Source
r/msp•
mspthrowaway72

Has anyone asked Labtech for a refund? Lawsuit?

Everything in this post represents my opinions only and is not to be taken as a statement of fact.

I'm mad, let me start with that. "Connectwise Automate" is the shell of a formerly good company. Connectwise has given everyone in the industry the middle finger because they have good market penetration and customer lock-in. In my opinion they have prioritized marketing and sales over development, customer service and support. The later three barely even existing in any sort of a recognizable state at this point and I have heard they are moving them overseas now so I wouldn't expect it to get better.

Our Labtech Patch Manager has been in a broken state for 6 months now. We have opened tickets on this for 6 months now. We have had multiple labtech employees and third parties examine our settings and confirm them as correct for 6 months now. We thought that the issue was fixed but now we have come to realize that the compliance status was just giving bad data. We have many machines that have not patched since we moved to labtech 11 but labtech tells us they are at 100% compliance.

Connectwise knows that it is broken. They knew it was broken either before or immediately after they shipped it. Instead of telling clients "This has a lot of problems and you shouldn't use it yet" they instead pushed it on everyone. When they knew that compliance metrics weren't working they kept it to themselves. My company has inadvertently been engaging in fraud by telling customers that we were managing their patching. Connectwise has been INTENTIONALLY engaging in fraud by not reporting this issue to their partners. Let alone all of the other things that are currently broken in labtech. I do not know what happened over there but this company has just completely shit the bed.

I know many people are considering jumping ship or already have in the last year. I wanted to know if anyone has approached Connectwise for a refund yet? Does this failure among many others amount to something that would be worth pursuing legally? I believe there is a legitimate cause of action and considering the number of partners this has affected there is possibly class-action status.

No one wants to sue anyone, but at a certain point for those of us who have invested heavily in a product that does not do what it claims to get to a certain point where there are not other options forward. I am not certain where that point is but I think I am pretty near it. Connectwise does not even seem to care a little bit which makes this harder. I would settle for a statement acknowledging the issues and some sort of a plan to make it right that comes from a higher up that I could at least show to my customers. It would help me sleep better at night to know that someone over there has made this a priority. But failing that I don't know what my options are. I am very beat down and frustrated by this whole situation.

Posted May 17, 2017, 1:57 PM UTC

73115
ramblingnonsense•

Labtech's support is laughable, and their account reps are not just awful, but god-awful. My company's account rep has called me a grand total of 0 times in the past 6 months. She also has never, literally not once, answered her phone when we call. I've finally given up leaving her messages because it accomplishes nothing. She also has no knowledge of what products we've already purchased, because any request for info on additional licenses or products gets us an emailed response with a link to the trial offer page of something we've already paid for. I've been trying to get info on an additional license for Screenconnect (which we already run a hosted copy of) for 3 months, and I can't even figure out whether we need the license for the hosted version or whether ours is just broken because no one will call me back.

Connectwise has the worst service and support staff I've ever personally encountered in my 20 years in IT. The fact that they're often considered the best RMM around is a disturbing commentary on the state of the industry.

29
traft00•

Just try Kaseya for a few years and you will feel better about Connectwise. Speaking from experience.

13
ramblingnonsense•

Yeah, that's what I hear about all the alternatives. Sad.

3
traft00•

We combine the entire Connectwise suite with Auvik and IT glue. It's a very robust setup. I feel like we've found the winning combination.

3
ScoobyRT•

I feel like Kaseya has gotten a lot better, are you still on it?

3
traft00•

We are in the process of leaving it and transitioning to Labtech/Connectwise Automate. Already seeing huge out of the box integration improvements between Connectwise Automate and Connectwise manage.

Sure Automate has some issues but it is definitely an improvement over Kaseya and we've been on Kaseya for 6 years.

2
marklein•

Maybe your account rep is crappy, but that doesn't make the whole company crappy. I just spoke with my rep yesterday and she had all the answers I needed. Just saying.

7
chilids•

Yeah my first account rep was great. He moved to a new spot and the replacement took some time to get going but now is pretty decent. I have no complaints.

