“Over the years if you’ve ever asked me what my favourite things are (to Automate), I’ve often struggled to give an answer. The problem is, there is so much to choose from and where do you begin?”, says Paul Kelly, the Head Nerd at N-able. In the article below, he gives some very valuable and perfectly structured bits of advice that could serve you well on your automation journey. Enjoy the read!
What IT Processes Should You Automate When Getting Started?
The good news is you’re probably automating already a lot more than you give yourself credit for. Just think about it, when you start to use solutions like N-central or N-sight RMM, you are beginning your automation journey, most partners will automate the deployment of agents, and when the agents check in with your RMM solution, monitoring will be automatically applied, and notifications will automatically trigger when issues are found. You also probably have Patch Management configured on these devices and deploy an AV or EDR solution, so again these IT processes are being automated for you. So now that we’ve established you’ve already begun your automation journey, I want to look beyond the automation we have configured out of the box and highlight a few of my favourite things to automate, I’ll also include links to each one making it easy for you to access and add to your RMM solution.
Remove Bloatware
When I think of all the time I’ve spent removing bloatware from workstations and laptops, it must amount to months if not years of my life. Thankfully my days of removing bloatware are behind me, but if you find yourself preforming this task on a regular basis, make sure you use this automation policy to speed up the bloatware removal process. The policy can be amended to include additional bloatware or exclude certain bloatware by removing or adding a # before the name of each one.
Download the policy:
Remove Bloatware Windows 10 for N-central
Monitor Bitlocker Status
In the ever-evolving threat landscape, it is imperative that you take action to help ensure your end-users are protected. Key to this is making sure that their drives are encrypted. This automation policy will monitor the Bitlocker status of a device and will alert you when a drive is not encrypted. From here you can then trigger the Enable Bitlocker automation policy as a self-healing action to ensure all devices are encrypted.
Download the policy:
BitLocker Disk Encryption Monitoring for N-sight
Workstation Daily Maintenance
We all know we simply don’t have the time or resources to preform manual daily checks on all the workstations under our management. If only there was a way, we could automate this, it would reduce the number of issues logged in our helpdesk and ensure the workstations are running smoothly. Well, the good news is, and you’ve probably guessed this already, there is an opportunity to automate daily maintenance of workstations. The Workstation Daily Maintenance automation policy preforms a number of checks to ensure workstations are up to their basic secure configuration. Again you can modify this to match your requirements before you deploy it through your RMM solution to run on a daily recurring basis.
Download the policy:
Workstation Daily Maintenance for N-sight
Monitor and Kill BitTorrent Software
In my opinion—and I’m sure it’s one many will share—BitTorrent software has no business on corporate devices. Torrents can host malicious files such as viruses, ransomware, and spyware and often contain copyrighted material. This automation policy is designed to detect if any of the most common BitTorrent software is running on your systems, and kill these processes for you if you desire. This automation policy can be added as a monitoring service to prevent users from running these unwanted applications on devices under your management.
Download the policy:
Bittorrent Detection and Mitigating for N-central
Bittorrent Detection and Mitigating for N-sight
Blue Screen of Death Monitoring
This is a relatively new addition to my list of favourite things to automate, but one I feel can add great value. I’d recommend monitoring for Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) as it can often be an indicator of an underlying issue with a device, , that may not be reported by the end-user or yet detected by your RMM platform. This monitoring check will alert you when a BSOD has occurred and monitor the number of BSODs over a 30-day period, allowing you to proactively reach out to your end-users to address potential issues before they become and major issue for your end-users.
Download the policy:
BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) Monitoring for N-central
BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) Monitoring for N-sight
So, there you have it, five of my favourite things to automate. If you implement these along with all the other automation you probably didn’t realize you were doing already, the next time someone tells you to automate more, you’ll simple remember my favourite things (to automate) and then you won’t feel so bad.
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