NTRadmin – Remote systems management and IT automation tool

Earlier I wrote about Spiceworks IT Dekstop, a free helpdesk, network inventory, and network monitoring software. I’ve personally used Spiceworks in my IT environment and found it to be a great tool for small businesses.

However, Spiceworks does not have some features and tools that are required if you need something beyond network inventory and monitoring software, such as more advanced systems management and automation tools.

NTRadmin is a full-featured web-based systems administration tool that can be used to manage servers, PCs, laptops, and more for a network of any size all from the web. It’s not free like Spiceworks, but it’s definitely worth the money if you need to remotely manage and perform tasks on any computer on your network from anywhere in the world.

If you’ve ever written a script in Windows before to perform a routine task, than you can think of NTRadmin as a super scripting machine. Using predefined and developed VBScripts, you can use NTRadmin to perform routine tasks on any device automatically, monitor and diagnose servers and PCs, or remotely shutdown or restart 100’s of PCs at once.

Here are some of the major features of the software:

• Job (aka bots) – One of the major downsides to Spiceworks is that you can’t really perform any tasks on the machines, you can only view information about them. With NTRadmin, you can create jobs using NTRadmin bots to perform just any IT task you can think of, including configuration management, inventory and auditing, software distribution, problem management, monitoring, storage operations, system operations, and system recovery.

• Remote Control & Remote Support – The best feature of NTRadmin in my opinion is not all of the tasks you can automate with it, but the fact that you can remotely control, monitor, or support any PC on your network from anywhere using secure 256-bit AES encryption. In Observer mode, you can silently monitor what someone is doing on their computer in real time. You can also take direct control over a computer instantly. Note that you can also remotely connect to several machines at once without a problem. Another cool feature is the ability to remotely access your network from a PocketPC. They even have a mobile website that makes it easy for administrators to log into from a mobile device.

• Remote Power Off and Power On – Using NTRadmin, you can easily setup jobs to remotely shutdown PCs during the night in order to save on energy usage. You can also remotely wake up any computer on your network that supports Wake-on-LAN.

• File Transfer & File Management – Without having to start a remote control session, you can transfer any file to any computer directly. You can ensure that virus updates and system patches are sent out to all the necessary systems. With the built-in file management system, administrators can easily store, organize and distribute all their important files like scripts, manuals, patches, etc.

• Network Inventory and Monitoring – Just like Spiceworks, NTRadmin will give you a fully detailed inventory of all of your network assets. NTRadmin includes a hardware inventory, software inventory and services and hotfixes inventory. Quickly find out which computers have less than 256MB of RAM, how many PCs do not have anti-virus installed, or which computers are not fully patched.

Overall, NTRadmin can save your IT department time, reduce costs, save energy, increase security, reduce downtime, and even reduce travel costs! Installing NTRadmin onto your network is a piece of cake using their simple to follow online wizard.

Once you have the program deployed on your machines, you are ready to start enjoying the incredible power of NTRadmin to manage, monitor, and configure your entire network locally or remotely. Enjoy!