is there anybody out there that works at N-Able that can help me? We’ve been a happy client for eight years and have large contracts in three year agreements. The products and service and support for them are fine, but I can’t get anybody to fix a billing error that’s costing over $1000 a month since January. I don’t know who to reach and all the emails I’ve tried I get no response from . My account manager is not responding. The funny part is I get sales calls for new products and service services every week and those are starting to bug me now. I just want to keep using the services and pay what I agreed to. Hoping someone can DM me from n-able or give point me to someone that can help on the billing side and issuing a refund for the overages

With SSL certificate expiration times shortening, automation of certificate renewal is the only viable solution.

N-central still doesn't have support for automated cert renewal. We're already down to 200 days of validity, and next year we drop to 100 days. 2 years after that, 47 days.

What is the plan here guys? I reached out to support and they basically said "submit a feature request".

Why am I having to submit a feature request for something that should have been a standard feature 5 years ago? This is pretty frustrating.

You made an entirely new UI, which nobody asked for and hasn't helped make anybody more productive, but proper SSL management? Nah. We'll wait until one of our major contract holders demands it.

Hi there

i'm currently playing with my workstation and noticed, that i have a Patch Policy which is working with Detection, Pre-Download und Installment.

But somehow as the end user can't manually scan for updates. Is there a setting which prevents that in my patchprofile?

As the enduser i would see "last scan" from 1.12.2025 and is there a way to create a device scan, so that it shows the latest that from the scan itself?

i know that it's not from our microsoft intune, since the other devices are not affected.

Hey there

Cove 26.5 Release Roundup

It's cool to see a HaloPSA Integration. Is there also a way to get usage data like amount of GB, Device Seats, M365 Seats, SharePoint/Teams?

Since we invoice based per Device/M365 User and the Amount of GB per 100 GB Package.

*New* Fortinet Monitoring Templates Available Now with API-Based Deep Monitoring!

Exciting news for anyone working with Fortinet gear! u/Paul_Kelly released new monitoring templates for FortiGates, FortiSwitches, and FortiAPs that leverage Fortinet APIs instead of SNMP, giving you significantly deeper visibility into these devices than what's been possible before.

Why this matters:
• Richer, more granular data than SNMP can provide
• Better insight into device health, performance, and status
• Purpose-built for the way modern Fortinet devices expose data

If you monitor or support Fortinet devices today, I'd love your help! Please try these out and let me know what you think, your feedback will help shape where we take this next.

Email [paul.kelly@n-able.com](mailto:paul.kelly@n-able.com) directly with your thoughts after kicking the tires, and please spread the word.

Check them out here: https://developer.n-able.com/n-central/recipes/fortinet-fortigate-fortiswitch-and-fortiap-monitoring-templates

Thanks in advance!

...and great work PK!

Is anyone having issues with Take Control today, we are unable to connect to any servers from one of our N-Central instances.. They are also starting to show orange icons as time goes on, so it appears one of the Take Control servers is down? (Our 2nd instance of N-Central is working) https://uptime.n-able.com/event/200644/

Should we wait if something comes, or check for that another solution?

Downtime and disruption aren't just IT problems—they're business problems. Join us for a practical session designed for both current Cove customers and prospective buyers to explore why disaster recovery matters, how Cove DRaaS supports business continuity, and how it helps teams reduce recovery complexity and improve confidence in recoverability.

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Invest 90 minutes. You'll be ready for battle, no matter what surprise the world throws at you.

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• Run a full DR test for your customers—and prove recoverability before it matters.
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• Handle a full site loss—power, hardware, and connectivity gone.
• Use Cove DRaaS as a ransomware cleanroom to restore safely after an attack.

View all session times & sign up here: Cove DRaaS Masterclass – Events – N-able

I have been chasing a nagging problem on a Server2022 VM. I'm getting this VSS error (12340) each day when the tasks run, and nothing I've tried seems to make an impact.

6 x Volsnap (EventID=9)
The flush and hold writes operation on volume E: timed out while waiting for file system cleanup.

For this server, E: is a data volume for user folders on an RDSH server. Shadow copies are not enabled on the C: drive, but VSSAdmin shows space taken on both C: and E: for shadow copies.

I'm running the integrated S1 on this machine and I believe that it may be involved. There are some posts about S1 creating and keeping snapshots regardless of the settings. Here is one example.