2
Ldigiore•

Hey there - sending you a private message now. If you could share your contact details with me I'd be happy to look into the challenges you face with your Account Manager. As evidenced by the replies here what you've described is not the partner experience we strive for.

3
RockFoo10•

My account rep is great. There's other aspects of LT that make me want to pull the last remaining hairs from my head but my account rep is not the one. If anything he's been great to work with.

2
MSPTech•

LOL your rep is Teresa right?

2
ramblingnonsense•

I can neither confirm nor den-

... yes. Did I mention that in a previous post or does she just have a reputation?

2
[deleted]•

[removed]

0
TNTGav•

If anything, you've under estimated.

The ConnectWise Automate (LabTech) 11 Patch Manager has been broken for at least 11 months and continues to be broken. I was onboarded on LabTech 11 RC, literally day one of its release and it was so far beyond broken that it may as well have not existed. Only recently has the UI even worked to the degree that you can actually click things and open them properly. There is absolutely zero % chance that that was tested properly before release.

I've been active in the LabTechGeek Slack for about 11 months now, and every single day I see someone with patching problems. We even have an entire slack channel dedicated to it. Most people have had to rely on external assistance and external articles to even set the thing up in the way they need.

Hell for 6 months the Patch Manager didn't work at all - my clients went COMPLETELY unpatched until the beginning of this year because Patch Manager couldn't handle international dates.

The biggest complaint I have seen following the MS17-010 saga is that multiple people were surprised when they actually checked to find that LabTech was massively inaccurate in its reporting of patch state and in a number of cases was not even working at all.

That entire part of LabTech is in dire need of some love, care and attention and ConnectWise should never have released it in its current form. No auto-remediation for out of date WUA, no autofixes for broken Windows update agents, inaccurate compliance and health percentages in the UI and reports, certain PCs not even showing that hotfixes they should have are applicable! No way to easily report on the compliancy of a single hotfix (either in the UI or in a report), Patch Jobs that make no sense (I should be able to see in the effective policy its UPCOMING patch windows!) I am also relatively sure that I am constantly approving the same updates again and again in the Patch Manager and I can't figure out why.

With all that said, if you're not already on the LabTech Geek Slack then come join us on there. http://slack.labtechgeek.com/ - you then at least don't have to suffer in silence. We will actually try to help you with issues, and scripts/monitors/reports and the like are freely shared on a daily basis.

Sorry for the rant but it was needed.

22
HereComesCthulhu•

+1 for the LTG slack channel. Been on for a month or two and I've learned more by lurking and occasionally asking than I had in the preceding 9 months of using Labtech and doing the training

2
[deleted]•

[deleted]

-1
LGeyer•

Hi, I work for ConnectWise (on reddit as part of my job). Can you DM me with your company/contact info? I'd like to look into this and escalate it on your behalf.

9
mspthrowaway72OP•

I don't want this taken care of for me. I want it taken care of for EVERYONE. There are a dozen people on this sub and the Labtech sub posting the same problems which means it is affecting hundreds or thousands of clients and in turn probably hundreds of thousands of endpoints. Given that this recent attack has afflicted mostly un-patched machines and that huge medical complexes have gone offline and people have probably died as a result. This is something that you should care about globally.

39
ComputersByte•

This is something that you should care about globally

I wish you luck in your crusade man. I highly doubt they'll take this seriously (on the scale of fixing it for everyone immediately that is), u/LGeyer likely only responded since you're looking potentially at starting a class action lawsuit against them.

9
LGeyer•

Making a change starts with one person. As I mentioned, I am happy to try my best help (at the very least, bring this post to the attention of those who can help) - starting with OP. DM me if I can assist. I also comment on posts like these that mention ConnectWise, good and bad, to offer support of our partners (do a search and see), regardless of mention of legal action.
Again, I would love to help!

4
ComputersByte•

Alright then u/LGeyer, what exactly is being done to resolve this issue for all of your client base, and why has it been apparently ignored for 6 months?

