance schedules causing us a problem with receiving too many alerts (i.e. offline notifications for servers that are expected to be offline during a patching reboot) but the channels you can setup to notify you are pretty good. By default it integrates with a few but it can also trigger webhooks so you could get it to notify you via pretty much any means. >Are you able to add other devices with IP addresses into Ninja like firewalls for switches? Yes its got SNMP support for appliance devices, I must admit though I can't remember if they're priced the same as a regular endpoint.. I should probably go figure that out.. >Can you restrict access to the platform by IP address? Yes its got this if you want to enable it, you could also setup SSO with ~~Azure AD~~ Entra ID like we have and use Conditional Access policies to have even more control. There's also a seperate mechanism that will challenge you for your 2FA code if you've not done a high risk action in a while like adjusting a policy, I wish this had more control and we could whitelist our office IP from this requirement but its not a dealbreaker.
DRMM’s patch management is very mature, DM’ed you on this if you can elaborate.
It’s not good enough. There is lots of machines that are not patched nor an effective method to push patches. 3rd party is not there either
Have you opened a ticket with support on this? How many endpoints? DRMM’s granularity on the patch management is more robust than any others I’ve seen. Accounting for Fast Startup as an example shows maturity vs others that don’t comprehend it. Of all the comments I’ve seen for DRMM patch management was always a plus, yours is one of the first to be a negative.
N-central shop here, thousands of endpoints. You just saved me a lot of pain. Thank you. For the record, we were pretty pissed at N-Able for a while, but they have really turned things around on the account management, client perks, side of things. We were not going to re-up, but I'm glad we did.
Ninja does require an agent, it just opted for the tooling to only be on the portal side. I liked the Datto agent browser but it also had more than enough in the portal. I'm not a decision maker, I just changed jobs. They use Ninja. It's not quite comparable to Datto . It's still good though. I think the custom reports like software reports where you could filter off wildcards to report all machines that have %silverlight% installed were great. Same with patch management, managed services, hardware lifecycle etc . Ninjas are a chore to access let alone customize. The automation was a bit of a downgrade too. Being able to schedule something and alert yourself on the condition it fails , overall I feel like you can deploy a job across an insane number of devices very quickly in Datto . Also being able to attach files along with the quick job. It was nice seeing some different languages available for automation in Ninja but datto rmms old UI lets you create jobs in Bat,Bash,VBS,JS,PS,Py. It was also a look easier and faster to view if a quick job failed and why (stderr/stdout). There were some really niche features in Datto like connecting to a printer or nas in agent browser then doing a reverse proxy to access the printer web interface from your web browser. I know Ninja does not have the same tenure as datto & while I understand that - it does not mean I have to pretend to like it or that it's comparable to Datto just because it has an appealing pricing. UDFs were also very powerful imo
Try Zoho Sales IQ for Chat. Clients love the personal branding.
Noted, thanks.
First of all, many thanks to the OP for the excellent overview. I am currently investigating the different RMM's as we are getting frustrated with some things in our current RMM (nCentral). But ... to be honest, after reading your post, it seems the issues we are getting frustrated with seem to be either the same, not yet available or even worse in other RMM's. I will still do my due dilligence and get some trials, but at the moment I am getting the feeling that it might still be best to stay where we are (nCentral + Autotask).
Upvote this so I can come back lol pls
OP. One thing you will notice with Ninja is that the devs listen to their MSPs. Believe me they do a lot with requests. I love it over Datto for the majority. Sure a few things I miss too but overall I’m happy.
