The Remote Access Tool You're Already Paying For Twice
Most MSPs pay for remote access capability twice — once inside their RMM's (remote monitoring and management platform's) per-technician licensing, and again through a dedicated MSP remote access tool bought to fill the gaps that RMM remote access leaves behind. Netmon includes integrated remote access directly inside its multi-tenant network monitoring platform, at no additional license, which removes the second bill entirely and gives technicians one login instead of two.
Here's a question worth asking at your next renewal meeting: how many places in your stack do you currently pay for the ability to click a button and land inside a client's machine?
If you're like most of the managed service providers we talk to, the honest answer is "two." Maybe three, if someone on the team still has a personal license for an old favourite they refuse to give up. There's the remote-access feature bolted onto your RMM, which is fine until it isn't. And there's the standalone remote-access tool your team actually reaches for, because it's faster, or it handles multi-monitor setups properly, or it doesn't disconnect every time a client's Wi-Fi hiccups.
Quick answer:
You are, in other words, running a subscription for a feature you already believe you own.
The invoice nobody questions
Software vendors are exceptionally good at a particular kind of magic trick: bundling a feature into a platform's headline price, then charging separately for the version of that feature people actually want to use. Remote access is the industry's best example. Almost every RMM on the market ships with "remote access included." Read the fine print and you'll usually find one of three catches: it's metered per session, it's capped at a low concurrency limit, or it's just slow enough that your technicians quietly stopped trusting it around the third support ticket where a client watched the cursor lag half a second behind every click.
So a second tool gets bought. Somebody on the leadership team signs off on it because the alternative — technicians losing ten minutes per ticket fighting with laggy sessions — costs more in labour than the license fee. That's a rational decision in isolation. It is also, cumulatively, how a ten-person MSP ends up paying for six different tools that each do one job adequately, instead of one platform that does five jobs well.
We built Netmon around a stubborn belief: if a monitoring platform already has an authenticated agent sitting on a client's network, watching device health in real time, that same agent is the most natural point in the world to also hand you a remote session. The infrastructure for "this platform knows exactly where every device is and whether it's online" is identical to the infrastructure needed for "click here to connect to it." Splitting those two jobs across two products was never a technical necessity. It was a licensing decision, made by vendors who realised a long time ago that remote access is sticky — once a technician's muscle memory is trained on a tool, they'll defend it in every renewal conversation, regardless of what it costs the business.
What "integrated" actually has to mean
There's a meaningful difference between a monitoring tool that has a remote-access button somewhere in its menu, and one where remote access is a first-class citizen of the platform. The test is simple: can a technician go from "this device is alerting" to "I'm inside this device" without opening a second application, re-authenticating, or hunting for a machine name in a different inventory?
Inside Netmon, the answer is yes, by design. Every device Netmon's agent discovers on a client network — workstation, server, or otherwise — carries its live status, its performance history, and a direct remote-access session, all from the same dashboard. There's no separate remote-access license to provision per technician, no separate agent to deploy, and no separate portal to remember a password for. One agent per site does the discovery, the monitoring, and the access.
That matters more than it sounds, for three reasons that show up directly on your bottom line.
First, it removes a recurring cost that scales with headcount.
Most standalone remote-access tools price per technician, per month. Add a technician, add a license. Over a few years, that's not a rounding error — it's a material chunk of your tooling budget, for a capability your monitoring platform was already halfway to providing.
Second, it removes a step from every single ticket.
Multiply the ten seconds it takes to switch applications, find the right device, and re-authenticate by the number of remote sessions your team opens in a week. For a busy MSP, that's hours of technician time per month spent context-switching between tools that should have been one tool from the start.
Third — and this is the one leadership tends to underweight — it removes a point of failure from your client relationships.
Every extra login is an extra place where credentials go stale, where MFA prompts get missed, where a technician on a client call has to say "one second, let me switch tools" while the clock on that call keeps running. Clients don't see your tool stack. They see a technician who either solved their problem in ninety seconds or fumbled through three application switches to do it.
The economics of "good enough" remote access
We should be honest about the objection here, because it's a fair one: doesn't a dedicated remote-access product do the job better than a feature built into a monitoring platform?
Sometimes, yes — for edge cases. If your business genuinely depends on remote-access features that go far beyond what any monitoring platform reasonably needs to offer, that's a legitimate reason to keep a specialist tool. But for the overwhelming majority of MSP support work — a technician needs to see a screen, move a mouse, install a patch, or walk a frustrated user through a settings menu — "good enough and included" beats "excellent and billed separately," every single time you do the maths across a full technician roster.
This is the same logic that killed the standalone fax machine, the standalone GPS unit, and the standalone MP3 player. Not because dedicated devices couldn't do their one job better than a phone could. They could, for a while. But "better at one thing, bought and maintained separately" loses to "good enough at several things, already in your pocket" once the good-enough option clears a certain quality bar. Remote access inside a monitoring platform has, for most MSP workloads, cleared that bar.
What this looks like on a Tuesday afternoon
Consider the ordinary shape of an MSP's day. A workstation on a client site starts throwing intermittent connectivity errors. Netmon's agent, already watching that device's latency and packet loss continuously, flags the anomaly and opens a ticket automatically. A technician picks up the ticket from the same dashboard where the alert appeared, sees the device's full history — is this new, or has it been degrading for three weeks — and, without switching tools, opens a remote session to the machine directly from that ticket.