There are, as the OP stated, many posts about this issue. So if your claim is that your job is to help out here, why haven't you already brought this issue to the development team to be dealt with? Why haven't Connectwise come out with an official response? What's the problem that this has to be dealt with one client at a time?

I don't mean to imply that your company only responds to what very much appears to be a legal threat, but it's pretty obvious that this issue has been long standing, and no one has even pushed an update that puts up a note in the patch section saying that it isn't accurately reflecting reality when it comes to whether or not systems are properly patched?

11
mspthrowaway72OP•

The person who can help is not a line technician dealing with the bad decisions of senior management. It's senior management.

10
chilids•

I'd also like this fixed for everybody. I'm sick of an RMM that can't do patch management or SNMP. These are the basics of an RMM guys.

13
kulps•

We paid for support hours on the SNMP module. We asked what were pretty straight forward questions (in the world of SNMP, can it discover this? how would we go about collecting that, etc.) at one point in time the rep outright said "I'll be honest with you, gentlemen. Labtech isn't the best SNMP tool out there" that was basically the end of it.
I'm now told that they're recommending Auvik as a solution, so that's great. We're supposed to go spend more money on third party tools to replace the first party tool that was supposed to work in the first place.

6
WilkoXor•

It's unbelievable the LabTech sales team rams so much SNMP sunshine up your rear end only to find out that Auvik is now recommended to replace it.

After contacting Auvik directly, their sales rep looked up and found our ConnectWise sales rep in seconds (without informing her who it was) and she try to include her in their sales pitch, which clearly shows the background relationship and what we can only assume are background sales perks in between the two companies. That's another $2000-$2500 a month for network device monitoring with Auvik that was never intended because the LabTech sales team pitched their own product as a great working component.

Another sore point with LabTech? Expensive maintenance and support fees: terrible ROI. we rarely see meaningful enhancements. Only fixes, which also have compounded issues. Have you looked at their actual roadmap? It's embarrassing! There is absolutely nothing to look forward to, and yet here we are paying thousands and thousands of dollars for maintenance and support.

I don't see us sticking with LabTech for much longer if big changes aren't made very soon. Empty promise patience bank is depleted.

4
kulps•

It's not even like it's the first time they've done it, either.
Did you ever get on board with the dumpster fire that was the Labtech MDM? The good news is, they've entirely given up on it. The bad news is they're now recommending Maas360
It's a good thing nobody was ever sold on the idea of a centralised tool with which to manage their clients, otherwise they might be pretty upset with this.

3
just_some_random_dud•

Yes we were also sold on how good the snmp was and then in practice it basically is abandon-ware.

2
ArnieBellini•

Hello, this is Arnie Bellini. please know that ConnectWise has taken all of these posts regarding Automate to heart. We have been working with partners, and are finding that there is confusion about the "compliance score" in Automate. Our apologies for this confusion. We have been working with those who have come forward for help. In all cases, so far, we have been able to quickly resolve any issues and educate those who have reached out to us. So far, we have not found any defects in Automate 11.12.

Here is our recommendation:

  1. Make sure you are on Automate 11.12.
  2. Verify all machines have patch inventory.
  3. Direct message me or u/bcheloff if you need any help with this.

We are here to make sure all machines are patched! We will post any updates as new information becomes available.

--Arnie Bellini, CEO ConnectWise

8
MrJoshua099•
So far, we have not found any defects in Automate 11.12.

That's a bold statement cotton, let's see if it works out for him!

I will say though that even without 'defects'. Patch manager has been monumentally useless in this wannacry outbreak. Those of us in labtech geek slack have had to rely on custom written scripts by community members.

5
MSPTech•

Arnie, patch management is important but for the love of god you have to fix the god awful GUI. The new redesign is a DISASTER!!!! Just give me the tabs back and I don't mean holding ALT, because half the plugins dont work in that mode any more. Bring it back!!! Please. The new GUI was designed by a 3rd world hooker on a coke binge.

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

7
avrealm•

Someone used reputationdefender.com lol

4
MSPTech•

Was it him? or his brother David?

