NinjaOne Best Practices for New Partners

Topic

This guide provides tips and best practices new partners can use when getting started with NinjaOne.

Environment

NinjaOne

Description

This guide will help you get started faster and maximize the value of NinjaOne. We've based this article on the NinjaOne Best Practice guide from our NinjaOne Resource Center. You can download the Best Practice guide as a PDF by selecting the link at the bottom of this page.

Select a topic to learn more.

• General Recommendations
• Deployment Recommendations
• Policy Inheritance
• Custom Alerts
• Patch Management and Antivirus
• Administrative Privileges
• Device Naming
• User Accounts
• Reporting
• Self-Help
• Accessibility
• Automation

General Recommendations

We've listed a few recommendations to get started below. As with any best practice or recommendations, the suggestions we've made may not precisely fit your use case or need. Your account manager can help you understand how to adjust these suggestions to your specific needs.

Here are a few general recommendations:

• Deploy NinjaOne internally and use your internal infrastructure for testing.
• Leverage policy inheritance to save yourself time.
• Minimize noise with custom alerts.
• Minimize end-user interruption for patch management and antivirus.
• Use administrative credentials to optimize patch and script deployment success rates.
• Develop a device-naming scheme to facilitate the easy identification of devices.
• Set up user permissions to ensure security.
• Use reports as a communication tool with clients.
• Give end-users access to self-help tools.
• Download NinjaOne's Mobile App.
• Start slow with automation.

Deployment Recommendations

Deploy NinjaOne internally and use your internal infrastructure for testing. No matter how friendly you are with your customers, you run the risk of angering your clients (at best) or losing clients (at worst) when you deploy an untested script, patch, or automation on their endpoints.

The following deployment recommendations will help avoid the above problems:

• Explore the platform, learn your organizational preferences, and develop your own best practices.
• Try new features for improved service delivery and test new OS patches without impacting production.
• Ensure you have a mix of devices on premises for testing that reflects your clients' systems. Standardized hardware kits can make this easier.

Policy Inheritance

As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), or IT professional, you likely offer a range of standard services. You probably monitor many of the same health and performance metrics across clients for each device type. You likely even deploy the same antivirus and remote access tools across all your customers.

NinjaOne's policy inheritance scheme allows you to do all the hard work of policy setup once and then apply those changes to sub-policies, saving you time and effort.

Follow the recommendations below to use policy inheritance to save time.

• Create a default policy for each device role (Microsoft Windows workstations or servers, Apple macOS workstations) to act as a template for future child policies.
• Set safe default patch management and antivirus preferences for child policies to inherit.
• Set up all your condition monitors, automated remediations, and scheduled scripts in the parent policy, but only enable those you want to run by default.
• Whenever you onboard a new client, use a child policy for the new client to make granular changes for new organizations while inheriting most of your customizations directly from the parent policy.

Custom Alerts

Underreporting and overreporting from your Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) system can be equally detrimental, but we sometimes hear complaints about excessive notifications. We've made our alerts completely flexible to ensure you get all the notifications you need, and none that you don't.

Follow these recommendations to minimize noise with custom alerts.

• Create a default severity scheme for alerts.
• Minimize the number of alerts each user receives.
  • Set notification schedules at an organizational level, so NinjaOne only sends them during business hours.
  • Set user permissions so that each user receives notifications only on their assigned accounts.
  • Set user schedules so they only receive alerts while they are on the job.
  • Set user notification settings only to accept higher-priority notifications.
• Turn notifications off for all users except a central service email and rely on in-platform notifications.

Patch Management and Antivirus

You can minimize end-user interruptions for patch management and antivirus by following these recommendations:

• Run patch installations and antivirus scans outside of business hours.
  • Set endpoints never to sleep.
  • Set scan and deploy times to either outside work hours during the week or to weekends.
• If patching outside business hours isn't feasible, work with partners to minimize disruptions.
  • Identify times when devices will be online, and installation will be least disruptive.
  • Determine if reboot notifications will be helpful or disruptive.
  • Use automation to reboot devices when they are online outside of business hours.
• Create a robust patch test group using your internal infrastructure.
  • Ensure that your patch testing group reasonably reflects the distribution of operating systems and hardware profiles of your client base.
  • Ensure you have copies of the business-critical applications your clients use in your test group.
  • Deploy patches to your test group and validate their impact on devices, operating system setups, and line-of-business applications before deploying them to customers.
• Alternatively, delay non-critical patches an appropriate amount of time to ensure stability before deploying to customers.

Administrative Privileges

Some of the most important functions our partners perform—like patching and software deployment—work best when run with administrative privileges. Sharing those credentials with all your technicians is a bad idea.

NinjaOne's credential exchange helps you keep endpoints secure by enabling the storage and use of privileged credentials for critical tasks without sharing those credentials with users.

Use these administrative credentials tips to maximize patch and script success rates.

