General product feedback thread - tell us what you think!

Well I have zero input on the product so far as I haven’t used it but I plan to fire up the trial and see the magic first-hand… either tomorrow or Monday. That said, the two folks you have out and about in the Spiceworks community are absolutely the worst… JK, they rock. Nic is about as real a dude as it gets and 100% of the reason I’m here to begin with. Give them a pay raise (Nic: I’ll take half)

Really looking forward to trialing the product. Right now my solution is a hodge podge of stuff. It works… but it ain’t pretty.

We have just started using Automox and rolling it out in our production environment, and I have really enjoyed how easy it is to install agents and how clean the UI is. Also this new community setup is awesome, so thanks for making it a reality! However both my boss and I feel like Automox has quite a few features missing before it becomes truely useful to us, but decided to go ahead with it anyway because of its modern design and future potential. Here are some of the features we would really like to see implemented:

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  Nested groups with cascading policies: The boss was complaining about the lack of this yesterday. We have a lot of different patch scenarios in our environment, and creating a totally separate group for each scenario is not ideal.

  
  


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  Custom device attributes for expanded device inventory details. They would preferably be able to be added to the devices page as an additional column as well. Would help greatly to position Automox as a more viable inventory solution for us.

  
  


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  Ability to run a policy/worklet once off on any selected devices or a group. This would be a nice-to-have for me when it comes to testing new policies or genuinely needing something run only once without having to add a policy to a group to run once, or setup a new group just for testing.

  
  


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  Realtime remote terminal sessions (preferably with api support): This was a feature in two competitors we tried and I really, really liked using it. I know this is supposed to be an automation platform, but being able to just run remote terminal commands on specific devices with real time feedback from a web interface without ever disturbing the user would be awesome for help desk work and quick troubleshooting. Having API support for running near real time terminal commands on specific groups of devices would be amazing for custom integrations too.

  
  

I was also a big fan of quite a few “under consideration” features on your roadmap too. Here are some of the ones that would be most useful to us that I would like to see in the “planned” section soon:

This would take patch automation to the next level:

This feature was specifically requested by my boss, and was in a lot of the other solutions we tried:

Command queue reporting/history/preview would be fantastic for peace of mind over the commands/policies that are being run especially as a newcomer the platform. This honestly seems like a core feature to me, and Im not sure why this would not already be in place:

Anyway thats enough from me for now! Thanks again for making this community forum happen, I hope to see lots of great things come from it!

Overall the product is very helpful and does everything that is needed for us. There are however some bugs and flaws with it such as having issues with the newest version of the client. Not being able to uninstall or reinstall the client because the amagent application is not in the Automox directory. Only way of fixing this as of now is to copy a existing amagent and paste it to the directory. This also leads to having issues with getting the device fully connected back on to Autmox.

Another bug/issue we’ve been seeing is devices not installing patches when they are restarted manually by the user. Only way to patch the device is by restarting it via Automox.

Other than those 2 I’m really enjoying using Automox, very useful in getting everything up to date with no hassle.

Glad a community forum was made, Cant wait till its available to the public so more people can get involved in discussions.

I’d be glad to take a look at your machines and see how we can help get those running.

Thanks for the great feedback @Ryan!

I’m with you on the running a worklet without having to assign a group. I’ve been doing a lot of coding and testing for the worklets to post to the community, and removing that extra step would be nice.

The nested/conditional groups/policies is another good call, and definitely something that gets talked about internally here a lot.

Not sure if a remote terminal or custom attributes are in discussion or not, but I’ll find out from the product folks.

Thanks also for posting the links to the Under Consideration roadmap items. That makes it easy for other community members to vote for the ones they like. You can also submit ideas on there for consideration, so feel free to create ones for the custom attributes and remote terminal ideas. Then others can vote for them and we can get a sense of how popular those features would be for all of our customers.

Thanks @Nic, good to hear some of this stuff is at least being talked about.

I have submitted some ideas to the product portal now, and I was just wondering how often it gets updated (I noticed the worklets name change hasnt been moved to launched yet), what the criteria were for a submitted idea to appear in the ‘Under Consideration’ page, and at what point is an idea considered popular/important enough to move to the planned stage? There are quite a few ideas in under consideration that are more liked/upvoted than anything in planned or upcoming (including the command queue one I so desperately want to see made reality), so just curious about the impact this actually has.

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for posting in the community. We really appreciate your feedback and do take it into account as we prioritize our roadmap. Regarding the public portal items in Under Consideration, we talk about those a lot and we are excited about those releases; however, we do not have a timeline yet on their availability. The Product team updates the portal regularly so keep an eye on it and you will see changes ongoing.

We have updated our product to include Worklets and intend to do more around this in the future. What we’ve launched now is the first iteration of it and we have plans to expand on this in the future. We will keep the enhanced Worklet idea in Under Consideration until we get closer to launching an enhanced version. As for the other items in there and their status, we want to make sure we provide accurate expectations around work being considered and/or planned with a release timeframe. When we learn about the approximate release date, we would update the portal.

Thank you again for your feedback and please keep it coming! It will only help us and your fellow Automox users.

Greg