Network Systems Engineers Consortium
Plugins4LabTech is having a contest and they are giving away a subscription to Surflog to 1 lucky participant. All they want is your honest opinions on the plugins you use. If you think your MSP will benefit from a free year of Surflog then go visit www.plugins4labtech.com and post your reviews.
In most MSPs, Linux is a small if any footprint in their overall service offerings and this is reflected in the support given to these systems within the RMM tools they use. MSPs often pass on managing Linux agents as the RMM tool they have available to them does not lend itself to managing Linux patching and updates.
Demand drives the development of the tools we use and we all know that Windows OS reigns supreme in the managed businesses realm. With MSPs looking to save every dollar where they can, they are not hiring techs to man the helpdesk that are Linux hardened vets. If they are lucky to have 1 guy that knows his way around BASH, he tends to be closer to management. They also most often overlook these systems in any maintenance plans the RMM tool is providing. This tends to leave Linux systems that are widely considered the workhorses of the Internet grossly under patched and vulnerable to exploits.
Like any MSP we had similar issues with maintenance plans as techs came and left taking skill sets with them. It was hard to keep up with managing maintenance when the previous engineer was very Linux savvy and the incoming engineer is not. Where do they pick up and go with patch management of these systems?
In comes a patch manager for Linux that plugs into LabTech, Linux Update Manager.
Plugins4LabTech decided to jump in and help give MSPs the ability to have a standard method and interface inside LabTech that they could use to determine what systems they have. MSPs can know what updates are available for each system and the ability to automate the installs of patches and updates. MSPs can determine if they have systems that have pending updates or pending reboots due to updates. See what update versions of packages are available and the ability to manually run updates or update a single package. The first release has basic automation controls for unassisted updating but the P4L team assures us there is several big expansions they want to add to the plugin to include detailed scheduling of updates, ticketing and alerting.
What to try the new Linux Update Manager plugin for free, or visit http://www.plugins4labtech.com
Access Office 365 for all your clients in a single pane of glass from inside LabTech in just a click with the all new Office 365 For LabTech plugin from the guys over at Plugins4Labtech (P4L). We here at P4L want to give all MSPs a chance to experience how having Office 365 at the techs’ fingertips can save time and money so we are offering 50% the life of the subscription if purchased in February. Just use the PROMO code TRYOFFICE365 at the checkout at plugins4labtech.com. You will receive 50% off your monthly subscription. The catch? We want your feedback. What do you like and what do you not like? After you take it for a spin, send your feedback to support@plugins4labtech.com.
What an incentive to come try a tool that puts control into the hands of the helpdesk!
I was recently tasked with an issue where our CIM probe was failing during CIM requests to new VMWare ESXi 6.5 servers we deployed. We were getting connection rejected failures from our probes which resulted in no valuable data being returned. We started following the breadcrumbs which lead us back to the ESXi host. We opened the UI and checked the health monitor in the UI and found it was showing “No sensor data available”. The first thing we checked was to see if the sfcbd-watchdog was running, and it was not. By default, this service was turned off, or so we thought! We turned on the service and the UI reported that the service was now running.
Even after several refreshes of the UI it stilled showed running but we still received a connection rejected. We rebooted the ESXi host and after it came back we tested the connections again and are still failing. We reopen the web UI and looked at the services again and there was our watchdog service stopped. We had set the service to autostart with host so this lead us to believe it must be dying at some point.
The best way to see what a service doesn’t like is to login to ESXi host using SSH and manually start the process and see what it’s output is. A quick /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start showed us that the service was “Administratively disabled”.
After digging around Google for some reference to this new data we came across a blurb about setting an option to allow CIM manager to run.
The command esxcli system wbem set –enable true followed by /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start allowed the sfcb-HTTPS-Daem process to start. This process is the TCP Listener that takes CIM requests from probes like ours and returns the health of the hardware.
You should get an output like the following
/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start
sfcbd-init: Getting Exclusive access, please wait…
sfcbd-init: Exclusive access granted.
sfcbd-init: Request to start sfcbd-watchdog, pid 69438
sfcbd-config[69448]: No third party cim providers installed
sfcbd-init: snmp has not been enabled.
sfcbd-init: starting sfcbd
sfcbd-init: Waiting for sfcb to start up.
sfcbd-init: Program started normally.
Invoking lsof -nPV | awk {‘count[$2]++}END{for(i in count)print count[i], i’} | sort -n in the SSH console will produce a list of running processes minus all the junk. You can use this list of processes to determine what is running on the ESXi Host.
We also used esxcli network ip connection list to get a list of ports the ESXi host was listening on to help determine if the port 5989 was active.
If you are deploying VMWare ESXi 6.5 in your environments and need CIM health data, remember to enable it and do not just assume that the WebUI is telling you it is active.
