Ten questions to ask every RMM and PSA vendor

Including us. If a vendor cannot answer one of these crisply, that is itself the answer.

Comparison charts are written by whoever wins them. These ten questions are the ones that actually separate the products in this category, because they cannot be answered by a feature checkbox. Bring the list to every call on your shortlist and write the answers down in the vendor’s own words. Where our own answer is a no, we say so.

Written by Jared DeGraffenried, Guardian Plus. Every claim here is on the site or in the product documentation; where our own answer is a no, it says so.

Every vendor now ships an assistant. The question is what happens the first time it is wrong at 3 am on a domain controller.

What a good answer sounds like: a named list of approval modes, a floor that unattended mode cannot cross, and the exact command shown before it runs.

Command output, ticket contents and monitoring data are the most sensitive things you hold about a client. The answer is often in a sub-processor list rather than the sales deck.

What a good answer sounds like: a specific model host, a data-retention statement, and whether you can run the models yourself.

If the answer is no, every remote session is a credential disclosure, and your audit trail cannot say who actually knew the password.

What a good answer sounds like: credentials injected server-side from the vault, with the reveal recorded separately from the use.

A nightly sync is the reason two products disagree about how many machines a client has, and the reason someone reconciles a spreadsheet every month.

What a good answer sounds like: the desk reads the monitoring platform’s device records directly, with nothing duplicated.

Every inbound rule on an endpoint is a rule your client’s security questionnaire will ask about, and one your firewall team has to maintain.

What a good answer sounds like: none on a managed endpoint; any listener named, optional and scoped to hardware you choose.

An audit trail that application code can rewrite is a log, not evidence.

What a good answer sounds like: which events are append-only, how that is enforced, and an honest statement of what it is not.

Multi-tenant SaaS is normal in this category and usually fine, until a client with a regulator asks where their data lives and who else is in the database.

What a good answer sounds like: a clear tenancy model and whether single-tenant is an option or the only option.

For many MSPs this is the centre of month-end. It deserves a plain answer.

What a good answer sounds like: yes with the workflow shown, or an honest not-yet with a date.

The honest cost of leaving tells you more about a vendor than the cost of joining.

What a good answer sounds like: what exports, in what format, and what cannot be taken.

Nobody re-keys thousands of articles by hand. This one shapes the migration timeline more than the decision.

What a good answer sounds like: a named importer for your current tool, or a services offer with a price.

Bring the list to a walkthrough at https://get.guardianplus.ai/demo, and bring the same list to everyone else on your shortlist. It is a better use of an hour than a feature matrix. Or put the agent on one machine at https://get.guardianplus.ai/trial and watch it discover itself.