Pulseway has rolled out version 9.6 of its RMM solution. It has also changed its pricing model according to Edgar Zacharjev, whom Enterprise Times recently discussed the update with. Pulseway will be turning to a more flexible subscription model per endpoint. Customers will be able to scale up or down during the month or cancel endpoints. The pricing is available to MSPs and internal IT teams, though Zacharjev admitted that the latter generally prefer to fix pricing for a year.
The update contains six core updates:
- Total Custom report builder
- Device Monitoring
- Patch Management
- Automation
- macOS Remote Control
- Autotask Integration
Total Custom report builder
Pulseway recently released a new reporting engine and this release sees the availability of a new custom report builder. Zacharjev explained, saying, “You can start from scratch, edit templates, add any graph, chart colour, any logo, image, GIF, text, data points, ranged data — a complete customizable Report Builder. We have templates because not everyone has time to build reports from scratch. If our clients wanted to build a completely custom report to their own liking, they have the ability to do that.”
Pulseway has initially released around 30 templates for the new engine. Customers can add data sets to the custom reports and with the customer report builder, customers can mix and match charts and data points. Effectively, MSPs could add customised reports for each client if needed, or have a standard monthly report across the business.
Device Monitoring
New features include SNMP alerts having the ability to trigger notifications based on a change to a specific value.
Patch Management
There are three new types of patch policy notifications, delivering users more granularity when patch updates fail. The new types, which have a level of configuration, include:
- Notification for new patches pending review
- Notification upon error during operating system patching
- Notification upon error during software patching
Zacharjev explained the reason for these improvements as patch compliance. He said, “Especially in the US, we’ve seen a big uplift with compliance. Car dealerships are being regulated like banks. Therefore, they have to have the same safety protocols.
“We have added detailed root cause notifications, with failed patches or issues with specific updates, where we send a detailed summary of failed updates on machines or applications, etc, which give our clients a detailed overview of exactly why it happened. But also let them take action to remediate the data automatically by pushing the update again.”
Pulseway is also adding a patch approvals status, enabling customers to preapprove patch updates if they wish to. This additional step is one that Zacharjev sees larger clients implementing.
Automation
Pulseway continues to build out its workflow capabilities. This update sees customers able to execute workflows as the current user rather than using a proxy account, enhancing security.
The workflow can not only act as the current user. The workflow will also interact with them as part of the process. For example, it could be used to confirm whether a user is still experiencing an issue.
macOS Remote Control
Pulseway is also adding the ability to log onto a MacOS device, even when a user is not logged on locally, matching the feature in Windows.
Autotask Integration
There is an update for the Autotask integration. Customers should update the integration and reconnect Autotask to Pulseway once they have upgraded to the latest version.
What else
There are a lot of other features in this update. I asked Zacharjev what his favourite new feature is. He replied, “The ability to change the device’s name as you’re hovering over. You right-click on the device name and you can quickly just change it without going anywhere. It’s a small thing that our clients want, to just change some device names.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a huge update from Pulseway, though it has been 3 full months since the release 9.5. Many of the new features are complementary to existing ones, but they are more than just iterations. The customer report builder is significant.
The new pricing model is also worth organisations, both internal IT teams and MSPs, considering if their user counts are likely to vary considerably during the year.