Check out our ESXi Health Monitor for LabTech (Automate) here
Plugins4Labtech (P4L) has reached a milestone with our Office 365 for LabTech plugin. After years of development, accolades from LabTech and managed service providers (MSPs) across the globe, we are finally ready to promote our Office 365 for LabTech plugin on www.plugins4labtech.com.
P4L is moving the Office 365 for LabTech plugin out of the development/beta phase (free) and into main production (premium plugins). This comes after several new improvements to the plugin and the successful trials of the plugin over the last six months. P4L would like to thank all the people involved with the testing and trials of this very inventive plugin. P4L also wants to thank everyone who helped with the strenuous testing allowing us to put together a very powerful tool. Trial (free) versions of the product’s license will expire on January 31.
We recommend users download the latest version of Office 365 for LabTech now.
Office 365 for LabTech is now a premium plugin that allows the collection of data and maintenance of Office 365, Azure and SharePoint services. From simple password unlocks for end users to setting ”out of office” messages for users’ email boxes, the Office 365 for LabTech plugin has what the help desk at your MSP needs—quick and easy access to common tools to manage Office 365.
P4L hopes you will come and join in the revolution of technology. Use P4L as your partner to automate.
Plugins4LabTech has created a new plugin that will monitor the CIM data announced by the hardware running VMWare ESX software. We can report on any hardware that follows CIM standards and makes it’s hardware statuses known to VMWare. This simple to use plugin deploys in just minutes and can be setup by anyone with little or no knowledge of LabTech functions and processes. If you want to see in action the easiest ESX Hardware Health Monitor available for LabTech then have a peek at our video on our YouTube Channel.
Get alerts and tickets when hardware failures are detected. Using the monitor agent supplied with the plugin get quick responses to failures and warnings directly from VMWare. When alarms happen get emails, tickets and messaging alerting you to the failure that is taking place on the hardware.
Plugins4LabTech’s VMWare Health Monitor plugin for Labtech uses an agent to talk to VMware ESX hosts and retrieves the CIM data for the hardware the ESX host is running on. The plugin processes this data and stores it in LabTech’s database to be used in the views and alarms the plugin issues when failures are seen. You will see data on your RAID arrays and SCSI controllers, Power Supplies failures and system overheats. If the hardware is reporting it to VMWare we can see it.
The main view lets you see all the ESX hosts under management sorted by Client. In this view you are able to turn on and off the collection of data, set the interval of how often the data is collected and enable alerting for any seen failures.
The Client Console tab is where you would add and delete the ESX Hosts you want to monitor. You are able to force the update of ESX CIM data by selecting to rescan ESX hosts and you can view the full CIM data list of any ESX Host.
The CIM Data view shows all the collected CIM data on a given ESX host. If any data is in a state not considered ok then those lines will be represented with warning and alarming icons. You will also get the hardware manufactures data back and in the case of Dell that is the Hardware type and Service Tag.
Under the main view you can select to enable alerts. When you do this agent is created in the internal monitors of LabTech. You can use this monitor to email, ticket, alert or message anyone when failures are picked up.
A simple plugin all self contained and easy to deploy. Just a few clicks to configure and you have data. So easy to use anyone can setup and have it working in just a few minutes.
The plugin is currently with the Squid Squad getting a final review before we release the new plugin. Follow our release notes at http://support.plugins4labtech.com
The recent announcement that LabTech Software is managing the the sale of CCleaner for Business licensing and providing free of charge the popular CCleaner for LabTech plugin developed by the Plugins4LabTech team is huge for the LabTech community. Every MSP knows the benefits of using CCleaner to maintain disk space and reduce junk on client PCs but most are unaware of the amazing security tool they have as well.
CCleaner a security tool? Absolutely, CCleaner is a great security tool to assist in maintaining password policies across the client and reducing the exposed footprint of the end users. Just have a look at another plugin provided freely by Plugins4LabTech called PassPort. This plugin scans the MSP’s client base for saved password and account info. It pulls this data directly out of the local windows PCs across the MSPs clients and brings all that data back to LabTech. This tool represents just how easy it is to get to this data and if you can get it, anyone can get it. CCleaner for Labtech can help prevent this data from reaching the wrong hands.
CCleaner for LabTech does this by automating the cleaning process across the entire MSP. By forcing a daily cleaning of all Browser Cache, Saved Passwords and Cookies will reduce the attack surface of each PC and trains the users to be more security minded by prevent them from getting value from saving passwords and allowing tracking and monitoring cookies to follow user’s browsing history.
For pennies a month a MSP can plugin to this powerful tool and really provide a value to their clients while helping to keep them safe! For more information on how to get CCleaner for LabTech please reach out to your LabTech Sales team. They will be glad to assist you and get you going with this great tool.
