Setting Up Your Atera Account for IT Departments

Webinar transcript

Lior: Hi everyone, my name is Lior. I’m an onboarding manager here at Atera, and I’m going to show you the first steps on how to set up your Atera account. When you log into the platform, you’re going to see the dashboard page, which will show you an all-in-one view of what’s happening within your environment. 

Customizing Widgets 

Lior: In order to change any of these widgets, all you have to do is click on “Edit Widgets” in the top right-hand corner and select or unselect any of these widgets. When you’re getting started, you’re going to want to go ahead and add in your sites. 

Adding Sites 

Lior: So let’s navigate to the Sites page over here, and you’ll see that you can either create a site manually or import from Azure AD. You’ll be asked to log into your environment, and then all you have to do is map over the sites and contacts. You can also import using our CSV template. To do that, click into the Admin section of your account, and under Data Management, you will find the Import Data option. All you have to do is download the CSV template and upload it as a file. For now, I’m going to show you guys one of the sites I created beforehand: Atera Headquarters. In the Overview section, you’ll be able to fill in all the relevant information like phone number, address, upload the company logo, and also associate the site’s domain to link incoming tickets into the specific site. 

Managing Users and Devices 

Lior: From the Users tab, you can also manage your users. You can create one manually, import using the CSV template, or sync with Azure AD. The next tab is the Devices tab. Here, we want to go ahead and create folders for our different devices. All you have to do is click on “Actions,” “Manage Folders,” and from the “Add Folder” option, you’ll see that you can create a folder for your servers, workstations, PCs, and laptops, for example. I highly recommend keeping in mind our different patching groups. The reason for this is that later on, when we’re creating our automation profiles and threshold profiles, you have the option of assigning them to a specific folder within your site. To assign your devices to this folder, select them over here, click on the three dots, “Edit Relations,” and from the dropdown, select the correct folder. Make sure to click on “Apply,” and you’re good to go. 

Tracking Assets 

Lior: The next few tabs you guys will see are for assets. If you want to go ahead and track your inventory using Atera, you can create different asset templates and have them assigned to specific users. You’ll also be able to find your tickets, alerts, passwords, attachments for the specific site from these tabs over here. The last one is the Work from Home tab, which is an add-on. 

Installing the Atera Agent 

Lior: You have different ways of installing the Atera agent. To install, let’s get started by clicking over here, selecting your operating system, and clicking “Next.” You’ll be able to also assign it to a specific site and folder. For now, I’m going to select the one we were just on, PCs, and click “Next.” You’ll see that we have three different options from here. The first is to download manually and complete the installation on the device you’re on. The second option is by using a script. As a side note, you guys can also run this script on a previous RMM to mass deploy the Atera agent. The third way is to share the installer download link with your end users. If you have any users working remotely, you can just share this link with them. Another way of installing the Atera agent is by using Group Policy. If you have access to a domain controller with admin rights, you can use Group Policy. The last way is through our Network Discovery add-on. This will also require a DC with admin rights, so keep that in mind. Once you install the Atera agent on your devices, you’ll be able to find those devices on this Devices page over here. You’ll be able to see the device name, last login, availability, device type, and much more. 

Editing Device Information 

Lior: To edit all these columns, click on the table settings, “Edit Columns,” and select whatever is relevant for you. You can also drag and drop all of these columns and reorder them to the way that is comfortable for you. You can also use the filters. For example, if I want to filter by all of my online PCs, I’ll select “PC” under device type and “Online” under availability. If you want to go ahead and save this as a view, you’ll see that you have the “Save View” option. You can title it, for example, “Online PCs,” and you can also decide whether it’s going to be a public or a private view. Once you click on “Save,” you’ll be able to navigate between your different views from this dropdown over here.

Advanced Filters 

Lior: If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll find our Advanced Filters. If you want to filter by something a little more specific, such as installed software includes, contains, equals, you can go ahead and search for it. Click on “Apply,” and it’ll list the number of devices with that installed software. For example, if we go back here, you’ll see that you can also filter by IP address, starts with, memory is less than, greater than. You have a lot of flexibility here. You can also turn on our AI Co-Pilot feature, type in what you want the devices to be filtered by, and it’ll find it in a few seconds. So let’s search for devices with less than 5GB of memory. As you guys can see, if you click on the filters, it’ll show you exactly what it filtered by. I’m scrolling down, and we found that it chose memory less than 5GB, so pretty cool, I would say. 

Running Bulk Actions 

Lior: From this view, you can also run bulk actions. If you click here to select all of your devices, you can run a script on those devices, install software, assign them to an automation profile. Under “Actions,” you’ll find the “Manage” button. From here, you guys can find all of these following tasks such as running a script, service manager, task manager, shutdown actions, command prompt, PowerShell, and so on. 