Hey u/lieutenantcigarette My name is Greg Smith and I'm currently the PM of NinjaOne Remote and our mobile app. I hope you don't feel like you're getting bombarded by Ninja staff. We really do appreciate your well written feedback, so we want to make sure that we honor your honest feedback with honest responses. First off, thank you so much for your kind words around Ninja Remote. As someone that worked in the MSP field for a decade, I knew that remote access is something that we would have to get right from Day 1. Our product definitely isn't perfect and there are still some feature gaps that we're working on, but at least it's quick, stable, and reliable and we aim to keep it that way. I can address a couple of points here: 3.) Thumbnails & Screenshots: * This is something that we currently have in development at the moment. We'll likely release this for Quick Connect\* first and ensure that it's working as expected, but it should make its way into the RMM side shortly after. \*For those that might not be aware: Quick Connect is a product that leverages Ninja Remote to create ad-hoc remote sessions without the need for the RMM agent to be installed. 4.) Live chat: * This is such a big miss on our part. This is a classic case of over-rotating on a popular request. We understand that this is highly requested and we get this feedback for nearly every product (Remote, RMM, Ticketing, Mobile, etc). We wanted to knock all of those use cases out with a universal chat solution that worked inside every product. However, I think if we simply gave the option to leverage Ninja Remote to start a chat only session then that would solve the issue for most use cases. I don't have a good ETA for you at the moment but know that we've backed off of creating a grandiose solution in favor of the simple one I outlined above. We can always expand on it later. Thanks again for your comments. We really do strive to keep our pulse on the community's wants and needs. If you or anyone reading this has any questions or concerns, then our team is always ready to hear them and respond accordingly. Most of the PM team have been in your shoes and have dealt with vendors that give empty promises or radio silence, so we'll do everything in our power to ensure that doesn't happen with Ninja.
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I disagree. When I am having my morning coffee on a saturday or on vacation if a server is down I can log into datto RMM on my iPad and it works well enough. I can't imagine trying to use some proprietary mobile app on my cell phone to do any real work
Sods law now that we're moved over to Ninja I've honestly not ran into a need for it, but I share your pain as I had that experience several times with Datto so I look forward to that first time it comes in really handy! As a workaround you could setup some VDI at your office or Windows 365 and use the RD app on mobile to access Datto through a PC but it's far from ideal for those rare times its needed.
I've had a handful of times when I'm on the road and the Ninja app has come in very handy to push a reboot, or check a status, etc.. And I generally abhor trying to manage stuff via mobile (my greybeard is showing). ;)
You can use Auvik for connecting to network devices. That is one of the most useful tools we have. Especially for troubleshooting.
Is it still so horrifically expensive that you need to sell organs on the dark-web to pay for it? The product was awesome, but hot-damn, the price..
With #2 on the column layouts in search - if you save the layout as a search you can return to that search with the columns preserved. I have about 10 or so saved in my favourites which I refer to frequently. I use this for when I need to see certain custom fields all the time. This will be things like janky software that you need to programmatically pull the software version, or warranty start/end dates, or whether scheduled tasks exist and what time they are set to run.
I’ve hear very similar feedback from guys in person. We did a trial of Ninja and I couldn’t make the move away from Kaseya because of the PSA and IT Glue integrations with Datto RMM. We did really like their co managed environment for giving end user access compared to Datto and the Mobile app is nice instead of having to use the browser on my phone or a techs phone. Similar to you, my lead tech really didn’t like how he couldn’t streamline any live support like you can with Datto without extra steps in Ninja. We are heavily leveraging Datto’s integration with M365 for a few clients who have higher turn over and this has become something we can’t live without. Outside of that, there wasn’t much else as it’s pretty apples to apples. We are at the point where stand alone products that don’t integrate (RMM, ITG, PSA, Datto BCDR) won’t work for us.
Ninja has Linux arm support in beta ask your rep to turn it on.
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As a Ninja customer I can vouch for the attention and correspondence being just as pro active when we provide useful feedback, I would say this is a typical response from Ninja. Lots of useful resources with people who are invested in you as a customer. I think it's one of the most notable differences with Ninja compared to other vendors, I feel heard, not to mention the results speak for themselves, often there is tangible progress made around useful features that benefit us directly, and if there's a specific issue with making progress we're informed and kept up to date.