Also check out http://www.plugins4labtech.com for a complete list of free plugins for LabTech Software.
Magma, a Monitoring And Graphing Management Archive is a very versatile platform to monitor just about anything you can come up with. If you can get a message or a counter from the device you should be able to monitor and graph that device in LabTech using Magma for LabTech.
Magma for LabTech integrates directly into the LabTech RMM tool providing quick and upfront views of the statues of your clients and the monitors beneath them.
Magma for Labtech is all about the colors and the visuals are really easy to understand. By using common colors and icons to represent a visual heath spectrum, the monitors stand out where they may not be seen as easily in other solutions. For example, In the picture above we see “Green“, green is good but as you look further you can see both diamonds and smiley faces depicted for each client we have activate monitors for. This minor change in the visual spectrum lets you know that recent events have happened with the P4L client at some point in the last 24 hours, where diamonds depict the nothing has changed for this client for at least 24 hours. This varying degree of good helps you quickly determine where your time and review should be spent.
When we select that client we drill into all the monitors we have set up for that client. We can then see what items being monitored have changed in the last 24 hours.
Open up a monitor and see what it has been doing over time and what it is doing right now. From our graph we can see that this system’s disk stopped getting data for a period of time last night. The Windows system was in hibernation and was not sending data back during the night.
Using the History button you can see the history of health and wellbeing of the monitors you have deployed.
Reach back in time to see data graphed over a 2 year period with just 1 click of your mouse. From the monitor’s view you can access years of metrics for any monitor, drill down into the graphs using a simple drawing tool provided by each graph to get up and close to your data.
With all the different event states a monitor can be in Magma makes it easy to see what events are taking place and in which state those monitors may be in at any given time. Get Daily , Weekly , Monthly and Yearly metrics on all your monitors.
Need access to your MSP’s health on the go! Get all this great data just as you would in LabTech but right on your smartphones. Never be more that a thumb press away from the health of your clients and your MSP.
When a client comes asking about the availability of their website, their servers or their line of business apps what do you tell them?
Availability reports are key to knowing how well a services is performing. Being able to pull up at will the availability of any system or monitor and project back over time for that data is priceless. Even export the data out to Excel with a click of a button for usable and reportable data.
Ask any engineer about availability and they will tell you, “It’s all about the nines(9)”, like in %99.999 availability. Do you know what your availability is? Get it for any time period, at any time you like day or night, that is Magma for Labtech.
Magma for LabTech is comprised of a single MAG Server / Service and the LabTech Plugin Integration which allows full management of your environment. The MAG server deploys a custom version of Xymon that delivers the processing and storage of your archives and the stepping point for external testing monitors like web, dns and mail services that need to have reach from the outside real world. MAG does not only probe but accepts probes allowing a very fluid ability to collect data from just about any source that has access to the Internet. Whether you need to monitor a heat sensor in a server room or the QOS of a router Magma for LabTech can visualize it.
Magma for Labtech is still under development but from our screenshots you can see it has come quite far. A general beta may be available in the coming weeks so watch for our announcments on our support.plugins4labtech.com site. If you have any questions, feature requests or comments feel free to post up on our forums as well.
Get Magma at http://www.plugins4labtech.com
We thought you might be so we posted up a video preview of Magma for Labtech in action as we use it. This is just a limited view into the visual spectrum but should give you a taste of what is coming.
See us on our YouTube Channel
Plugins4LabTech is about to release to the community it’s next generation of Office365 Management for LabTech
Plugins4LabTech has completely rewritten this plugin from the ground up. No longer are your required to go through a set of manual installs and system prep to use the plugin. No longer is your workstation tied to processing Office365 commands. No longer do you have to deploy MSOL scanners at every location that uses Office365. No longer do you have to have a client systems collecting Office365 data. So say goodbye to all that luggage and say hello to the new and improved Office365 for Labtech.
Let’s go over some of the new innovations we have coming with this new plugin. Our biggest change comes in the form of a single pane of glass. We have moved all views into one master manager so you can flip from client to client without ever leaving the windows console you are in. This centralization does not stop at the user’s view but continues to the data collection and control systems. You now assign a single system anywhere across your MSP to manage Office365 for all your techs and clients. You can control what is collected and at anytime you can start a manual collection of data through the plugins control center.