Agent Page 

Lior: If we just click into one of these devices, this will bring us to what we call the Agent Page. Once you click on a device, it’ll take you to what we call the Agent Page. From here, you can rename the device, assign it to the correct user, find any alert status, patching status, and from these tabs, you can navigate to find the hardware information, disk usage, and security, and so on. On the right-hand side, you can find the memory and CPU average. If you scroll down, you’ll also find the activity log. Whether any automations ran on this device, if any remote sessions happened, you would be able to find it over here under the activity log and also see a report directly from here. From the top, you’ll also be able to remote into the device. If you click on the arrow right by “Connect,” this will take you to the remote access setting, where you’ll have to select what is going to be your default platform, whether that’s Splashtop, AnyDesk, TeamViewer, or ScreenConnect. 

Profiles Section 

Lior: If we scroll all the way down, you’ll find the Profiles section on the bottom left. From here, you’ll see which profiles have been assigned for this particular device. With Atera, we have three different main profiles. We have the Threshold Profiles, which are responsible for creating alerts for you within the system whenever a threshold has been met. The second type is an Automation Profile, which will schedule any automated tasks and patch management. The third one is a Configuration Policy, which will give you more control over the reboots of your devices when a reboot is required. 

Threshold Profiles 

Lior: Let’s get started by diving into Threshold Profiles. Click on the Admin section, and under Monitoring and Automation, you’ll find the Thresholds. From here, all we have to do is click on “Add Profile.” Let’s give the profile a name, so I’m just going to name this “PCS” and click on “Save.” On the right-hand side, you’ll see that we offer presets depending on the device type you’re wishing to monitor. Over here, I’m just going to select “Set” for the PC option, and it’s just our recommendations and an effortless way to create this profile. From here, you’ll see different performance items and hardware items, and if needed, you can also create your own by clicking on “New Item” over here. I will say that any of these items you can go ahead and edit or remove. If you hover above an item, you’ll see the pencil icon to edit it or the trash icon to remove it. For now, I’m just going to click on “Edit” to play around with the different percentages and time periods. It is recommended to edit this because if you leave them as is, they may create a lot of alerts for you within the system. Let’s take this hardware item, for example: “Create critical alert for hard disk usage exceeding 90%.” I’m going to go ahead and edit it, and you’ll see that you have an option of attaching a script to this threshold item. If you click on “Select,” you can either choose a script from your own library if you’ve created it beforehand using our AI Co-Pilot, or you can navigate to our shared script library and search for a specific script, such as “Delete temporary files for all users.” Once you view it, of course, click on it.

Cloning and Customizing Scripts 

Lior: Clone the script, and once you clone it, it’s going to be added to your own scripts library where we can select it. Now, there we go. Click on “Select” and “Add,” and now whenever hard disk usage exceeds 90% on any of the devices you have this profile assigned to, it’s going to automatically run the script and hopefully free up some space in the system, and you’ll be good to go. 

Creating Custom Threshold Items 

Lior: Now we can also click on “New Item” to create your own unique items. Of course, we have three different types of threshold items you can add. The first is event-based. Select the event, the severity of the alert (whether it’s informational, warning, or critical), and click on “Add.” Let’s go ahead and now create our own item. Click on “New Item,” and you’ll find three different types of threshold items you can create. The first is event-based. The second is custom. If you click on the category, you’ll be able to see all of the different options. For example, if you want to get notified whenever there are several failed login attempts on a device, we can go ahead and select “Failed Log Attempts.” The alert severity could be informational, warning, or alert. We can decide that if there are more than three failed login attempts in a 3-minute time period, we are going to get an alert in the system. The third way is using a monitoring script. If you couldn’t find anything under the category over here, you can always create your own monitoring script. Make sure to give it a value type (whether it’s a number or text) and enter the value that needs to be met in order for the alert to be created. Of course, you can also attach an auto-healing script here in order to solve the problem. Once you have all of your items ready, make sure to click on “Save” and only then assign this profile by clicking on “Profile Assignment.” This is where our folders come in handy. I can either assign it to my entire site if needed, or I can only assign this to my PC folder under that site. So that’s what I’m going to do. Select “PCS,” add, and save. 

Managing Alerts 

Lior: Once you have this assigned to your devices, you’re going to start receiving alerts in the system. Let’s make sure to check out the alert settings on the left-hand side. Under the alert settings, you’ll see that you have the option of turning on email alerts. You can decide whether you’re getting an email for warning and critical as well as resolved. Resolved is anything that was resolved through the auto-healing script. On the right-hand side, you’ll see that you have an option of having tickets automatically created directly from these alerts. You have the option of selecting this option for all of your sites or maybe for one VIP site, and this is only available for the critical and warning alerts. If you scroll all the way down, you’ll also see that you have an option of turning on sound alerts. 

