What We're Building at Level

A New Approach to RMM

Remote monitoring and management (RMM) needs to enter the 21st century. IT teams deserve modern tools with clean interfaces and low latency. In the world of remote work, technicians need access to devices on-demand from anywhere. What's more, keeping devices patched and up-to-date should be easy, and it should be clear to see device status at any time.

When building Level, we set out to solve these problems, and we're tackling them one after another. While we've come a long way, there's still plenty of work to be done. This post outlines the next big problems we want to tackle in the RMM space.

Making RMM More Automated & Collaborative

Our goal is an intuitive, modern RMM built to support distributed workplaces. So far, we've been working on a lot of the foundational, technical challenges surrounding peer-to-peer connections and bringing in real-time device information to our browser-based dashboard. Our agent and management console are fast, flexible, and easy to use.

The next phase of product development takes us into more advanced features around automating jobs and managing multiple devices at once. These are major pain points for customers who use our competitors. We're betting on automation and collaboration across IT teams to be the major evolution of RMM for the future.

1. Bulk Management: Seamless as Managing One Device

In interviews with RMM users, we've heard time and again that RMM solutions make it too difficult to manage devices in bulk. While you might be able to make the necessary changes to a single device, rolling the same change out to hundreds of devices is not intuitive and often takes a lot of manual work.

At Level, we've started with the objective of making the experience great on a single device. However, as we've developed the product, we've always kept bulk management in the backs of our minds while designing the code. All along, our intention has been to expand the same functionality to managing many devices at once.

Ultimately, whether it's one device or one hundred, it should be simple to remotely roll out changes via a single interface.

2. Task Status Reports, with Scheduled and Pending Reminders

Another thing we've heard from existing RMM users is how difficult other solutions make it to view and manage scheduled, pending, and recently completed tasks. When a job runs across machines on the network, it's difficult to track that job's status, whether it has started, and if it has completed on some machines but not others.

Solving this challenge is key to making automated IT more reliable. Technicians should be able to tell at a glance which jobs have succeeded, failed, or are upcoming. For scheduled tasks, it should be simple to make edits or reschedule the task with just a few clicks.

After the fact, task logs need to be much more robust than we've seen from our competitors. Success, failure, and pending messages are the baseline for task status on a given machine. Ultimately, Level will offer deeper governance over what changes occurred, rolled up reporting on overall system status, and detailed alerts when jobs fail.

3. Peer Review of Tasks Before They Go Live

The next step in collaborative IT is to make job creation and scheduling part of a reviewable life cycle. Shockingly, there's currently no solution that offers peer review or approval barriers for tasks before they run. The result is technicians often work in isolation, and one mistake in a script or configuration could have bad effects downstream when the job runs across many devices.

In the software development world, code has to be approved by your peers before it can go live. Additionally, there are ways to test the results of your code in a sandbox before running it on production. The ability to request peer review and test tasks in a sandbox are sorely missing from IT management.

We believe that adding review for tasks, configuration, and management actions will take IT teams to the next level of collaboration. With the ability to solicit feedback, team members can share best practices and institutional knowledge. Moreover, the upshot is better uptime for your systems because tasks that have been reviewed will fail less often.

Bringing RMM into the 21st Century

At this point, you've probably noticed a theme: making device management (and IT generally) more intuitive, automated, and collaborative.

We're building something that's altogether different from most RMM solutions today. In the modern era of IT, teams need flexibility and the capacity to make changes quickly across an entire network. On the other hand, they also need access and tools for troubleshooting and supporting individual users on single devices.

The IT role has changed to a strategic one that is responsible for security, scalability, support, maintenance, and management of a modern company's most vital asset: employee's computers and their connection to the internet.

We're building Level to meet the needs of modern IT teams supporting the future of work. And this is just the beginning.

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