hey everyone welcome to the june edition

of the iit documentation users group

webinar i am shree the community manager

at eureka process

and the it documentation users group is

one of the two communities that i work

very closely with the other one being

the eureka community uh it comprises

people from all over the world really uh

different job functions but everyone is

interested in the art of id

documentation

we have a special speaker with us today

to talk about lion guard uh apart from

being our client

friend and an active i.t dog member

himself uh which which alone makes him

special play uh i’m happy we have

matthew gilliam with us today because he

is in the msp business himself and he

has been in it for

quite some years now um he’s the founder

and ceo of divergent i.t based in

matthews um

north carolina

matthew thank you and uh welcome to the

webinar is there something to do with

your name being matthew and you being in

matthews i don’t know i was wondering

about it

it’s funny everybody uh yeah thanks for

having me it’s everybody that that i

meet and like oh where do you live i

usually will tell them charlotte because

matthews is a suburb but yeah i’m

basically from matthews

at this point everybody you’ll you’ll

obviously joke and say yeah did they

name the town after you and and whatnot

so

uh yeah i’ve heard a lot of that which

you know hey no problem we’ve been here

14 years now

and uh have no plans of going back up

north so

uh very very happy to be here

that’s cool and uh you’ve divergent has

been around for a few years and i i know

that you had a different msp business

before that so you’ve been in the game

for a while

yep so i’ve been in this is gonna be my

uh 25th year professionally being in it

had my my first uh professional i.t job

working for the new york city board of

education

um so yep i’ve had i’ve been

i’ve worked for corporate for many

different years started out in banking

then went the pharmaceutical route which

was a great industry for me

and um probably

15 years ago i was just building up

clients on the side while still working

full-time and decided that yep let’s go

ahead and do this full time and that’s

when we started so yeah i did have a

much larger

msp prior to this we were had about 130

clients globally that we were supporting

uh i think we were doing a little bit

more than 2 million a year arr so

i had a staff well i think was about 15.

