IT Glue, a Kaseya company since the December 2018 acquisition, is an information management platform that allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation an organization needs to help their MSP run better. By integrating PSA and RMM data, the vendor says they can help increase efficiency, and reduce onboarding times.
$29
per month per user (5 user minimum)
PaperTrail
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
PaperTrail is a document management software offering from Egis Software. It includes features such as storage and retrieval find any document instantly and routing and workflow streamline processes with automated routing and a rule-based workflow.
IT Glue is well suited to any size managed service provider that requires a secure central knowledge base. IT Glue also integrates well with N-Central to automatically populate the configurations tab with all the relevant Workstation, Printer, and Server information making client on-boarding a breeze.
Flexible Assets are custom questions or forms that you get to create to keep the kind of documentation that *you* want. Our team has done this, and have developed a comprehensive system in our documentation that is better than anything we've ever had.
Tagging. This feature is so helpful when interlinking related items in the documentation system. IT Glue makes it so easy to tag other configurations, including printers, firewalls, phones, etc.
Public sharing of knowledge base articles. Often our clients need to know how to do something. We can add pictures, step-by-step walkthroughs that save us and them a ton of time.
iFrame embedding. There's some flexibility to the web pages that have been helpful for putting other things, such as Cognito Forms in.
So far we have enjoyed the functionality of ITG with one exception:
The search feature is severely lacking. We have thousands of articles in this knowledge base but the search window is about 1" wide and only shows the first few words of each article. Within our system, those first few words are often the same "SYSTEMS: How-To...". If we are searching for a system, we will have no alternative but to manually try to find this document by browsing through folders within ITG.
Unfortunately ITG has not responded to a flurry of enhancement requests around this feature, that go back quite a while.
The functionality that would make this a killer app for us would be a dedicated search page that displayed results like a Google search page.
Ability to export all client documentation if the client moves to another provider.
Overall IT Glue meets every need that we need it to. IT is easy to use and convenient and we have not had very many issues with it since the inception. I would easily recommend it to anyone who needs this software.
The interface is excellent and very easy to use. As long as the text you input into the system can be easily read, you will have no problem finding it with all the different categories offered. Sometimes, the slider on the right can blend in with dark backgrounds, making it hard to see.
PaperTrail is extremely easy to use. Engineers can open the web console and begin tailing or searching logs. Simple searches are very intuitive; you may need to consult their documentation to write more complex queries. It is also very easy to configure alerts for specific log events. Configuring log collection with PaperTrail is simple.
Other than a few access outages, ITGlue is always up and available to us. Their ability to export Playbook, that contain our customers data, and securely send those over to them is amazing and are produced pretty fast. We have IT Glue linked with several other services and software and we have not found that it slows anything down.
Pages loads quickly. The only thing I would like the team to improve is the way we are able to navigate between app groups It is easy but doesn't respond as quickly as I would like.
No problems with support when needed it. Their answers on how to handle DR/BC situations when ITG is down are not stellar. They don't seem to get the business risks of their suggestions to just give the xls backup to engineers (aka give all passwords of ALL clients to engineers in an unencrypted flat-file where it is easy to copy, print, etc.)
Currently, we are evaluating using Sharepoint instead of IT Glue as documents and items are searchable within the document instead of by title. We feel that by only searching by title and the type it hinders the speed at which information can be found easily.
Amazon CloudWatch logging is integrated with most Amazon products out-of-the-box. Both offer web consoles for searching logs, and both are fully-managed and can be configured easily. We chose PaperTrail because some of our services run on Heroku. We would have chosen PaperTrail even if this weren't the case because its search capabilities are better.
We've had a number of false starts on getting all of our clients' assets documented. The culture shift just has not happened yet and there is a general lack of trust in the data.
It's nice to not have to go hunting for information about client assets anymore. We can be much more productive this way.
PaperTrail saves developers ($$$) a lot of time trying to track down where errors occured; rather than needing to SSH into machines and view error logs, all error logs for certain applications are available in one view
