Liongard’s new Metrics feature gives their MSPs the ability to generate their own metrics to provide deeper insight into issues of concern to their customers.

Automated documentation software maker Liongard has formally announced Metrics, a major enhancement to their documentation automation platform for MSPs. The announcement strengthens Liongard’s Roar platform as the IT documentation business looks to assess the impact of Wednesday’s bombshell announcement that IT Glue, the market leader in the IT documentation space for MSPs, has been acquired by Kaseya.

Liongard has been a strong strategic partner of IT Glue. While Liongard’s platform could be positioned to compete with IT Glue and the other IT documentation players, they have chosen an alternative strategy, partnering with these companies to make it easier for them to collect documentation data by automating the process of system discovery, documentation, change detection and assessment.

“Our focus is on automation,” said Joe Alapat, Liongard’s CEO. “We view IT Glue as more closely aligned with the business management side of the MSP, whereas we are on the automation side. Kaseya’s interest in IT Glue just strengthens our message around why IT documentation is so important. It is something that is extremely hard for IT to catalogue, and having a system to do that is what allows an MSP to function at scale.”

Kaseya’s acquisition of IT Glue actually took place two years ago, and the companies successfully kept the news under wraps until now, even as it was transitioning to a future in which IT Glue was part of Kaseya. Alapat and Vincent Tran, Liongard’s COO, both indicated they had no idea IT Glue had been acquired. They also emphasize that it makes no different in Liongard’s positioning, particularly as Kaseya has strongly stressed that IT Glue will operate exactly the same after the acquisition has been announced as it did during the last two years, before it was announced.

“Our strategy remains completely consistent,” Alapat said. “We expect that things will continue to operate as they have, and that would be great. We have a solid working relationship with IT Glue. We have talked extensively with Luis [Giraldo, IT Glue’s VP of Product] about the integration. Much of the managed services industry is based on that open ecosystem, and we anticipate that it will continue.”

“The integrations in this industry is what keeps the ecosystem working,” Tran emphasized.

Liongard believes that the announcement of Metrics significantly strengthens Liongard’s part of that ecosystem. They featured it in demos during its pre-release stage at the ConnectWise Connect event in Orlando last month. Metrics leverages the raw data that Roar was already collecting, and turns it into actionable information for the MSP.

“Metrics is the result of feedback from our MSP partners, who asked for more insight on things that mattered to their end customers,” Tran said. “It provides them with much more usable information, like being able to see who the users are, when things expire, and if they are up to date. The first use case we released alongside it was billing reconciliation, where you can map this information into billing.” That was the most requested use case, and was something that Liongard demonstrated at ConnectWise Connect.

“The data that we are capturing with Metrics is extremely rich and there is a ton of it – the data print we call it,” Alapat stated. “You really have to dig into it. For the MSP, the value of the Metrics capability is around building formulas to get insights that they would have to have a Level 3 go off to address otherwise. It enables the MSP to create their own metrics. None of this was possible before, because we had no way to share it with MSPs, and more collaboratively, with our MSPs’ customers. It was baked in before, but now MSPs are able to use it to obtain insight.”

“We are now able to create a formula capability to allow MSP customers to define it,  and one of the use cases is billing reconciliation,” Tran indicated. “The other use cases are weekly health checks, and periodic business reviews.”

Change management issues are on the top of Liongard’s agenda for the year ahead.

“You will see us focus more heavily on actionable alerts and change detection,” Alapat said. “They exist in limit form today, with things like basic starter content around actionable alerts, but we haven’t produced content around the rules to push them to the limit. We will invest more time in things that drive actionable alerts, like identifying privileged Office 365 users that don’t have two-factor authentication enabled – use cases like that.”

“We are also expanding our integrations, with Autotask and with Kaseya,” Tran indicated.