so um i got sick at the end of 2018 and

decided to dissolve that business with

the partners that i had and

started diverging it um

with another partner who’s my wife

and um just much more intentional much

more

um

you know focused on on being a

professional and not allowing clients to

tell us what they want but telling us

telling them exactly what they need so

um you know i think a lot of companies

or a lot of msps or tsps strive

to do that and it is hard

right because we don’t want to turn

business away but it is what it is

agreed and i’m i’m um very excited about

this i’m sure all that experience is

going to funnel into you talking about

lion guard uh and everyone who’s tuned

in right now please feel free to ask

questions

um

in the comment box of wherever you’re

watching from and we will address them

as we go along or we’ll handle them at

the end when we wrap up and during our q

a uh we’ll keep this to around 30

minutes it’s not hard to stop so over to

you matthew yep so where i’d like to

start is so

our maturity in our in our company was

we we always thought documentation oh

we’ll just keep it in in connect wise

that that’s it works for us it does this

it does that right connect wise we found

out is not the best place for

documentation so

when we started to look for

documentation tools we had previously

used it glue at my previous msp

uh but we had that um

uh that negative connotation towards

anything cosea

and we did not want to go back that

route so we we came across lion guard

and

um i was very very surprised to find out

that nobody else is doing what they’re

doing and how they’re doing it right

because it um

when we got it implemented it did take

us you know a couple of weeks to really

kind of understand the full capabilities

and the aspects and we we’ve been using

it now i think we’re going on three

years so they’ve come a long way since

then but

um

you know lion guard

can be used as a documentation tool an

automatic documentation tool it does

automatically import into hoodoo as well

as it glue and i’m sure some others

uh we we do currently use both hoodoo

and it glue so we do have data going

into both but um the way

that that we utilize it most and the way

we find the most effective is as a

change management database

and why that’s so important for us is

we can see changes that are made whether

it’s by a tech

whether it’s by firmware updates whether

you know

uh a new piece of device or new piece of

equipment has been added to to an

environment and it’ll let us know and we

can kind of automatically have a ticket

created in connect wise categorize it

and say yep this was known this was

unknown

who did this who did that so that that’s

one of the great features of it i mean

it’s got the have you been pawn built in

um and you’re constantly constantly

adding you know inspectors right the big

one is the microsoft 365 inspector

where you know if uh one of my texts we

terminate we terminate a user for one of

our clients they

they they go through the process that

they’re supposed to follow but they

forget to

you know remove the license from the

user right because these things never

happen yeah um right we get notified and

say hey there’s there’s a there’s a

blocked user

with with the license still assigned

right so we don’t we don’t have to worry

that you know at the end of the month oh

we forgot to

to do this for three or four users and

now we we we can’t charge the customer

for that we have to take that hit right

lion guard we’ll we’ll pick all that up

for us yeah that’s no i mean it’s one

way to minimize the human error i guess

correct yep yep and as more as we can

take out or whatever you know uh

extra layers or false gaps that we can

kind of say yes this is you know what’s

going on it helps right and then the

other big one that we use it for and

then i’ll get into the system is you

know we don’t currently manage dns for

our clients websites right so

marketing teams love to move stuff

around and not move

you know the appropriate records or

whatnot right so line guards actively

looking at that

and then we get notified right we don’t

get those we don’t we don’t get those

calls hey our email is not working we

don’t know what’s going on right right

um it’ll alert us and then we can reach

out and say hey who did this right or

just

go to their marketing contact say hey

did you guys move the website because

you didn’t tell us oh yeah we did and we

didn’t think that it really mattered

right well here’s why it’s mattered and

then we can go back to

you know the c-level team for the

organization and say yeah well your

marketing team’s making changes without

involving us and i’m just hitting it

quincy because i’m marketing i get boy

me yeah no i mean

look in i t we we make some stupid

mistakes too but you know sometimes it’s

uh

you know it does happen but it allows us

to to be notified

even before most of the time the client

is is realizing that they’re having an

issue right because those changes are

usually done

after hours

right and then in the morning it’s like

hey i haven’t gotten email in 12 hours

right and we’re already notified by that

point so

um

so i’ll go and get into the system right

so this is the just the standard

dashboard that you get right it tells us

how many environments how many total

systems

we’re maintaining or monitoring within

lion guard how many alerts that we have

and

uh one of their nice features here is

how many you know new systems have been

discovered uh with the inspectors that

that we have set up

um

so i’ll start out with alerts just so

people can see you know what some of the

alerts are right so we do manage

uh dkim for all of our clients so we do

make sure that dkim is set up these are

uh luckily they’re all false positives

right now

because some of them are pulling from

the second key rather than the first key

so that’s something that uh

lionguard is working on to fix right so

we’re getting we don’t maintain or

manage the ssl certificates

or the domains but we get notified that

hey it’s going to expire

and part of our process is just to reach

