We've been quietly building something significant behind the scenes. Over the past year, EB IT Support has developed two new in-house software tools — EBMA and AdHoc Remote — designed to replace third-party RMM platforms and bring smarter, faster, and more personalised support directly to your devices.

For many years, like most IT support companies, we have relied on third-party Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software to keep an eye on our customers' computers. These platforms do the job — but they come with significant drawbacks: high subscription costs, limited customisation, data being stored on external servers, and a "one size fits all" approach that doesn't always reflect how we work or what our customers actually need.

That's why we made the decision to build our own. EBMA — short for EB Monitoring Agent — is our custom-built RMM platform. It's a small, lightweight piece of software that runs quietly in the background on a monitored PC, reporting health data back to our dashboard in real time. Alongside EBMA, we've built AdHoc Remote, a secure on-demand remote access tool for situations where a customer needs quick help without a pre-installed agent.

This isn't just a technical exercise — it's a meaningful step forward in the quality of service we can offer. By owning our own tooling, we can move faster, respond smarter, and keep your data entirely within our control.

The EBMA agent is a small program that runs as a Windows service, periodically sending a health report back to our dashboard. It's designed to be invisible to the user — you'll never notice it's running — but from our end, we get a continuous picture of how your machine is performing.

🔥 CPU Usage

Tracks processor load in real time. Alerts us at 75% (warning) and 90% (critical) so we can investigate before a slowdown becomes a problem.

💾 Memory (RAM)

Monitors how much RAM is in use. High memory usage is often an early sign of a runaway process, memory leak, or the need for a hardware upgrade.

💿 Disk Space

Watches every drive on the machine. Alerts before disks fill up — a full disk can cause crashes, failed updates, and data loss with no warning.

🌡️ Temperature

Reads CPU temperature data. Overheating is a leading cause of hardware failure and is often invisible to the user until it's too late.

🔄 Windows Updates

Counts pending system updates. Security patches are critical — we'll flag machines that are falling behind before they become a vulnerability.

🔴 Offline Detection

If a monitored machine stops checking in for 15 minutes, we're automatically alerted. This helps us spot unexpected shutdowns or network issues quickly.

How Alerts Work — and Why They Matter

The real power of EBMA isn't just the monitoring — it's what happens when something goes wrong. The system is built around a tiered alert system with two severity levels: Warning and Critical. Rather than waiting for a customer to call us with a problem, we receive an alert the moment a threshold is crossed.

When an alert fires, our team is notified instantly via our internal dashboard — a bell notification, a browser push notification, and an email to our support inbox. The alert includes the machine's name, what the problem is, the exact reading that triggered it, and a direct link to that machine's health page so we can investigate immediately.

Alert severity levels:

• Warning — The metric has crossed a threshold that warrants attention. Not immediately dangerous, but something we'll investigate and monitor closely. Example: CPU at 78%, disk at 83% full, 25 pending Windows updates.
• Critical — The metric has reached a level that requires prompt action. Example: drive 91% full, CPU temperature over 90°C, machine offline for 15+ minutes.
• Resolved — Alerts clear themselves automatically when the issue drops back below the warning threshold. Our team always knows the current state of every machine — not just that something went wrong, but whether it's since recovered.

"The goal isn't to react to problems after they happen. It's to know about them before the customer even notices anything is wrong."

From Reactive Support to Proactive Care

The traditional model of IT support is reactive: something breaks, you call us, we fix it. This model works, but it's not ideal — downtime has already happened, data may already be at risk, and the fix is often more expensive and disruptive than prevention would have been.

EBMA enables a fundamentally different approach. By watching key health metrics continuously, we can identify machines that are heading towards a problem and address them before they fail. This is what the industry calls preventative maintenance — and it's now something we can offer as standard for monitored customers.

Examples of preventative maintenance in action:

• A machine running at 91% disk capacity will grind to a halt when it fills completely. Without monitoring, you'd have no idea until the day it stops working. With EBMA, we see the critical alert, reach out, and clear the space before anything fails.
• A laptop running consistently hot is at serious risk of hardware damage. EBMA flags the warning before the chip throttles or the machine shuts itself down.
• A server with 40 outstanding Windows security updates is a vulnerability waiting to be exploited. We know about it and can schedule patching before it becomes a problem.
• A machine that goes offline overnight unexpectedly — EBMA alerts us within 15 minutes, so we can investigate whether it's a power issue, a crash, or something more serious.

