The Case for Open-Source RMM - From a Real MSP

Control and visibility, not cost. Founder Colm Whelan says commercial RMMs left his team unable to troubleshoot agent or server problems, with everything cloud-hosted by a third party and no insight into the security behind it. TacticalRMM gave Rockfield back the full end-to-end process - the savings were a bonus, not the reason.

Colm Whelan is the founder of Rockfield IT Services, an MSP in the east of Ireland, and marks 30 years in IT this year. A former psychiatric nurse who turned an IT hobby into a business in 1996, he founded Rockfield in 2004 and was the first guest on the OpenMSP Podcast.

Four years, self-hosted, across roughly 200 to 250 endpoints. Colm describes it as simple to monitor, maintain, and script for, and says he has needed support only about twice in that time - the reliability trade-off skeptics expect never materialized.

An open-source-obsessed DevOps hire got Rockfield onto TacticalRMM. He has since moved on, and Colm says AI coding tools now handle much of what once needed a dedicated DevOps engineer, softening the curve - though serious integration or automation work would still justify the hire.

Yes - he can see an entirely open-source MSP serving entirely open-source businesses within six to ten years. He credits the shift to open-source developers finally prioritizing user experience, and to mixed open-plus-commercial models that let maintainers make a real living.

Make sure it works commercially and operationally for both you and your clients. If a tool saves time or money without reducing functionality or security - or actually increases them - reach out and take it immediately. Principle alone isn't enough; the bigger picture has to make sense.

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