out to the vendor and say hey you know

we got a notification it’s going to

expire we just want to make sure you’re

going to renew this

and you know they come back they say yes

you know it’s all good

um here’s another one tells us that you

know uh mfa is not turned on for

uh privileged accounts right so we can

go in there we can see why or what

account is not

does not have mfa turned on um

this one we believe is also a false

positive we utilize a tool

that uh cannot have mfa on and we just

need to to work that out so you just

want to make sure people understand

um

right same thing right so here domains

are are expiring we get notified about

those

um

but let’s go into what the inspectors

look like because this is where all your

data is going to be set up and

configured

um and whatnot right so they do have uh

which

we’ve rolled out a couple so far they do

have an endpoint so right now you can

install the lionguard agent on on

windows workstations and have it do a

bunch of different items um they just

came out with that this year

and we are

actively testing as you can see just on

on two machines currently

uh you know windows server sql active

directory right it’ll pull all that

information

and it’ll tell you you know when’s the

last time someone changed their password

in active directory it’ll tell you what

all the sql databases are

and what not right here’s all your your

standard stuff

webroot right here’s the ubiquity

um

if we just get into one of these i’ll

show you kind of what one of the

uh

what one of the data prints looks like

here

just so people can see what

what kind of information is

is being pulled

i just want to make sure that

i know you’re sharing all this with us

but that the information is okay to go

public um

i mean this is just me yeah yeah it

doesn’t happen

yeah none of this has i mean no one’s

gonna be able to pull this data and do

anything with it

cool

right so just i mean

they can have my host to find

information i’m okay with that they’re

not gonna be able to get in

right it’ll it’ll show us the devices

right so there’s here’s the two

different unifi devices we have serial

numbers what the ip addresses are set to

mac addresses

and whatnot right network configuration

all right we’ll show just the what’s

being pulled from there whatever users

we have which i’ll skip that

um

what’s the w wlan set up like right so

we have two wireless setup here

um you know and we can have all this

data be pushed to like i said it glue or

hoodoo we currently just have the lion

guard data pushed to it blue

unfortunately it does not go into the

areas in it glue that you would want it

to go into

um

you know it doesn’t go into

configurations like you would think the

wireless information would want to go

into wireless and i.t glue

it’s not there yet

where does it end up in

so in it glue it ends up it creates its

own flexible asset

for that customer and you’ll see that

entire data print in it glue i can

probably bring that up i just uh i want

to make sure i don’t have anything else

on that screen show you

um you know so here’s a list right so

it’ll do this it’ll do synchro veeam

sonic wall sentinel one

um

right quite quite the spectrum there

yeah and they’re constantly adding new

inspectors which is what we’re looking

at here

um

right so it’ll go in and say okay yeah

they’ve rolled out this new inspector

like they just rolled out i think a

month ago maybe two months ago they

rolled out a quickbooks inspector

that will go in and

it’ll inspect your your quickbooks

environment to the pool excuse me it’ll

pull your users

it’ll say who has what type of access

and and whatnot and then you know

you can have that push to it glue right

it’s not going to come over

unfortunately in applications which is

where i would want it sure

it comes over as its own flexible asset

but the data is still there

yeah you know this this might sound like

a bit of a new question but i see this

conversation come in i do like all the

time you know every time someone’s

discussing

a different tool um you know there’s

always a bunch of people say hey this

support is not great you know i put in

requests for this feature you know

there’s no response nothing happens

how do you find line guide like you know

they rule out something new like this

and you inspect it and then you know

you would have to assume that it would

have some glitches some

um starting trouble and how to respond

to

your support requests etc i mean their

support has been phenomenal um like i

said when we when they were what much

smaller company right i would seem like

i’d always get like the one or same one

or two people um now you know i get i

know they’ve grown

uh so i do get different

sets of texts but you know they they do

still perform at a very high level right

it’s all on chat you can email them

um and they’re willing to to help and

understand and guide you even if it’s

creating you know like some custom

actionable alert the support from what

i’ve seen is has always been very very

good

um right yeah so yeah they roll out

these these new inspectors you know

sometimes they’ll start out on preview

right so i’ll just skip down to that

right so sometimes they’ll start out in

preview

um which means that they’re not

um you know they’re not fully deployed

yet yeah

you can still roll these out right so

like we’ve rolled out the godaddy ones

but yeah their support

is is very very good and i will tell you

like all their inspectors have um a

wonderful

document on a how-to how to set it up

what are their steps right and i mean

nothing’s perfect but it’s

they do do a very good job in supplying

that this way

you can just go read it and say okay how

am i doing this and you know

our biggest hurdle was when we first got

this set up right they didn’t have some

of these inspectors out like teams or

onedrive

or sharepoint right so it was okay yeah

once you get

the m365 set up now

right and if you’re a csp and you’re

pulling in all of your your clients

right

within your csp portal right you only

got to set it up once and it’ll just

