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Magma for LabTech – Get your graph on!

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.

Follow the yellow brick road

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.

Multi Graph Timelines

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.

Don’t be left out in the cold

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.

Your data on the go

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.

magma-IPhone

It’s all about the Uptime

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.

Show me the nines

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

Are you left wanting more?

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

Office365 for LabTech Pre-Release Feature Overview

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?

Backup Windows for LabTech gets new Offsite Synchronization features

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

Squidworks launched Plugins 4 LabTech web services portal

A new one-stop-shop for LabTech plugins has arrived with the latest launch of plugins4Labtech.com, developed by Squidworks. The new user-friendly shop offers both free and paid plugin tools for the most popular remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool in the market place. It’s specifically designed for IT managed service providers (MSPs) and offers powerful tools all in one place.

The new plugins4Labtech.com site features some of the more popular premium plugins like Chocolatey for LabTech, CCleaner for LabTech, Patch Remedy and a new plugin released today—Backup Windows. It also features free plugins developed and honed quickly to meet the growing needs of IT professionals and MSPs like Office365 Manager, Agent Status, Flu Shot and PowerShell. What’s more is that the plugins are created by an experienced systems engineer with 20 years in managed services and a multi-system developer, Squidworks (a.k.a. Cubert), and tested by a user group made up of MSP engineers affectionately called the Squid Squad.

The site offers links for support as well, including helpful support forums where users contribute to the development of new plugins like the one hosted on plugins4LabTech.com.

For more information on the site or to find and provide feedback on the latest tools to help you with LabTech, visit the online forum at plugins4LabTech.com.