No searching a separate remote-access console for the right hostname. No re-authenticating against a second identity provider. No explaining to a new hire why the remote tool shows a different device list than the monitoring tool, because the client renamed a machine last month and only one of the two systems picked it up. The technician goes from alert to hands-on-keyboard in the time it takes to click twice.
That workflow compounds. Across a technician team running dozens of tickets a day, across dozens of client sites, the minutes saved per ticket become hours saved per week, and the licenses not renewed become real money back in the business.
Multi-tenant remote access done properly
There's a security dimension here too, and it's one that standalone remote-access tools often handle poorly when an MSP is managing many clients at once. When remote access lives inside a genuinely multi-tenant monitoring platform, session access is scoped to the client the device belongs to, by construction — not by a permissions setting a technician has to remember to apply correctly every time. A technician logged into Netmon sees the devices for the clients they're authorised to support, and nothing else. There's no shared device list across tenants to accidentally connect to the wrong machine, and no separate remote-access address book to keep synchronised with your actual client roster as it changes.
That isolation isn't a bolt-on feature. It's the natural consequence of building remote access on top of a platform that was already multi-tenant from day one, rather than retrofitting tenant separation onto a remote-access tool that was originally designed for a single organisation to manage its own machines.
Onboarding a new technician just got shorter
There's a second-order cost to running two tools for one job that rarely makes it into a budget spreadsheet: training time. Every new hire on your service desk has to learn not just your monitoring platform's quirks, but a second application's login flow, its keyboard shortcuts, its particular way of listing devices, and its own set of permissions to be configured by whoever handles onboarding that week. Multiply that by however many technicians you hire in a year, and "just learn the second tool too" stops being a five-minute aside in a new-hire's first week and starts being a recurring tax on your onboarding process.
Collapsing monitoring and remote access into one platform collapses that training curve too. A new technician learns one login, one device list, one way of moving from "something's wrong" to "I'm looking at the machine." There's no separate remote-access manual to write, no separate permissions matrix to keep in sync with your monitoring platform's client assignments, and no awkward first week where a new hire has device access in one tool but not the other because somebody forgot to provision the second license.
For MSPs that hire seasonally, or that lean on subcontracted technicians for overflow work, this matters more than it looks like on paper. A subcontractor who needs read-only visibility into a client's network for a single engagement is a much simpler access request when there's one platform to grant access to, rather than two separate systems each needing their own careful, client-scoped permission set.
What your renewal conversation should actually ask
Most tooling renewals get rubber-stamped because the alternative — actually auditing what each line item does and whether it overlaps with something else in the stack — takes an afternoon nobody has spare. But a remote-access renewal is exactly the kind of decision worth that afternoon, because the overlap is usually total. It is rare to find an MSP running a standalone remote-access tool that does something their monitoring platform's integrated access genuinely cannot.
The question worth putting to your own team, honestly, is not "is our remote-access tool good?" Most of them are. The question is "what is it doing that an integrated, no-extra-license alternative inside our monitoring platform wouldn't also do, for the workload we actually have?" For most support tickets, the honest answer is nothing — which makes the second invoice a cost with no corresponding benefit, sitting quietly on your books every month until someone asks the question.
The real cost of "we'll sort the licensing later"
We hear a version of the same story from almost every MSP who switches to a consolidated platform: the standalone remote-access tool wasn't chosen deliberately. It was adopted years ago, by whoever was setting up the stack at the time, because it was the popular option or a colleague recommended it. Nobody has revisited that decision since, because revisiting a tool a whole technician team already knows how to use feels riskier than just renewing it.
That inertia is understandable. It's also expensive, quietly, every month, for years. The fix isn't asking your team to give up a tool they like for nothing in return — it's giving them a workflow that's actually faster, because the remote session opens from the same place the alert did, with the same device context already loaded. Technicians tend to adopt that change quickly, because it removes friction from their day rather than adding a new tool to learn.
Where to start
If you want a genuinely low-effort way to see how much overlap exists in your current stack, list every place in your toolset where "remote access" appears as a line item — your RMM's included tier, your standalone remote tool's invoice, and any per-technician add-ons layered on top of either. Add up what that list costs annually. Then compare it against what a single multi-tenant platform with remote access built in would cost for the same technician count.
For most MSPs we've talked to, that comparison is the moment the decision makes itself.
FAQ: Remote access and MSP tool consolidation
No. Netmon remote access is included as part of the core platform — there's no separate per-technician remote-access license to provision, on top of what you already pay for monitoring, and no separate MSP remote access tool to source elsewhere.
Technicians see and access only the devices belonging to clients they're authorised to support. Multi-tenant isolation is enforced at the platform level, so there's no shared device list to navigate around.
One agent per site handles device discovery, live monitoring, and remote access. There's no second agent to deploy solely for remote-access purposes.
For the majority of day-to-day support tickets — patching, troubleshooting, walking a user through a fix — integrated remote access covers the workload well. MSPs with highly specialised remote-support requirements outside typical break/fix and proactive maintenance work should evaluate their specific use case against what any monitoring-integrated tool offers.
