I love many things about MBS. It's powerful and responsive. However there is one thing about it that makes it very difficult to scale. Specifically, we as MSPs try to design SOPs (standard operating procedures) that are easy to implement and carry out by lower skilled persons. This is how we can make a profit; by having someone less than a top engineer carrying out maintenance and management tasks with a high degree of reliability and consistency.

One area in MBS where this falls short is in the use of the Overdue status. I want to be able to create a procedure that handles overdue backups however with the present implementation, we would be calling the endusers daily. This is not a scalable situation. I would like to see some flexibility in how we define overdue status.

I would suggest to have a way to create Overdue presets. For example we know that many people turn off their computers over the weekend. We could have a status for this which does not consider a backup overdue unless it has not run for more than 3 days. We could also have a status for servers which we know are never turned off, which would raise the flag on a daily basis. Give us the ability to define overdue with variables of last backup, last backup status, and online/offline status. This way we could let the MBS system handle the automation and my staff could take corrective action on the relatively few number of backups that would truly be overdue instead of the relatively high number we see on a daily basis.