Team: Huntress EDR
Product: N-Able N-Central (formerly SolarWinds MSP)
Environment: Windows Server 2008 and newer, Windows Vista and newer
Summary: Deploy Huntress quickly and automatically using your N-able N-central Automation Manager

This guide is meant to provide a basic overview of deploying the Huntress Agent using N-able N-central (formerly SolarWinds MSP). While we are not able to offer comprehensive support for N-central, there is documentation available related to N-central Policies.

This Automation Policy was created on version 2.16.0.1 of Automation Manager, it may not work with older versions of N-central. We have seen errors when trying to run the policy and the version of N-central does not match the version of the N-Able agent.

When this policy is run it will prompt for an Organization Key. This is a unique key to identify each of your clients (referred to as a "customer" within N-central) within the Huntress console. Using this method requires scheduling the script individually per customer.

If you know of a way to streamline this process please let us know at support@huntress.io. We want to make deployment as simple as possible.

Installing any product should be a breeze and that's especially true with Huntress. We've created an Automation Policy for N-able N-central that will install the Huntress agent on 32 and 64-bit Windows systems (Vista/Server 2008 and above) without any user interruptions or reboots. This is a two-step process that involves:

1. Downloading and Importing the Huntress Deployment Policy (Automation Policy)
2. Scheduling the Policy to Run
3. Troubleshooting

Download and Import the Huntress Deployment Policy

1. Download the Huntress Agent Deployment policy from our GitHub repository. The file is XML so the browser displays the contents. From the "Save as" dialog, save the file as "Huntress Deployment Policy.amp" for use with N-Central.
   
2. In the N-able dashboard, at the Service Organization (SO) level, expand "Configuration" > "Scheduled Tasks" and click "Script/Software Repository". Then click the "Add" button and select "Automation Policy".
3. Next, on the Add Script/Software Repository Item page browse to the Huntress Deployment Policy file you just downloaded and click the OK button.

Schedule the Policy to Run

Because you will likely want each customer to appear as a separate organization within Huntress you will need to schedule each customer individually.

1. To schedule the Automation Policy, navigate to the desired customer, expand "Actions", and click "Run an Automation Policy
   .
2. On the "Details" tab of the AUTOMATION POLICY TASK page, select the "Huntress Deployment Policy" from the Repository Item dropdown. Enter your Account Key in the "Account Key" field and a unique identifier for the customer in the "Organization Key" field. The Organization Key is used to associate agents with an organization (customer):
3. On the "Targets" tabs of the AUTOMATION POLICY TASK page, select the devices you want to deploy Huntress to:
   
4. On the "Schedule" tab of the AUTOMATION POLICY TASK page, chose when to run the task ("Now" will run immediately). Optionally, set the number of days the task will remain active so that any offline hosts will run the task when they come back online. Finally, click "Save".
   

The task will be queued and start executing. The policy itself does error checking to ensure that the Account Key was set and other validation to verify the installer was downloaded from the Huntress website and installed properly. If you encounter any errors please send the deployment log to support@huntress.io.

Troubleshooting

If the task fails or runs but the agent was not installed, the N-central logs may provide additional details.

On the "Scheduled Tasks" page you can click the link in the "Status" column.

The "Status" page should provide additional details and a zip file containing log information.

Need something else?

The N-able N-central Huntress Install Script is written in the N-able Language (.amp). You can view the source here.

If you need any assistance from Huntress, or if you notice a step that's missing, please contact us at support@huntress.io.