Video Call with @gilgi

iectechbrian

I just had a video call with @gilgi and a great Customer Success Manager. It went very well. We had the chance to talk about how I use Atera and some of my unique use cases. They both were very open to and asked for my blunt and honest feedback and they were very great about hearing what I had to say along with asking questions about what I had said.

So, if Gil reaches out about a video call, it is 30 minutes well spent. It is also a great way to give and discuss real feedback. I definitely feel more heard (even though the community is great and Gil is great about responding to feedback and concerns, and communicating with us here.)

mbudke

Good feedback! Thanks for sharing :-)

May I ask what your "painpoints" have been? :-)

Russ

Great to know and thank you for sharing your experience with the community here. Much appreciated.

mbudke

Today I also had the chance to have a meeting with @gilgi and eve.
I can 100% agree to what @iectechbrian is saying. This was very well spent time.

I had the chance to explain how I am using Atera, what I am missing and I got a lot of information in regards to my requests and some insights which I would not have received following the normal communication.
I can only say: If you get the chance to talk to @gilgi - do it 😄

I really appreciated the call. Thanks!

gilgi

Thank you both <3
It's truly my pleasure.

iectechbrian

Here is the link to my comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/1er8287/comment/ljk2bes/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Here is what it says in case the link gives you any issues:

My company has had an overall good experience with Atera, with some bumps along the way.

TLDR: There have been some bumps along the way, BUT Atera does try to listen to their users and welcomes feedback. It is a huge help for IT Departments, especially at small to medium businesses who only have 1 IT person.

The bad news first:

We decided to go with Atera over other options because of the pay-per-technician pricing and AIT. It was great the first few months and AIT really helped. Then those at the top of Atera made the horrible decision to yank AIT from being included in the pricing. They instead made it exclusive to annual only subscribers, and made AIT a per-device charge. These two completely went against their main advertising points for the previous year. Having it pulled away too hindered my work that I was able to do with it for sure, like helping to diagnose things, find solutions, and writing scripts.

The good news:

That being said, Atera has, at least in part, listened a bit to the community. The community was livid when we got a banner on the Atera portal that we had 30 days before the changes would take place. After a while, Atera decided to make the per-device cost a per-technician cost with Copilot 2.0. It still, sadly, is restricted to annual subscribers only, with little hope that will change soon.

However, Atera overall has been a good experience. Its capabilities even without the AIT/Copilot 2.0 are good. Having multiple options for remoting into an effected system is very handy, especially when physical locations are hours apart like at my company. (And when you're a one-man IT department.) Being able to chat with users right on the screen when remoting in is a big help too.

The portal for clients is fully customizable and easy to use. (Getting the users to actually put in a ticket can still be like pulling teeth, but that's EOBKAC issue for sure.

If you do go annual, the script writing of the AIT/Copilot is great. Even without that, there is a script library for everyone to use. The scripts are reviewed by Atera for validity and security to my understanding as well.

Recently I was even able to hop on a call with a Customer Success Manager and the Atera Community Manager. They took the time to talk with me for close to an hour. They knew about some of my pain points with the AIT/Copilot progression and we were able to discuss that. We also were able to discuss my specific use cases for Atera, some of which were new to them. We discussed things that were going well, things that could use tweaking (which wasn't much), and any ideas that I have on new features. It was time well spent for sure.

Overall I am glad that my company approved using Atera, and I expect that they will continue improving as time goes on.

heimir

Its good to hear that. We are unhappy with Atera and we have only used the product for 2 months or so. We paid for a year, Atera can't even get our payment done right. I think when the year is up we will not be with Atera. I regret the decision.

mbudke

@heimir
May I ask what is not working as you expected it? Would be interested how others are using the product or what their expectations are.

Do you currently use a different RMM?

heimir

We signed up with Atera a few months ago. I think the RMM part is pretty good but the ticketing system is bad, its surprisingly bad I think. We use Smartertrack for our ticketing now and its out of the box so much better than Atera. Pretty much every ticket system we have looked at its better than Atera and so much better than Atera.

Several things like a user can only have 1 device is is just wrong. In todays world so many users has more than 1 device. Many of our clients has a desktop, laptop and virtual desktop.

Reporting isnt good either. Plenty of reports of us as an MSP but very little good reports for our clients. We need to justify to our clients why they should pay us and we do that via reports.

SNMP isnt done well. Its very limited feature. Its almost like "lets just put it in there" knowing its limited.

The price of the AI is not even close to be worth it. Its like they spend all their effort on developing that and not the rest of the platform.

Atera/bluesnap is crap, just crap. Bluesnap seems to think that payment method dictates sales tax. Atera can't even get this straight.

We paid for a year upfront and I regret that. I dont think we will be with Atera when it comes up for renewal unless they improve several things.

The biggest issue for me now is the ticketing system.

We did use a different RMM but we have migrated to Atera. Like I said, the RMM is pretty good, been working pretty well for us.

1. Get the ticket system to work for us. We are currently not working on. Kind of given up.
2. Get reports we can send to our clients. We probably can find something that might work there.
3. Then we need to get the billing part done but since the ticketing isnt working thats been put on the back burner. They QB desktop integration needs to be done better and working.

So far the support has been very good. Im sure some of the issues are lack of understanding on our part but I struggle getting past the ticketing system. The template editor is bad. We had better ones 15 years ago and there are many excellent ones. The ticket rules is also lacking when it comes to changing status and what happens. I had very high hopes and I was very excited when we joined but that has now faded.

gilgi

https://community.atera.com/discussion/comment/2871#Comment_2871

Thanks for the candid feedback @heimir
There are some areas here which I think that are worth discussing to ensure you're maximizing what the product already has in place, and others where there is perhaps a feature gap that can be shared with out product team.

I'm DMing you, I'm happy to join on call and say hi, but in this case I want to have someone assigned to go over these areas and assist in working with them, there is a learning curve to using any new software and I'm here to try and make things easier for you.