The Control Center
The Control Center allows you to deploy all the MSOL modules you need to manage Office365 to your master scanner. If you find that you would like to use the Console Shell feature on your local workstation as well then you can select from the list of systems, your workstation PC and “Deploy MSOL Modules” to your workstation quickly. You can execute manual scans of all clients MSOL data, MSOL Statuses and more from this convenient window. Verify when the last scans took place to know if your data is up to date and how many clients were scanned. We also monitor and display if your scanner is online and available and if we see it up to date with it’s MSOL modules. All this is done automatically when you install and add your clients. LabTech will execute scanner twice every 24 hours to keep all data up to date with the clients real world data so as to capture changes made from AAD Connect if active for clients.
Your Single Pane Of Glass
The Office365 for LabTech console is pretty strait forward, At the top you have your active Office365 client list to select any client configured for Office365. From this view you get to manage the clients Azure, Exchange, Groups, Sharepoint sites and licensing usage along with the most recent MSOL hosting statuses for each client. Once a client is selected then their list of users becomes available for selection. By selecting a user from the list each tab will reflect that users information where relevant allowing you to manage many aspects of the user’s experience. In Azure you can manage new users, user passwords, unblocking a locked out user, setting strong password requirements and enabling and disabling many other features in Azure.
Azure Groups
Quickly manage new groups and removing old groups and Add and remove users from groups without ever leaving LabTech.
Exchange Management
Easily Convert user mailboxes to shared mailboxes saving your client license usage when archiving expired employees. Setting mailbox permissions quickly like Grant Send on behalf of, read only or full access to mailboxes for any user is a snap with Office365 for LabTech. Set forwarding addresses and manage a users Out Of Office messages and activity all right inside this single pane of glass.
Manage Sharepoint
Add and remove sites from Sharepoint. Manage Sharepoint groups and members site access.
MSOL License Management
Get access to all the license information for your clients, see what service plans exist for each license the client holds and the usage of each license. Add and remove licenses for users quickly without ever leaving your LabTech console.
MSOL Status
MSOL statuses keep you informed as to the state of the hosted services Microsoft is providing to your clients. Each client can have different status messages based on location of hosted services and the systems and services affected. These status messages are extensive and provide detailed information from Microsoft on the issues and resolutions completed.
The All Powerful MSOL Shell
Our Holy Grail, The MSOL Powershell console, Launched from Office365 For Labtech’s single pane of glass, has also been rewritten from the ground up to include module loading management, new commandlets and a clean look. If you are one for shells then this makes it easy to launch a Powershell console for access to any clients data directly from your workstations (no login information required). Run commands and scripts directly from the shell accessing all the MSOL services the client is entitled to as the tenant admin.
Our plugin has a little something for everyone, Stats and metrics for the senior staff, High level control over clients settings and global data for you engineers and access to common tech functions like password updates and removing lockouts making Office365 for LabTech a must have tool in your Labtech Tool Belts. We are not stopping there, Plugins4Labtech development team is continuously adding new features and functions to this plugin allowing the plugin to grow as MSOL services change and develop.
Office365 for Labtech will be released to the general community on Monday, June 20th for the opening of Automation Nation. If you are going to be at Automation Nation come seek me out if you would like more information on this release.
Visit Plugins4LabTech.com for more information and downloads. Would you like to see a Demo of Office365 being used in LabTech?
The Plugin4LabTech development team has let it leak out that the next version of the Backup Windows for LabTech plugin will now include Offsite Synchronization as a standard feature in all new versions. This feature allows MSPs to Offsite the local backups with schedulable Sync times keeping mirrors of the local backup directory on storage services across the internet.
Developers at P4L went on to comment that all transmissions over the internet of backup files were encrypted and secure point to point. With all the security issues abound you shouldn’t have to worry about someone scarfing up you backups. Shannon (a.k.a Cubert) said “We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here, we are using proven technology by long standing venders. So it just works.”
Plugins4LabTech has now made it so that no MSP has an excuse not to have good quality backups as part of their offerings. No longer do you need to force consumers into expensive backup services to ensure a quality backup is maintained for your clients. You can also be assured that backup are safe offsite in event of a disaster event.
Virtualize Anywhere, Backups are created using Microsoft Virtual Disk format so all backups files are VHDX files that when mounted can become a Virtual Machine or be mounted as a hard drive. This makes it a great tool for disaster recovery, mount and recover just about anywhere using the tools you have within your Windows system. No special recover tools to download and maintain which is great when the fires are raging.
Automatic backup archive usage management means you will never run out of disk space on your target backup disk making backups worry free!
After you configure a disk for a scheduled backup, Windows Server Backup automatically manages the disk usage—you do not need to be concerned about running out of disk space after repeated backups. Windows Server Backup will automatically reuse the space occupied by older backups when creating new backups. The management tool displays the backups that are available as well as the disk usage information. This can help you plan for provisioning additional storage to meet your recovery objective.
To get more information on this plugin and all the other plugins Plugins4LabTech offers please visit Plugins4LabTech.com