Creating Scripts with AI Co-Pilot 

Lior: Before we move on to the patch management and IT automation profiles, I want to show you how you can create a script using our AI Co-Pilot. Under Monitoring and Automation, let’s navigate to the Scripts page. From here, all you have to do is click on “Create Script.” Over here, you have to type in what the script should do or just choose an example from this dropdown. I’m going to choose “Delete temporary files for all users.” Click on “Generate,” and as you can see, in less than a second it created the script for me. I can go ahead and edit the file type. It even gave it a name and a description, and you can select an online agent to run the script on for testing purposes. Once you click on “Create,” this will be added to your own library where you have the option of attaching it to a threshold item or to an automation profile. 

Creating Automation Profiles 

Lior: Let’s go ahead and create an automation profile by navigating to Patch Management and IT Automation. Scroll all the way to the bottom, and you’ll find two main settings. The first is to exclude patches for all of your profiles, and the other one is for how long we are going to keep trying to run a profile if the agent was offline. I’m going to select one week and click on “Update.” Let’s go ahead and click on “Add Profile,” enter your profile’s name (Windows Patches), and click on “Save.” From here, you can see that we have different types of tasks that you can run in the profile. Let’s get started by selecting our Windows patch updates. This will include the critical updates, security updates, service packs, drivers, and tools. Make sure to select the “Reboot if needed” option. Only once the critical and security updates run, it’s going to check if the reboot is required, and only then it will reboot those devices. We’re also going to go ahead and create a configuration policy which will give you more control of these reboots on your devices. Make sure to click on “Add Schedule.” You can have this run weekly, monthly, or on any custom day of the month. For example, on the 3rd Wednesday of every month at 1:00 a.m., click on “Save.” On the left-hand side, you’ll be able to select either your account’s time zone or the device local time in order for it to know what time it should run. You can also enter your email address if you want to be notified each time this profile runs. All that’s left is to click on “Save” and “Profile Assignments” to select the correct folder or site it should be assigned to.

Software Management and Deployment 

Lior: Let’s go ahead and now create an additional profile for our software management and deployment. Yet again, I’m going to click on “Add Profile,” enter “Software Updates,” and click on “Save.” I’m going to go ahead and select “Update All” under Software Management. Our software patches are installed via Chocolatey for Windows and Homebrew for Mac. If you click on “Learn More,” this will take you to a knowledge-based article with a list of the additional software that will also be updated regardless of the installation source. Now you have the option of selecting this to run the profile on newly installed agents. Once you have the Atera agent installed on any new devices, it’s going to automatically run this profile and install the software bundle on those devices. I’m also going to go ahead and add an additional schedule to have it run every Monday at 1:00 a.m. as well. Again, I’m going to go ahead and click on “Save” and assign this. You can go ahead and do this for any tasks, whether that’s disk management, maintenance tasks, or running a script on a scheduled basis. For example, I can go ahead and add the script we created beforehand or choose one from the shared script library like before. 

Creating Configuration Policies 

Lior: Now we’re going to go ahead and create a configuration policy for this reboot if needed. Keep in mind that it must be selected in order for the configuration policy to work. Let’s go ahead and create a configuration policy. Click on “Add Policy,” enter the name, and toggle this setting on. You’ll see different options such as “Revert to device settings,” “Restart outside of active hours” (so you can add in the schedule of your users and it’ll know to only restart outside of these hours, like outside of 8 to 5, for example), “Allow your end users to control the device restarts,” and “Force restart after a few tries.” You’ll see that you can even customize a message for them. Once you have this ready, all you have to do is scroll down in order to assign this profile. Let’s go ahead and either select our site or a specific folder from the dropdown. Make sure to click on “Add” and “Create” on the top right-hand corner. Now, whenever a reboot is required, if you have it selected in the profile, it’s going to take this policy into consideration. 

Patching Status Overview 

Lior: In order to see an overview of your patching status, let’s go ahead and select the Patch Management section. Over here, you’ll be able to see the overview of the patching status of your devices. You’ll see any top vulnerable devices based on their missing patches, which devices are pending reboots, and much more. 

Generating Reports 

Lior: Let’s navigate into Reports where we can gain insights into your account. One example of that is the Auditor Report under Monitoring. From here, you select your site’s name, click “Generate,” and you’ll find loads of information on the hardware and software inventory. You also have the option of exporting if needed. 

Admin Settings 

Lior: Let’s navigate to the Admin section where you can set up your other settings. From here, you’ll find your account settings. Under Users and Security, you can set up different technician groups and access roles. Under Monitoring and Automation, you’ll find the different profiles we created. Under Support and Ticketing, you’ll find those ticket settings, employee service for white labeling, and knowledge base. We have Data Management for importing different data and creating custom fields. 

Conclusion 

Lior: Thank you guys for watching the onboarding session on the RMM side of our platform. Make sure to watch our next one when I go over ticketing and PSA.