1
LVNeptune•

I'm pretty positive it was him. I remember doing some research on the owners of a few MSP programs somewhere back between 2010-2011 and saw it.

2
ArnieBellini•

NO way, not me. I am squeaky clean. I have never been convicted, or even accused, of any such crime. I think you are confusing me with the founder of Kaseya, Gerald Blackie. Some clarification: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-05-10/business/fi-2737_1_financial-officer

1
LVNeptune•

That looks pretty in line with what I was talking about. I deleted the post.

1
nostradx•

Yes! First, we created trouble tickets documenting each major concern. After 6+ months of no resolution/progress/updates on the tickets (including some that were "erroneously" closed as resolved), our attorney drafted a "strongly worded letter" giving Labtech XX days to fix what was broken. Labtech could not do that so when their time was up we terminated the contract. I believe we exited about 1 year into a 3 year agreement. If a company's product is broken and they can't/won't fix it, they can't hold you to a contract, plan and simple.

6
Atlantisman•

What did you switch to?

3
nostradx•

N-able. It mostly works. Definitely not perfect.

4
gingerjackuk•

This. This a million times over. We used LT for 5-6 years, and just switched last year to ConnectWise. When I first used LT, I remember getting great support from them for any issue, with techs having remote access to our server and logging in to fix most issues within a day or two at the latest. There was also a prompt line of escalation as well, and fixes were put in place.

The first warning sign that something was wrong was the release cycles. Pushing out releases on a strict schedule, when things were quite clearly not working properly, it seemed that each time we updated, something would break, and something that hadn't been working from 3 days ago still hadn't been fixed. There also seems to have been very little development and product enhancement, all the focus is on branding and acquisition. The one single saving grace for LT was the addition of ScreenConnect. That software blows anything else I have used out of the water.

Then came the extreme drop in support after connectwise took over. Literally dropped through the floor. First it was blamed on an office move, then got blamed on a "busy period". 18 months later we were still getting the same answers. SLAs became worthless, you can only reach ticket loggers on the phone, and sometimes quite major issues (such as disappearing tickets) would not get looked at for at least a week, because "the issues was on a tech's queue, but he went on vacation", or something to this effect.

Then came the account management fiasco. Use the term "account management" very loosely. Have been through 4 account managers, before returning to original one. They are not interested in dealing with issues at all, only respond quickly if there is a chance to upsell.

We invested a hell of a lot of time in customising and developing LT internally, but in the end we had to call it a day and move on. We cannot provide SLAs to customers using a piece of software that cannot stick to it's own SLAs.

Sure, Autotask is not perfect, but quite often support is on hand as soon as you need it, and the feature set is far richer. Man, I do miss ScreenConnect though. Splash top is not bad but just nowhere near as reliable and without half of the extra features.

4
jrtaylor32k•

I agree with much of your sentiment, I have been looking at alternatives Like PulseWay and Atera that just seem to do it simpler and better. I am now forced to use PDQ Deploy and Ninite for much of my patch management. If it wasn't for ScreenConnect I would have already left, which is the best in the industry in my opinion.

I was fired from a customer once already for not patching properly and since it was early one I just though it was me an not understanding LabTech properly. I not longer feel that way, I may hate WSUS, but it is better than Labtech.

My suggestion is that everyone with LabTech/Connectwise Automate do what is withing their control and that is to open a tickets and keep opening tickets. In the interim, we have just purchased rapidfiretools.com and if they can be an auditing function with good reporting then maybe this is what our organization always needed a verification/on boarding tool.

get an patch only solution to augment what you have. We have just purchased/rented

4
chillzatl•

It's all cyclical. They all go through these phases/stretches. You either tough it out and give them time to fix things or you jump ship.

I'd be willing to bet you that the contract that you signed protects them enough that you'd have a hard time making anything stick.

3
TechBlizzard•

This is why I didn't sign up with ConnectWise and instead chose to sign up with NinjaMSP. I'm not schilling, but they release new features often and their system works great for me.