keep reading the new client so as you

add a new client it’ll come under

discovery you can just tell it to go

and it’s a lot simpler but yeah setting

up the inspectors you gotta understand i

mean every every vendor is different

right so sophos then fortinet or palo

and meraki right so

uh that that learning process was

was interesting for us but now we

understand why and we absolutely see the

benefit so

yeah i mean my only knock on on

on lion guard right now honestly would

be you know i wish they would roll out

inspectors faster

you hooked now

i have a laundry list of stuff that that

i would that i would love to have that

you know was not there yet right so some

of the aruba instant on products right

we use we use inky for email security

right i would love to have that this way

right let i want to let the tools do

what they’re designed to do to limit the

amount of uh time that we have to go and

do it right so right um and that like i

said that’s what i always tell them they

always ask me what else could we do i’m

like roll out inspectors faster right so

um you know i i am pretty active on the

on their on their ideas board um i do

they do listen to you guys

or they do listen to their community i i

can tell you that cause uh this bunch of

the stuff i’ve voted on

has been implemented and they do they do

take that serious where some other

vendors invite you

yeah some of their other vendors they

just tell you you know hey go uh go vote

on the idea and you look at the idea and

it’s got 2500 votes and it’s been around

for five years but they’re not making

any progress on it right so why am i

gonna go vote why am i gonna make it

2501 that that’s not going to tip the

the scale at all right

um so lion guard i you know i’m not

saying they do everything but you know

they they do listen to their community

they do the weekly or monthly calls

about what’s coming out

um so it’s important to to be part of

that as well

do you find that it talks um i know you

mentioned that when it pulls into it

glows just going to create a flexible

asset do you find it talks about a

hoodoo compared to it google

so

i would say no um

just because

when we we started out with lion guard

before hoodoo or it glue and then when

we chose

um

a true documentation system we went hudu

first and the connection was not there

when uh when we started with hoodoo

but they they had developed it and it’s

it’s

i don’t remember why we stopped the

connection there

but i would say

you know

from knowing it glue i would i would

think it’s more i.t glue not allowing

that stuff to go into flexible assets

and not going yeah going into the

flexible assets that they’ve set up

as opposed to its lion guard not being

able to push it there because lion

guard’s gonna push it wherever i t glue

allows it um i’m just saying that

because we’ve had other issues with it

glue

where you know like connect wise it you

know you can’t do certain things because

they only allow like their vsa to do it

so that would be my assumption

um but the data looks very similar in in

either platform

um so what we’re seeing now is really

the inspectors dashboard right correct

yep this is where you would come in

and you would

you know click on on an inspector right

you set it up

they do do parent child relationships

for the majority of their inspectors

there are some that are just not

um available right because the systems

are not set up in that in that manner

um so yeah sometimes you have to go in

and uh

you know configure each one

individually which

you know sucks but you know if you got

your onboarding process down properly

it’s you know it should be pretty easy

to

um to just go in and add so this is one

of the ones that there’s no child

relationship set up for this is the

information that they pull from have you

been pawned

so as part of our onboarding process of

a new client uh we just come in here and

we’ll we’ll add them all manually

right and i mean a lot of it i mean most

of it is automated once you first set it

up right sorry

yeah yeah once it’s set up right i’m not

coming back into that inspector right so

yeah i know we probably saw that that

failed

uh you know there’s uh yeah there are

failed inspectors at times that that

stuff tends to to re-run um on its next

cycle and and get it cleared up so yeah

just a reminder to everyone watching in

um please feel free to ask your

questions um i’m sure matthew would

love to give you an answer if you can

yeah it’s funny

oh that’s a nice no-name knock on it

glue’s id form yeah it’s not just like

i’ll be honest with you i mean

i’ve seen it in

so many other platforms as well um

just reason why i pointed out that lion

guard does listen because i’ve seen them

actually make traction

based on those votes so but yeah i i you

know that is if anybody’s on any of

those it glue like email chains

sometimes and they’re saying this out or

that out and

they start to get pretty funny so yeah

let’s let’s rewind the clock a bit i

mean you’ve been using lion guard for a

while now i mean you active on the

discussion forums and you sort of you

know towards the exploit end of the

spectrum but when you first started um

and i know they were different then but

can you think of

what you found difficult like and this

would be thinking of someone who’s you

know watching right now it’s considering

lion guard and have no clue how to start

yeah so for us

we when it was pitched early on it was

you know onboarding

is is not very long um from what i

remember and i remember having a

conversation with my account manager at

the time who’s not my account manager

anymore but who is still with the

company and he acts like how long did it

really take and i said it you know it

took us probably a good three weeks

to fully understand the capabilities

and

really get everything rolled out

and just say okay this is what we want

to do for this customer and this is how

we want to do it and what not right um

like i said a lot of it is

is is a lot more automated now right so

the m365 one right we had to create one

for

viticrete um the api permissions or the

