Advice on Remote PC Management for 24/7 Golf Simulator Business

[MrTomLA]

Maybe a bit of a unique request for this forum, and I’m not sure if I’ve posted in the right category; so please feel free to let me know if this should go somewhere else.

I’m currently in the planning phase of a business that will operate a Golf Simulator facility. Naturally, I’ll need PCs to run the simulator software. The facility itself will operate 24/7.

My main question is: what is the best way to manage these PCs remotely? While I’ll have physical access to the machines, I’d ideally like to be able to remote into them for a number of reasons:

 

1. To handle customer support issues

2. To run software, Windows, and driver updates

3. For any other kind of general maintenance

 

I’m fairly new to remote PC management. Even something as basic as restarting a PC remotely seems like it would be tricky. From my past experience with IT support, a restart requires I re-initiate the remote support session manually afterward to allow IT to continue working on the machine. Is that unavoidable? My concern is that if a customer is having an issue that could be resolved with a restart, I want to be able to do that remotely without needing someone on-site to log me back in.

 

Also, are there any other considerations I might be missing from a remote management or IT infrastructure point of view?

 

Any help, advice, or suggestions would be really appreciated.

 

Thanks!

[manikyath]

1 hour ago, MrTomLA said:

a restart requires I re-initiate the remote support session manually afterward to allow IT to continue working on the machine. Is that unavoidable

that's a user privacy feature, any propper RMM software makes that configurable, but for legal reasons any machine an end user might be using should have the prompt enabled... although.. given the usecase here i doubt there's much of a privacy argument to be made.

 

on that note.. we've come to the answer to this question:

1 hour ago, MrTomLA said:

what is the best way to manage these PCs remotely?

some variety of RMM software.. a few names come to mind:

- pulseway (LTT sponsor)

- kaseya

- solarwinds

- aside from remote access just using azureAD with endpoint manager is pretty much all you'll ever need for update and software management.

 

something to note here is that all these companies are very much assholes. they're selling you a proverbial chicken that lays golden eggs, and they're well aware of the value their software brings for you, being very intent on pricing as close to that value as possible.

 

with kaseya VSA for example, you pay monthly per engineer seat, you pay monthly per module of the software you use, and you pay monthly per computer. and if you want support... good luck with that. want to buy more licenses? expect response times to be painfully slow...

 

what i do want to add is that while microsoft's "you need an MS account" gets a lot of hate in enthousiast communities (including from me), the power you get with AzureAD and endpoint manager is insane. a well configured domain lets you onboard and set up new devices just by logging in with domain credentials during OOBE. need software? installs by itself. need special drivers? already deploying. need to not have candy crush soda saga? already gone.

 

the only downside is that endpoint manager is very "at your own pace" about updates. if you require everything to version match, you'll be babysitting the deployment to make sure everything goes trough.

[MrTomLA]

This is very helpful, thanks.

 

From a little research it looks like Pulseway might be the simplest and fairly inexpensive setup for a small business like mine.

 

Appreciate your help on this.