Atera, which makes a joint RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) and PSA (Professional Services Automation) platform with a single code base, has announced a new release with a broad range of enhancements. Chief among them are the addition of auto-healing scripts, and enhanced out-of-the-box monitoring, both of which reduce the amount of work an MSP has to do.

One significant addition is the addition of Auto Healing Scripts, which trigger a script to run when a threshold level is exceeded.

“This is a very key thing, because it allows the MSP to build a set of automated actions and reactions,” said Gil Pekelman, Atera’s CEO. “And it’s all automated, so they don’t have to do it again in the future. Anything that is automated in autohealing is work the MSP won’t have to do.”

“It extends the monitoring path once a threshold is reached so you can react automatically with a script,” said Oshri Moyal, VP of Research and Development at Atera. “If you are close to running out of disk space, for example, you will automatically clean the disk.”

Enhanced out-of-the-box monitoring has also been added, which include allowing MSPs to select multiple events in one threshold item.

“In feedback, this was high on the list of missing features,” Moyal said.

“Users have said we want a lot more monitored out of the box,” Pekelman said,” “But how much do you monitor, that’s the issue. If you monitor too much, you get lots of false positives and you run around chasing them, and if you monitor too little, you don’t get alerts when you need them. A few things are absolutely essential, but beyond that, it’s tough to determine what gives you the biggest bang for your buck. We have effectively engaged in Crowdsourcing to get feedback, and have given what the crowd has told us they wanted. We added new capabilities out of the box so there is less work to do. Combined with autohealing, where things will be automatically fixed for you, you become more efficient.”

The Splashtop remote app has now been fully integrated into the Atera system.

“We started with a tool for remote management that we developed ourselves, but we decided to focus on our core competency and we released the integration with Splashtop in September,” Pekelman said. Then, you still had to go through Splashtop and get a Splashtop account. Now, when you sign up with Atera you are fully connected. You don’t have to set up another account or deal with a third party.”

The agent installation process has been streamlined through newly integrated troubleshooting diagnostics, improving the speed and ease of installing agents.

“What we have done here is taken how we handled support cases, and turned it into a piece of software,” Moyal said. “Our diagnostic tool checks connectivity and in one click finds potential issues when an MSP installs an agent that can the MSP how to fix the problem.”

“Atera doesn’t charge per agent, and so this troubleshooting capability is especially valuable here.” Pekelman stated. “We don’t believe in support, not in this day and age. You don’t call Google and Facebook for support. We have a very dedicated support team, but we don’t want you to have to call them.”

Other improvements beyond the automation ones include the addition of Integrated Wake-on-LAN (WoL) capabilities, which Moyal said was among their most requested enhancements, and which lets a computer to be turned on or awakened directly from the Atera console.

“This is a very cool feature,” Pekelman said. “If a server is down and off and you need to access it, you don’t have to drive over to do that. You just click a button, and it wakes up.”

User activity status updates now allow MSPs to see if an account is active, disconnected, idle, or locked before they remotely connect to the workstation.

“MSPs say when they connect remotely to a machine, they want to know if user is on the machine or not, so that they will only connect if its idle or disconnected,” Moyal stated.

Atera stresses its uniqueness in having the same code for its RMM and PSA capabilities, and Pekelman indicated improvements have been made on the PSA side as well.

“We now have automatic email alerts on contracts that are about to expire, and more detailed invoices based on contract type, ticket, and time entry,” he said.