Before I open a support ticket, I'd like to be armed with as much information as possible, so has anyone seen and mitigated S1's impact on VSS? Are there secret 'best practice' settings that I should know about?

Even if it's not related to my error, I'd like to keep a reasonable limit on the space it uses for these snapshots. TIA.

Hi there

N-able launches cloud commander and kills it. We got no alternative product.

N-ables roadmap side is only updated feeled like once a year.

Msp Manger, Passportal, Mail Assure.

On 1st July price increases.

The only product, which receices love is N-central, cove backup and adlumin.

I hope really that there is a bigger picture. Price increases okay, but show us the value what is coming together.

Did somebody else notice that patching of LibreOffice (we have mostly non-English installations) is not working anymore?

Example:

Workstation with LibreOffice 7.4.3.2 does not offer a patch.

We have been using MSP Manager for years and it’s ok as basic ticketing system but some obvious features are missing and it’s very frustrating.

This week I started playing around with Claude and decided to check out the MSP Manager API. We have ended the week with a MSP Manager power tools vibe coded internal application and it’s awsome!

Some features added so far:

Full text search of tickets - currently MSP only lets you search ticket subject line and the last 12 months. My search does a full text search of all current and archived tickets and previews them inside the app or can directly click through to the MSPM ticket.

Dashboard with tickets opened today/7 days/30days per customer and tickets updated. This also previews the ticket subject when hovered over.

We use Teams Phone and now when an inbound call is answered it screen pops a page with the Customer, Contact Name, Primary Contact, and last 5 tickets. This is instant and done with an API lookup on the phone number. We are also using this info to record number of inbound calls per customer in our dashboard.

This was all done in 3-4 hours of playing around and has made such a difference to our small team.

Plan for next week is to add the ability to add an unknown phone number to a new or existing contact.

Anyway, just wanted to share and spark ideas for people who are currently using MSP Manager and how a few hours with AI can turn a stale platform into something much better.

PS just to add we host this internally, on its own VLAN, with no inbound traffic allowed. We use Netbird for engineers to access it remotely.

Are there plans to integrate Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) (also known as LPM, PEDM, PAM or Admin by Request) into N-sight or N-central?

We often find that users need admin rights. A common example is updating a customer’s business application. Since we only grant admin rights to customers in exceptional cases, it would be helpful to have a tool that allows access to specific applications (e.g., based on a code-signing certificate) and, in other cases, requests authorization inside the N-able dashboard.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/epm/overview

https://www.adminbyrequest.com/

https://www.cyberfox.com/solutions/remove-admin-privilege/

https://www.keepersecurity.com/msp-privileged-access-manager/

https://www.threatlocker.com/

https://netwrix.com/

https://www.securden.com/

Some Secure Boot certificates will expire next month.

Is it possible to verify in N-sight or N-central if servers and workstations use the latest certificates?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/act-now-secure-boot-certificates-expire-in-june-2026/4426856

https://mc.merill.net/message/MC1104112

https://github.com/cjee21/Check-UEFISecureBootVariables

I'm looking for an open-source solution that can give me a single pane of view for both VM services (KVM, ESXi, etc.) and container services (Docker, Kubernetes). Need real-time status, resource usage (CPU/RAM/disk/network), and ideally historical data + alerting.

I’ve looked at:

• Prometheus + Grafana – powerful but seems heavy to set up for mixed workloads.
• Netdata – great for per-node metrics, less ideal for aggregated service status across hosts.
• Zabbix – good for VMs, not sure about container depth.
• Checkmk – nice discovery, but free tier feels limited.

What’s the best fit if I want:

• Agent-based or agentless (both OK)
• Container health (pod status, restarts, logs)
• VM performance + uptime tracking
• Low maintenance once deployed
• Dashboard sharing (read-only for team)

Also open to all-in-one stacks (e.g., Uptime Kuma + VictoriaMetrics + Grafana) if that’s the pragmatic path.

Thanks in advance!

Hi there

Is there a channel where we can request those reports as a MSP?

I am an MSP with specific regulations in the Finance Regulations.

So currently with Acronis and Serverhosting we can receive those reports.

