Business Ideas From r/sysadmin

“So this client (a CPA) has one remote employee using a company computer. My problem is, most screen monitoring software have a min 5 user subscription. Client doesn't want to spend more for nothing. Can anyone recommend a good solution? preferably with live screen viewing, 2nd best is frequent screenshots. Metrics are a must. TIA.”

CPA firm with single remote employee needs affordable screen monitoring without 5-user minimums; niche low-cost monitoring SaaS

“I have just recently started expanding my team, and now there are 5 of us working in my small business. Because it’s a product related to accounts, there is some sensitive data that we want to protect. I want to find a password manager that is focused on a small team, so that it has an easy interface, and sharing system, and it’s not that expensive.  So far, I have found this post about some business passwords out there, and it’s leaning toward NordPass – has anyone tried it before? What are your reviews (I only read this[ ~post~](https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1aka3rn/best_business_password_manager/) so far, which recommended NordPass for business)?”

Small business sysadmin expanding to 5-person team needs easy team-focused password manager with sensitive data protection - underserved vertical SaaS for micro-teams

“I'm going down my first rabbit hole with employee monitoring software. A small business customer of mine made the request, but here's the catch: it's only for 1 contractor, and it's for the contractor's own personal computer. I informed my customer about how invasive these things can be, especially on a computer he doesn't own, but what I couldn't answer was if there's an "opt in" kind of way for the contractor to manually turn on the monitoring when they start their billing clock, so to speak. When they are done their billing, then can turn off any monitoring. Do we know if any of the players in this space offer that specific feature (ActivTrack, Time Champ, Hubstaff, Monitask, CurrentWare, Time Doctor, Cattr, Teramind, et al)? The other important consideration for this ask is that it's a basic, simple-to-use software with low/no contract commitments and reasonable monthly fees. Preferably the data is cloud-hosted, I don't want to set up any kind of on-prem server for this. Thanks in”

Small businesses wanting optional monitoring only when contractor clicks start; flexible consent-based employee tracking tool opportunity

“I am choosing between three of the best enterprise password managers I managed to find. I base this on the general reviews I read on Reddit, personal recommendations I’ve received, and also price points.  I’m starting a small enterprise for travel insurance, and I want to keep my data protected for a reasonable price – I think that's a rather fair thing to ask. I compiled the three that stood out the most:  * **NordPass** - Has all the basic features like autofill and centralized administration, and you can create groups, and get alerted when there’s a data breach.  - The price is only starting at $1.79 per user per month (there’s also a discount code I found BusinessNP15). - Great activity logs feature and password strength reporting.  * **1Password** - Also covers the basics I already mentioned, including activity log, password sharing, etc. - Price starts at $7.99 per person per month, which is on the pricey side even with 14 days free discount (found it in this[ table](http”

Travel insurance startup seeking enterprise password manager shows demand for vertical SaaS tailored to regulated industries like insurance at $50-200/mo

“Onboarding for us, and some of you I’m sure, is a very annoying, labor-intensive process, all because there is very little automation. For the past year as a back-burner side project, I’ve been gathering requirements from each department that touches the new hire process in any way. At this point, I’m just blind to my options because I’ve never done this before in my career. In my research, I am considering Power Automate and set up as may triggers and dependencies as I can, and leave certain things to manual process, but other than that, I have no direction or knowledge of the COTS solutions out there. What do you do for onboarding? I’m not looking for what happens during your personal business process. I’m asking specifically about what tools and solutions worked for you in your org? Hoping to get some traction and places to look. ”

IT departments need integrated onboarding automation platform pulling requirements from multiple teams — labor-intensive manual workflows create bottlenecks

“Hello, We have gone pretty heavy on automating our onboarding and offboarding processes as we have an incredible amount of turnover at this company. Everything generally works really well, but the one place where things keep falling apart is the "eventually consistent" part of the MS stack. We can create the user in Entra no problem, but then sending them email or adding them to meetings will fail because it doesn't resolve the user in Exchange yet. So we've tried adding in a 5, and now 10 minute delay after user creation in hopes that will solve it. This sometimes works, sometimes it still isn't enough time. Is there another pattern/approach you take to solving this issue, or automating these processes? What immediately comes to mind would be some kind of trigger on the Exchange mailbox being created, and we then do those 'email related steps' based on that trigger. Perhaps a customattribute is set on user creation that we could clear, so that we know when this account wa”

Sysadmins need SaaS for reliable Microsoft 365/AD onboarding automation handling eventual consistency delays — manual fixes drain IT time across high-turnover firms