3
chilids•

Labtech used to be that company. They had great support and new features all the time. They were constantly growing and moving in the right direction. Last few major "updates" have been disaster. The new UI is a mess. LT 11 patching is completely useless. I've been a huge LT fanboy for years and I'm seriously thinking of changing lately.

9
idontwerk•

Ninja is even worse and their entire systems have had major outages twice in the past year.

5
KaJothee•

Yeah, I'm happy with my decision to go NinjaMSP right now. Patch management is a big part of my sales process. And I was able to follow up confidently with customers this weekend to show them they were protected.

Hopefully, Ninja gets better reporting in place before I scale up too much though.

3
qwertyaccess•

Have you used Labtech before, any comparisons?

1
j0dan•

At least ConnectWise from my understanding of the agreement lets you leave without paying out the rest of your contract. Unlike SolarWinds/N-able who we tried to switch to so we could get a more stable product. They made me pay out the full agreement when the product wouldn't patch or alert. The grass is not greener on the other side.

3
thekurst•

What did you switch to by the way? Asking for a friend.

1
j0dan•

LabTech's user interface is very difficult to train techs on. We thought onboarding would be easier with a simpler to use RMM like N-Able.

We've changed our thinking. It's now, LabTech is so powerful that it automatically does most things and when configured properly, techs just need to understand the tickets it makes.

1
kwzombie•

Wow, after a fairly negative experience looking at CW for PSA, I'm glad I stayed away. I have a friend who uses Labtech, I should ask him if he's having patching issues. Maybe the right thing to do is to get a CA lawsuit together, especially in light on the recent MS17-010 issues.

3
jackmusick•

Boy do these things make me glad we haven't switched. We use AVG MW and it works phenomenally well considering all it's responsible for. No complaints even though it doesn't seem extremely popular in the community.

3
kar3less•

Agreed, MW has had its hiccups over the years, but overall the support they offer makes up for it. Their in-house support is phenomenal compared to some of the others we've tried. Techs that speak clearly and go above and beyond to make it work on most environments.

3
bleachbitexpert•

Ew. Came from AVG MW. They cut out most of their third party vendors. Released new AV engines without broadcasting data and killed most of our LT agents once we switched. Still own hundreds of unused AVG licenses... OM database eats so many resources you can feel it.

AVG MW was not our answer. Our LT demo 2.5 years ago found 3 clients in a journal wrap and that had me sold on day 1 - MW showed everything was golden.

Oh and I spent months trying to get AVG to fix their e-mail system's DKIM on marketing e-mails. Literally took months...

I'd be afraid given the push to merge with Avast now. Not trying ot be doom and gloom - but we left running. I do hope your experience is more positive.

1
jroe6352•

I can understand much of the frustration noted here - We've been with labtech for about 6 years. Our rep calls me at least every couple months. He's very readily available for sales items. We have had our share of technical issues and support has been lacking but I've found that if I kick them via a phone call things move forward. I'm also quite active with Labtechgeeks and solve many of my own problems. While I'd love to see support back to the good old days I'll happily take a more powerful product over one that's dramatically lacking. That's said I'm hopeful things smooth out moving forward.

3
abefroman80•

This is one of the main reasons why I left LT and went with SolarWinds MSP RMM. LT was saying that I had almost 100% patch compliance. A manual audit showed this was a lie. MSP RMM caught everything up in no time and was SO much easier to work with.

When I was still with LT and the new 3rd party patching was rolled out, I had a senior tech call me directly to get everything setup because I couldn't get it to work. Hell, there wasn't even any end user documentation available to set it up at the time! He used some internal power point as reference and still couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. Yet, I was locked in and still paying for something that didn't work as it should.

When something is overly complex and still doesn't work, it's time to switch. Luckily, I purchased LT/CW through TechData, so I was month-to-month.

I wonder if ConnectWise Automate's inability to perform core/basic tasks (patch management) would be considered a breach of contract? I'm no lawyer, but this seems like the obvious way to get out of a contract with them. There is enough documentation on r/msp alone to prove the issues with patch management are not isolated and are not being addressed in a reasonable time frame by ConnectWise.