• Set up common administrative privileges across devices for each client.
• You can create and set up scheduled PowerShell scripts to create local administrative accounts on each device for a given client.
  • Hint: use 'Run Once, Immediately' to create this account whenever you add a new device to a
    policy.
• Store credentials in the credential exchange.
• Set organization defaults to the correct stored credentials.

Device Naming

Having a standard and systematic way to name devices in NinjaOne can positively impact organization, efficiency, and even open up new capabilities.

How you name your devices will largely depend on how you manage your clients.

Check out these three naming conventions suggestions:

• System naming: in this method, you leave the device name set to whatever the user has named their device.
  • This method requires the least upfront work, as NinjaOne automatically assigns the computer name as the device name when you install the agent.
  • Default computer names are often not in an easily human-readable format.
• Functional naming: in this method, you name devices after the function they perform.
  • Example: an email server in San Francisco might be called "San Francisco Email Server." This naming method is beneficial because it is easily readable by humans, which can be particularly helpful in client communications.
• Inventory-based naming: this naming convention is highly structured and uses multiple pieces of information, such as client name, device function, functional group, user, manufacturer, OS, or computer name.
  • Example (client-user): Ninja (Sal Sferlazza)
  • Example (client-functional group-serial): Ninja- Product-0001
  • Example (client-location-device function-user):
    Ninja-SF-Workstation-SSferlazza
    • Abbreviated versions of this format help keep names short while preserving functionality.
    • This type of naming convention makes NinjaOne's dynamic groups even more powerful, allowing you to leverage device names for inventory management and cross-organization automation.

User Accounts

As we've seen over the last several years, RMMs can be vectors for malicious activity. Former employees, and undertrained employees or clients (in a co-managed environment), can pose risks that could wreak havoc on a system. At NinjaOne, we take security seriously, so we've designed our solution to minimize vulnerabilities. We also provide our partners with a range of tools to help secure their environment. 

Follow these recommendations to enhance NinjaOne's security:

• If you assign technicians to specific accounts, restrict their NinjaOne access to those accounts only.
• Restrict your technicians' access to only the functionality for which they have training.
  • For example, junior technicians without scripting experience should not have access to write scripts. or you might restrict policy changes to senior technicians.
• Enable platform activity notifications to stay informed about significant environmental changes.
  • At a minimum, set up notifications for the deletion of devices, organizations, policies, and users.
  • Enact strict user permissions to limit access to platform changes. We also recommend that you enable notifications for editing or creating organizations and policies.

Reporting

Quick wins and solid communication are key to keeping clients happy. Reporting can help you with both.

Follow these suggestions for using reports as a communication tool with clients.

• Brand your reports so they're customer-ready.
• Set up and schedule executive summary reports for all your clients.
• Send the executive summary to yourself and use it as a centerpiece in your monthly client meetings.
• Sending the report to yourself allows you to review it, address any issues, and incorporate your expert analysis into the results before your client sees it.
• If you've set up patching, patch compliance reports are also great customer-facing reports.

Self-Help

Give end-users access to self-help tools.

Any help request that you can avoid by allowing end-users to help themselves is a win for your team. NinjaOne allows you to deploy a custom systray icon that you can turn into a toolbox for end-user self-help.

Here are a few suggestions for improving self-help capabilities:

• Brand your systray icon with a high-contrast logo, so it's easily visible in the systray.
• Add a tooltip so end-users know what the icon is for. Try something like "IT self-service" or "IT help request".

• At a minimum, include a help request form tied to either a service email address or your ticketing system.

  You can also consider adding:

  • One-click launch of scripts that end-users can run.
  • Software installation self-service.
  • URLs to helpful tools.

Accessibility

Download NinjaOne's Mobile App.

Whether you're in your office, at home, with a client, or on the go, being able to quickly identify and triage client problems is crucial. Being able to log into NinjaOne on your phone, remotely access a server or device, and resolve an issue without needing a laptop can help you provide faster support.

The following tips can improve your support capabilities:

• Have all your technicians download the NinjaOne app.
• The NinjaOne app has separate notification preferences. At a minimum, have technicians turn on notifications when they're on call. Technicians can receive notifications:
  • Only when on call.
  • During business hours.
  • At all times.

Automation

Basic automations like patch management and antivirus deployment are essential tools for any IT professional. To get started with automation, look at ticket trends to identify your most common issues and identify which are easily solved via automation – start there. Start slow with automation and follow these recommendations:

• Test new scripts and automations on your internal infrastructure before rolling them out to clients.
• Use a standard failure code across scripts and use a script output monitor to alert when scripts fail.
• Create dynamic groups using NinjaOne's search and group feature to create cross-organization and cross-policy device groups you can run scripts against.
• Auto-remediate simple, repetitive errors by monitoring event codes and triggering scripts when those codes are triggered.

Example Automations

• Detecting line-of-business applications that are down and restarting them.
• Basic maintenance—disk space cleanup.
• Check and restart RMM tools.
• Check for and run reboots.
• Install utility applications.
• Change power profiles.
• Automatically add administrator profiles to new devices.