For our managed IT customers, this means fewer emergency call-outs, less downtime, and hardware that lasts longer — because problems that would have gone unnoticed for weeks or months are now caught in minutes.

AdHoc Remote — Support Without Installation

EBMA is designed for machines we manage on an ongoing basis. But sometimes a customer needs remote help quickly, on a computer that doesn't have a permanent agent installed — a laptop they've borrowed, a home PC, or a machine they've just bought. That's where AdHoc Remote comes in.

AdHoc Remote is a lightweight, one-time-use tool. A customer downloads a small executable, runs it, and receives a six-digit session code. They read us that code, we enter it on our dashboard, and we're connected to their screen within seconds. No installation, no accounts, no configuration — and once the session ends, the software closes and leaves no trace on the machine.

How a session works:

• Customer downloads AdHoc Remote (a single small .exe file)
• Runs it — no installation required
• Receives a unique 6-digit session code on screen
• Reads the code to our engineer over phone or via their support ticket
• We connect via an encrypted relay — we can see and control their screen
• We resolve the issue
• Session ends — the tool closes automatically and leaves nothing behind

The session cannot be reconnected to without the customer's active involvement — they must run the tool again and share a new code. Our engineers can also initiate AdHoc sessions directly from an open support ticket, and the full session details — duration, device diagnostics, technician name — are automatically logged back to the ticket.

Why We're Building Our Own Tools

Third-party RMM platforms charge per device, per month. As our customer base grows, those costs escalate — and ultimately, they work their way into what we charge. By building our own tooling, we remove that overhead entirely.

More importantly, third-party tools are built for the average IT company. We're not average — we've spent over 15 years developing a very specific way of working with our customers, and generic software rarely maps cleanly onto that. When we build our own, every feature exists because we needed it, and every alert goes exactly where we want it to go.

There's also a data question. When you use a third-party RMM, diagnostic data from your machines is stored on that company's servers — often abroad. With EBMA, everything stays on our own infrastructure, hosted in the UK, under our direct control.

The key benefits of our in-house approach:

• Your data stays in the UK, on our servers — not on a third-party platform abroad
• Alerts are fully integrated with our ticketing and notification systems
• Thresholds can be customised per machine based on its role and specifications
• No per-device licence costs — savings we can pass on to customers
• Session notes are automatically logged to the relevant support ticket
• Built specifically for how EB IT Support works, not for a generic IT company
• When something needs fixing or improving, we can do it ourselves immediately

Still in Development — What's Coming Next

Both EBMA and AdHoc Remote are currently in active development and internal testing. We're rolling them out carefully and incrementally. Here's what we're working towards:

• Monthly Health Reports — Automated monthly summaries showing your machine's health trends over time, delivered to your customer portal.
• Automated Maintenance Tasks — Scheduled disk cleanup, update installation, and startup optimisation — tasks we can push to your machine without disturbing you.
• Customer Alerts (Optional) — Notifications so you can see your own machine's health alerts, not just us. Transparency into what we're monitoring.
• Software Inventory — A full record of what's installed on each machine — useful for licence audits, upgrade planning, and security reviews.

A Note on Data & Privacy

We know that every new piece of software raises questions — especially software that runs on your computer. We want to be completely transparent: EBMA collects hardware health data only. It does not read files, monitor browsing activity, access documents, or record anything personal. Its sole purpose is to tell us how the machine is performing.

This is one part of a broader push to bring more of our tooling in-house — from our ticketing and customer portal system (already fully custom-built) through to monitoring, remote access, and eventually our own backup solutions. The goal is the same throughout: better, faster, more personal service, without relying on third parties who don't know you the way we do.

We'll keep you updated as EBMA and AdHoc Remote continue to develop. As always, if you have questions, ideas, or feedback — we genuinely want to hear from you.