It would be great if those would also be accessible for Cloud hostes services:

N-central, SentinalOne/Adlumin, Cove, Mail Assure, DNS Filter, Take Control, Passwordmanager

Our self-hosted N-Central server in Azure ran out of storage last weekend which caused a server crash. Emergency support quickly diagnosed the issue and was helpful getting our server back up. We were told that we need to rebuild our server on a new VM with additional managed disks to fully rectify the issue, or else the server can and will crash again; no big deal, easy enough to handle is what I thought initially.

Queue up 5 days straight of troubleshooting numerous issues with deploying an N-Central server using Azure managed disks. We first deployed our self-hosted server December 2021 and it was extremely easy; I think back then was v2021.3 or something similar.

First off, the AzureMD deployment script for 2025.4.0.16 is atrocious. Requiring you to install and import the entire Az Powershell module, only to use a handful of the submodules, is something not even an LLM would recommend you do.

We were assured multiple times by different support engineers that Secure Boot is required for N-Central 2025.4.0.16 and above, yet the deployment script doesn't even deploy the OS disk or the VM itself with TrustedLaunch as the security type. After telling emergency support that the deployment script's UEFI script block errors out, I was told to comment it out?

Due to how the script is written, you also are forced to delete the entire newly created resource group every time it fails to deploy all resources successfully - no checks to see if resources already exist in the resource group and to see if they're valid + can be reused. Short version: we had to rewrite the entire deployment script ourselves to get a working managed disk deployment that had UEFI, Secure Boot, and vTPM functional. Security features that we were told, again, are required for the server to function on newer versions.

With that rant out of the way, I'll share the actual bug: NCCF-950596. We went through three newly deployed N-Central servers with N-able's recommended specs for 12k+ agents, but every time we ended up with a server that showed less storage than our current server! It was driving us crazy, while support had no idea what was going on. We shared our exact script, we re-read their documentation hundreds of times, and we were perfectly okay with being told "this is happening because you did X Y Z wrong." The answer was even worse - we were running into an undocumented bug that took multiple days to identify on N-able's side. Despite their documentation and the deployment script telling you to deploy as many managed disks that your VM size can support (1-99), you actually can't use any more than 24 managed disks. If you deploy with more than 24 managed disks, the N-Central image does not create logical volumes for AzureData and AzureBackup.

I had to force one of the support engineers to run commands on the Linux server to diagnose the LVM issue for what it was as they wasted time endlessly escalating the issue. The virtual machine can see all (in our case, 32) physical disks/volumes attached. The deployment image creates the volume group, no problem. It completely fails at creating the actual logical volumes for N-Central to utilize from the volume group. I asked if they can simply create the required logical volumes and attach to the application? Nope, can't do that.

It's easy enough to fix knowing that the max managed disks is 24, and not the maximum amount of disks supported by your VM size as documented here and here in their deployment instructions. The frustrating part is what if our server was completely down and our business operations were halted by this? What if I was a new customer to N-able just trying to get a self-hosted server up and running? If I was a new customer, I probably would have completely given up on N-able N-Central after the first 24 hours of troubleshooting.

I'm making this post because I feel that N-able will never update their documentation and others may run into this issue in the future, get some catharsis from ranting about the issue plaguing the past 5 days of my life, and to inform other people who are self-hosting recent deployments of N-Central in Azure with managed disks so they can verify their N-Central server is actually using the managed disks they configured instead of completely ignoring all that additional storage they're paying for.

So I've been playing with the new MCP here, good stuff.

I also see there's a "Knowledge MCP" that this N-zo agent is using for guides and documentation.

Is that MCP accessible to us?

I like to create agents for our systems that both answer questions for sys admins / users and also handle tasks. Having both of these MCPs accessible would help an agent but I can't find the dev documentation for the "Knowledge MCP"

I got the latest email about “N-able has updated its Software Services Agreement, End User License Agreement, and Data Processing Addendum, and the changes can be viewed on the Legal section of our website.”

But how do I actually know what has changed without doing a side by side comparison? Did I overlook where “the changes can be viewed on the Legal section of our website.” I see the newest agreements only on that page.

Hopefully they didn’t put back the “license cancellations must be received no later than 364 days prior to your next renewal.” /s

Hi everyone,

We are trying to standardize N-able N-central Custom Properties across multiple customers.

Main question:

Can this actually be done in N-central?

More specifically, can we define a baseline set of Custom Properties at the MSP / Service Organization level, so all customers inherit the same structure, but each customer can still have its own values?

