ConnectWise Automate: Shortcut for Applying Remote Monitors to a Group

This video shows a little-known shortcut for applying a remote monitor to a group once you have finished testing it. It also touches on the importance of testing something on one computer before applying it to a large group.

Step by Step:

1. I’m going to be showing you a lesser-known shortcut for quickly applying a remote monitor that you have tested on a single machine to a group once it’s ready for production.
2. So usually when we see our partners create a new remote monitor this is kind of the process that they follow so we’ll find a Target machine they’ll create the monitor here against one machine and they’ll test it out on the pilot agent which is the right way to do it and then once they’ve messed with it and made sure the configuration is good, made sure that the alert template is what they want they’ll come into the group and they’ll just kind of put it side by side and create it one to one from here manually using the original settings that they applied to the agent.
3. There’s actually a quicker way to do this and one that makes sure that all your settings are going to be copied over properly.
4. So, to demonstrate we’re going to go back to our test machine here and we’re going to create a new monitor and for the sake of example let’s call it Google DNS thing test make sure the targeting is set to this computer.
5. As always need to have an alert template set whenever we create a new monitor so we’re going to come down here and it is recommended to do default, do nothing until you have some test data so you know whether or not you’re going to be actually creating tickets when you start testing.
6. Go to the configuration a simple ping check to 8.8.8.8 and finally let’s test it out before we create it to make sure that we’re actually getting data.
7. So, it’s going to send four pings to that IP address and shortly here we should have a response.
8. It is successful 16 millisecond response time good to see everything appears to be working so we’re going to add new monitor.
9. So, now we’ll come back down to the agent level refresh the screen we’re going to find our brand new monitor (so still in the status of installing but let’s say that it’s several hours later we have now given it lots of time to run) maybe we killed the network adapter on it to give it some test failures to make sure that it alerts properly when it doesn’t work and it’s ready for production.
10. So instead of creating it one-to-one here just by nearing the settings opening it up side by side and risking missing something when you go through and start to configure it over here we can actually just right-click hit, send to, and then groups. This is a much easier way to do it.
11. So momentarily here a group screen is going to pop open you can find the group or multiple groups here if you so choose and assign it to them.
12. So, in this case, I am going to send it through to the Ping test group which I created for the sake of this video, and we’ll hit send. The nice thing about this is you don’t even have to reload your cache and reopen the group if you already have it open just click refresh here, here is our monitor this is now going to apply to every computer that we don’t have it excluded from at this group level we can set the alert template to something we want.
13. We are good to go this is ready for production so hopefully that shortcut will help save you some time in the future when you’re messing around with remote monitors.