“Another post on here about automation got me thinking again about automating our onboarding and off-boarding process as much as possible. And I'm wondering how you guys are doing it in your offices. We are a law firm with multiple offices. We use FreshService as our ticketing system and we currently use DayForce as our HR System but we are replacing day force with something else and I don't think I'd be able to get away with trying to link the HR System to our hybrid domain anytime soon as our team has no Developers and doing anything with API's and code it's just not going to happen. Also the other offices are located in other provinces and they're all using their own HR platforms. The offices do kind of run like their own separate law firms but IT is regionalized. We all have the Regional domain and then are subdomains for the various offices, and that all synchs to 365 It seems like it's very easy to set up automation if you just have 365 or just have AD but not if you have both”

Law firms need ticketing-integrated onboarding/offboarding automation — multi-office manual processes are inefficient and compliance-heavy

“TL;DR: What environmental monitoring system do you currently use? What do you wish it did differently - or that it doesn't already do? Hi fellow sysadmins! For a while I've wanted an easy and simple way to monitor the temperature and humidity for my small server room (which is really just a "den" that has no business being called anything more than a big-ish closet, but happens to be the perfect size for a single four post rack). I looked around and couldn't really find any simple or affordable environmental sensor solutions for my basic needs. I mean, it is just a home lab full of old Dell PowerEdges from eBay, after all. I didn't really want to spend more than $100 on equipment. I wanted PoE and easy setup, and to access it over the internet from anywhere. So a few months ago I decided to setup a little environmental monitoring system of my own and bought some sensor breakout boards and microcontrollers. I wanted to be alerted when it got too hot or too humid, or if the te”

Sysadmins need affordable SaaS for environmental monitoring in small server rooms with temp/humidity alerts and integrations

“I’m evaluating modern SIEM / XDR / SecOps platforms and would appreciate input from people who have gone through similar selection or migration projects. Context: We have a relatively small security team - essentially one person responsible for security operations, but the environment is not small: several thousand servers, around 1.5k users, hybrid identity with Microsoft Entra ID and on-prem Active Directory, and a mixed OS estate that is currently about 40% Windows and 60% Linux, with more Linux migration planned. What I’m looking for is not just a log storage/search platform, but a SIEM/SecOps solution that can realistically work for a very lean team. Key requirements: \\* Strong integrations with Microsoft identity, AD, Windows, Linux, network/security tools, cloud services, and custom applications. \\* Flexible detection / alerting language, similar in spirit to Splunk SPL, KQL, YARA-L, Python-based detections, etc. \\* Good support for custom log ingestion, because we h”

Small SecOps teams need affordable SIEM/XDR without heavy ops overhead — simplified SecOps platform with one-person team workflows and preset playbooks

“I was hired on at a company as an IT Engineer. I was given a Mac laptop. On my third day, my manager asked me why I was "away" on Teams for 40 minutes. I said I was watching a training video which was an hour long, to which he questioned me on that. Right before this, a popup saying something about "System Monitor" requesting access to accessibility settings or something like that. Being new to using Macs as a general user, it never occurred to me until later what that popup was talking about. About two weeks later, one of my coworkers said they were working on an audit of all of our Mac devices and needed to change some settings for our DLP software since they appeared to be disabled. Didn't think anything of that at the time. Another week goes by, and someone else's manager asks if there is a way we can see if someone is using a mouse jiggler. I was unsure and basically told them no, but I asked my team just to make sure, and that's when I found out that our way of confirming that”

IT managers dealing with remote productivity tracking need less invasive monitoring tools than Time Doctor; demand for ethical alternatives in hybrid teams

“I'm really wrestling with a directive from HR. They want to implement employee monitoring software for our hundreds of remote employees. The biggest headache is doing this without a massive backlash. I'm thinking about solutions that allow for silent, automated install. It's not only solid activity monitoring software and app and website tracking we need but also something easy to manage at scale for remote team management. Any thoughts on how to pull this off without causing a panic? Or pitfalls to avoid for workforce analytics at this scale? Thanks.”

Sysadmins needing silent deployment options for remote employee monitoring across hundreds of PCs; tool for frictionless rollout

“Looking for recommendations on employee monitoring systems with the least amount of bells and whistles.”

Requests for simplest employee monitoring with minimal features; market for stripped-down, no-frills productivity SaaS

“I'm effectively the sysadmin for a small company. I've set them up with a server that will last for awhile, I manage it in general and update it as needed by hand. My main field of expertise is programming, but I'm pretty familiar with the basics of managing Linux servers. **My question is:** What are some tools to help me keep track of uptime, updates, service status, etc.? Ideally something that's FOSS. A bonus would be if I'm able to install something on my own computers and monitor everything from my phone or laptop. It'd be really nice to know when my computer goes offline while I'm away, on top of seeing info about the server(s) I manage. I've heard of Wazuh - and it looks decent, but I'm not sure how good it is. Any suggestions?”