2
atomey•

I started looking at SolarWinds MSP after reading your post. Loaded their home page and immediately found links on their front page linking to a dev page with a self-signed SSL certificate. I hope their web development team doesn't work on the product!

3
ramblingnonsense•

Hell, there wasn't even any end user documentation available to set it up at the time!

Spoiler: there still isn't, at least none that actually takes you through the whole process.

0
qwertyaccess•

Are using SolarWinds MSP any good?

2
mpev73•

We're leaving the "un"integrated ConnectWise (LT/CW) (too many issues to count) and gone back to SW MSP (temporarily). It's a good solution (easy to to use) for short-term.

Currently looking at SW N-Central & Naverisk and Kaseya for RMM with either MSP MGR or AutoTask or Accelo for PSA/Ticketing.

2
edneil•

I'm just scared by the fact ScreenConnect (ahem "ConnectWiseControl" (sic) seriously, guys, at least rebrand it sensibly) is owned by ConnectWise.

How long until that turns in to a joke product? :/

2
Kepabar•

Uhhg, I know.

Been a ScreenConnect customer since before the acquisition.

Scares the bejesus out of me.

2
Morkoth-Toronto-CA•

This is very interesting. I'm a SC user. Was going to demo the ConnectWise product. Now - not so much.

No public response from the vendor? This product just went to the bottom of the pile.

2
LGeyer•

ConnectWise Automate GM posted above in this thread.

4
bleachbitexpert•

To be fair - Arnie also posted

2
[deleted]•

[deleted]

2
MSPTech•

Patch Remedy didn't really re-mediate most of my issues. Did it work for you?

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
ryan99fl•

This must be fixed. Period.

2
shittyCEO•

Somethings fishy here.

I'm all aboard for some of the hate for Connectwise especially some of their business practices or lack thereof. However you come here being beat down and frustrated on a throwaway account.

A CW employee comes here and extends a hand to get you a top priority but you decline? If I was in your shoes and I have customers bitching at me for downtime I would take the help to get answers to them faster. You say you want it solved GLOBALLY and won't divulge any information to CW. Why not take the handout and become a priority to get your questions answers and shown to your customers who are upset? Makes no sense.

Now if I was a competitor to CW this would be the perfect post to make, then I would come on my different account and preach my product which people on here are already doing, which they may or may not have the best intentions.

Making claims like "medical complexes have gone offline and people have probably died as a result". Somethings off.

Just making an honest assessment. Seems like a lot of people on here are taking out their frustrations on a CW employee who seems like hes doing his best to TRY and remedy the situation. Seems like most people on here don't deal directly with their customers.

1†
mspthrowaway72OP•

I am partnered with them and I do not want my account flagged as difficult or whatever because I came here and really showed my ass. God knows what is written on there already. The medical complex thing was maybe overly dramatic but I am in the medical vert and my medical clients throw it at me all the time. There are a million reasons to use a throw away account for this.

9
shittyCEO•

I was just making an assessment of what I saw but I appreciate your honest answer.

I'm just curious what are your motives of the post? To bring awareness by calling them out publicly or seeking help/answers or form a class-action lawsuit?

It wasn't JUST your post it's a couple comments on this post. A lot of people on here have some crazy hatred for CW which is definitely warranted to a degree but I don't understand why they take it out on employees who are just doing their job. It's like none of us deal with customers directly or have been in their shoes?

Like I said your post rubbed be the wrong way initially with some of the wording and actions, but thank you for clarifying.

4
qwertyaccess•

I think a lot of people are just pissed that with how expensive Labtech is there's so many issues, even when I went through initial onboarding and setup there were lots of bugs. I like Labtech, but for how expensive it is, it's on the back of my mind some days whether its worth keeping. If labtech was half the price I'd have less complaints with it.

3
j0dan•

Expensive compared to what?

We switched to LabTech primarily because it was so cheap. Did Continuum, looked at Kaseya, and also tried N-Able.

1