enterprise app for office 365 we had to

create one for azure active directory we

had to create one for teams we had to

create one for sharepoint right now i

think it’s it’s just all encompassing

so it did take us that amount of time um

and then you know to understand what

what actionable alerts

or what data you want to be alerted on

or what change you want to be alerted on

on some of these inspectors

is

it was the other thing right we’re just

thinking oh yeah it’s going to alert us

on everything and that’s you know that’s

not the case i mean lion guard does give

you

um a good amount of actionable alerts

based on

you know each inspector

right so

like for windows workstation so these

endpoints right these are everything

that we could turn on

right so i don’t i don’t

i won’t turn on

i don’t want to get notified if it’s got

15 percent less free space because our

rmn’s telling us that already right we

don’t use defender so i turn that one

off right um

is it the default when you start just

everything is on

uh yeah so you gotta you need to spend

time and come in here

and say okay i want to turn this on

right so we we don’t use webroot so i

turn all the web root ones off

i don’t have to it doesn’t matter it’s

just that that’s just the way we like it

but right so here’s a windows inspector

ip address you know modified

right domain modified right so these are

machine warranties expired so i can

literally turn everything on

if i wanted to and i think that’s what

we did initially but

we learned very quickly that you know

some of it

is just how the environment is set up

some of it doesn’t matter

right um so i would say yeah the

onboarding does you know

uh

the onboarding process just be prepared

it’s if you can

if you can provide or you know give the

necessary time to fully understand how

it goes i think in the long run

it does make things a lot easier and

gives you a better understanding of

what’s going on and how you can utilize

the system so

okay that’s um that’s definitely good

advice someone looking to start out

um i’ve come across names that sort of

do you know elements of

the whole spectrum of stuff that line

guard does but

i mean correct me if i’m wrong i don’t i

don’t think there’s anyone who leads the

whole spectrum of automation like they

do but is there anyone you’ve heard of

you’ve considered

there there there’s not anybody that

i’ve found or that that is doing exactly

what this is someone had mentioned

something to me

one time

and it was a software that i guess was

like from like 20 years ago and that

i’ve never heard of and i honestly don’t

even remember

um you know you are starting to see

some of what lion guard does

for us specifically we are starting to

see some of it in it blue

they do have the office 365

connection now which will go out and do

and

to go out and pull the license

information into its own flexible asset

it’s not it’s not alerting us um i’ve

never investigated if it could

but uh

right and they have i t glue has the

meraki inspector which will you know

pull that information in as well

it’s not alerting us if like firmware

has been updated or vlan was added or

whatnot and that’s where like lion guard

is

is is really helping out right so even

with like sentinel one we

get that from uh from a third party

vendor with a with a sock 24 7 sock and

when we first got engaged with them

for them it was some false positives

that they didn’t need to notify us about

but we had lion guard and you know

inspectors set up and we’re getting

these notifications saying hey yeah

there’s you know there’s something going

on over here it’s unresolved it’s

unresolved

so it allowed us to really be very

diligent and say hey go back to the

event hey what’s going on here because

you guys aren’t notifying us we’d like

to be modified and it was just it helped

us with that vendor just really be

better engaged and understand what their

process is

and helped us you know really add to our

process of of vendor analysis and and

whatnot so

yeah

that’s awesome um

i don’t see any questions coming in so

probably move towards wrapping this up

um this was awesome i mean for me as

well um this is one of the conversations

that keep keeps coming up in iitw you’ve

seen so yourself matthew

and i’m sure people will have questions

as this sits there uh and you can come

into

i think in your own words start the pot

that’s right i love stirring a pot

um did you know that alan is publishing

a book i did not

yeah we’ve

got the

process and the other keyword um that is

um on its way so if anyone’s watching is

interested uh please go to

eurekaprocess.com scan the qr code

that’s on the screen right now

or eurekaprocess.com

pre-order and you’ll get on the list and

we’ll notify you when it’s ready

um i’ve gone through about half of the

book myself and it’s a it’s a great read

um especially so if you’re in the msp

field yourself

and we have a bunch of events coming up

um offline we will be at the channel pro

assembly from southeastern charlotte

north carolina on 8th and 9th of august

and then join us for a few drinks uh at

an industry meetup next day on the 10th

and we’ll also be in dc uh washington dc

on the 8th of september

again uh and no secret that we love to

have a good time and connect with people

so please do meet us there if you’re

around

the next it the last wednesday of july

which is the 27th will be about

documenting kpis specifically using

brightgage to do that and i i’m very

excited about that because we’re having

joe torso uh he’s a new member of our

team uh

immense amount of experience and he’ll

be the one who’s hosting that um and

then august we’ll be having new employee

onboarding uh we’ll have over on brooke

talking to you about that as well

so thank you again matthew that was uh a

very good use of everyone’s time who was

on here today and uh please do

pop into it i can see if there any

questions later on in the days and weeks

to come

awesome man i appreciate the invite and

allowing me to uh

kind of demo and tell you guys how it uh

how lion guard works for us man

thank you appreciate it

thank you