Small company sysadmins need FOSS tools covering server uptime, updates, services and security status

“I’m a one man IT team for a company of around 75 people. The previous IT was very lax with enforcing any type of policies, so it’s been an upward battle to convince people that keeping passwords in places like a plain text file on their desktop is a bad idea. I tried slowly rolling out NordPass a year ago but not everyone is using it. I often get complaints about it being too difficult or confusing to use. People are getting tripped up by having an account password and a master password, and when to use which. Also any inconsistency with when it autofills or auto saves will cause them issues if they’re too reliant on it. Anyone have some recommendations on password managers that could be more user friendly but without sacrificing security?”

IT admin for 75-person company struggling with user adoption of password managers needs simple enterprise onboarding SaaS with training features

“Hi, fresh sysadmin here. I am trying to make an impact by creating something, rather than just support tickets and requests. I need pointers from someone more experienced than me on how I can do this. One of our clients has a big turn over of employees, being able to automate some of the job will Ale me stand out in the company. Currently onboarding process is: Edit: it is hybrid environment with Entra Connect 1. Create AD account. 2. Add security groups for SharePoint drive access. 3. Add proxy addresses attribute 4.1. Add Premium License 5. Add new user in scan to email on 2 printers 6. Edit user in 3CX (voip) 7. Setup new computer. 7.1. Set outlook and Teams and sign user 7.2. Add their 3cx 7.3. Add default printers 7.4. Sync SharePoint sites MDM is installed thru GPO so that is already set. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.”

Small IT teams need simple onboarding automation tool for new hires covering accounts and access — current manual processes are error-prone and time-consuming

“I want to move away from our MSP and curious what flavor of monitoring and alerting tool is good for on-premise assets. We're a handful of admins with some servers, vms, and storage. talking a few hundred devices. AWS is not in our scope as that's devops' problem. We're not adverse to paid vs open source solutions, but it would be a bonus if it's lower cost at this point in time. The network team has latched to openNMS, but I'm looking for some system side ideas. EDIT: Here's a tally as of 2/27 - Thanks for the responses. |Zabbix|7| |:-|:-| |PRTG|5| |NinjaOne|4| |Grafana|3| |CheckMK|2| |Icinga|2| |Uptime Kuma|2| |OpenNMS|2| |ActiveXperts|1| |ConnectWise|1| |Lansweeper|1| |ManageEngine|1| |NEMS Linux|1| |NetCrunch|1| |PA Server Monitor|1| |Site 24x7|1| |WhatsUp Gold|1|”

Sysadmins need affordable on-prem monitoring/alerting for hundreds of devices without MSP or cloud dependency

“So... Linux admin who inherited responsibility for supporting non-standard engineering software (license-serving, installs, and so on) to a bunch of users in a large org. While our activities are approved and policy compliant, we exist entirely to provide software that is needed by our users but outside what the enterprise-wide IT department offers.... This means we can't just add software to the existing enterprise-wide deployment system (or use GPOs, etc) - and that we presently operate via distributing installs over USB media (The previous guy retired, this was his system. He was also fond of, for example, using Dekstop Windows as a server OS).... I want to change this - specifically I am looking for a solution that allows users to connect to a server we host via their browser, click on a piece of software to install, and (provided they are in the correct LDAP/AD group) have a client software package (running as a service, SYSTEM user, etc) that we install on each PC we support ”

Sysadmins seek open-source Intune alternative for non-standard software deployment to Windows users in large orgs

“All, does anyone automate their onboarding process with "inhouse"built scripts and tools? How would you deal with a situation where there are 3 major steps, 1 creating user,do attributes,groups.2 create a mailbox on-prem. The problem is the remote teams who need to wait 10-20 or sometimes more minutes to have sync complete from remote dc-hq dc - hq exch. 3 migrate mailbox to o365. Yet again, dc-az dc sync could take 10-15 minutes. I don't have a say on why we use hybrid or why sync is done the way is done. Dc and exch needs domain credentials while o365 action need AAD login, to make it even worse. What tools or options would you do to try automate all in one? Partial automations we do "expect" at least 3 clicks with a time between, but easy to forget after 30 minutes of running around.”

Sysadmins need reliable in-house onboarding scripts handling multi-step delays across remote teams and on-prem systems

“I work at a small company of <100 employees. About 75% of them use a dedicated PC and the other half kind of gradually bounce around from PC to PC as their is a lot of multiple hat wearing. We have Microsoft E3 licensing and most people are using Edge browser which obviously syncs their settings and passwords via the built in Edge password manager, which works really great. We also have some users who use Chrome (and Edge) and if they are on Chrome, they use LastPass. IT primarily uses LastPass and we tried testing it with more users a few years ago but only a handful of Edge people use it and then they also had their security incidents and stuff, so we never really finished setting the org up with that. Passwords aren't too much of a problem except we have some departments that store shared passwords on documents on the network and we want to get those moved into a password vault (for departmental sharing) and get everyone using a single password manager regardless of browser. I”

Small company <100 employees with shared PCs needs flexible password manager supporting multiple users and E3 integration - clear SMB SaaS opportunity