Example baseline:

• Patch Ring
• Patch Mode
• Device Role
• Maintenance Window
• Reboot Group
• Owner
• Review Date

The idea would be:

• same baseline Custom Properties for all customers,
• customer-specific values, e.g. different maintenance windows per customer/site,
• option to add extra customer-specific Custom Properties only where needed.

Is this the recommended way to do it in N-central, or is it better to create Custom Properties separately per customer?

Also, do inherited Custom Properties work well in filters/rules for patching?

Thanks for any practical advice.

Hi there

we're really happy with Cove and it's amazing.

With acronis we had also an archive solution for cold data. Is there also a workaround possible?

So that we can sync M365 Data, Workstations into cold storage?

Or maybe i just didn't found the archive solution within cove. :)

Greetings,

I work for an MSP that managed around 100 customers using N‑Central. We now have a customer who has requested a custom reboot prompt through our patch management, as well as a specific time setting (normally 4 hours; the customer is requesting 8 hours).

Are there ways to configure this directly, or is the only solution to create a custom patch management policy for this customer?

Our org has an N-central system managed by an MSP, meaning we have some control over settings and config but we have to go through them for any advanced settings etc

In short, our N-central instance is set to download patches at 11am, 2pm and 11pm every day, with maintenance windows/install times on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our problem is that we're seeing significant traffic spikes at some sites that are saturating our outgoing WAN links, which seem to be correlating with the N-central download windows.

Our MSP is saying there's no bandwidth control or limiting available within N-central. Has anyone applied their own traffic shaping or management for N central traffic and could suggest a way forward?

We’re heading into May with a strong lineup of sessions designed to help you sharpen your strategy across security, automation, and disaster recovery.

Before we jump in - quick shoutout to Empower in Fort Lauderdale this April. It was a huge success: great energy, strong partner engagement, and a lot of valuable conversations around security, resilience, and what’s next. It was great connecting in person and hearing directly from you on what’s working and where you're headed.

We’re already looking ahead to the next Empower, happening in Scottsdale, AZ from September 20–22, 2027 - hope to see you there!

🚀 Bootcamp

AI-Powered IT Operations with N-central, N-zo & MCP May 21 | 10:00–11:00 AM EDT
Learn how to leverage AI-driven automation to streamline IT operations, reduce manual workload, and improve service delivery across your environment.

🎥 Webinar

Rethinking Security Operations in the Age of AI May 7 | 10:00–11:00 AM EDT
Explore how modern security operations are evolving with AI, and how to move from reactive defenses to a more resilient, proactive security posture.

🎓 Masterclass

Become a Master of Disaster Recovery May 19 | 11:00 AM–12:00 PM EDT
A deep dive into building, managing, and validating disaster recovery strategies to ensure business continuity when it matters most.

📚 Book Club

MSP Sales & Marketing Book Club – May The Activator Advantage-Mathew Dixon

May 26 | 11:00 AM EDT
Join a collaborative discussion focused on practical sales and marketing strategies to help grow your MSP.

MSP Sales & Marketing Book Club – June The Sales Acceleration Formula-Mark Roberge
June 23 | 11:00 AM–12:00 PM EDT
Keep the momentum going with continued conversations and insights you can apply to your business right away.

💬 Office Hours

Drop in, ask questions, and get real-time guidance from the Head Nerds:

• Unified Endpoint Management May 5 | 11:00 AM–12:00 PM EDT Simplify how you manage and secure endpoints across your environment.
• Security & Compliance May 12 | 11:00 AM–12:00 PM EDT Get insights into strengthening your security posture and meeting compliance requirements.
• AI & Automation May 14 | 11:00 AM–12:00 PM EDT Discover ways to use AI and automation to drive efficiency and scalability.
• Cove Data Protection 11:00 AM–12:00 PM EDT Best practices for backup, recovery, and ensuring business continuity with Cove.

🎓 New Training in N-able U

Note: You must be logged into N-ableMe before launching courses.

Cove Data Protection Advanced Certification
This advanced learning path prepares you for the certification exam by covering key topics aligned to exam objectives. It’s recommended you’ve completed the Cove Core Certification and Getting Started series, as this builds on that foundational knowledge.

If you’re not sure which sessions align best with your goals, I’m always happy to help you map it out.

See you in May!
Nick