Why we are building OpsLantern

Every serious ops team has the same unwritten rule: two or three senior engineers carry the real operational knowledge, and everyone else files tickets through them. Vacations stretch response times. Resignations walk institutional memory out the door. Documentation exists, but it lives in personal Notion pages, DM threads, and the occasional half-updated Confluence wiki.

Meanwhile the work keeps expanding. Windows Server, Linux, VMware, Proxmox, Hyper-V, Azure, Microsoft 365, Huawei Cloud, cPanel, Plesk, Exchange, MailEnable, ModusGate, FortiMail, MSSQL, MySQL. Each with its own console. Its own credential. Its own retention window. Its own secret incantation to fix the thing that breaks every three months.

We built OpsLantern because we were tired of that model.

What every RMM gets wrong

The dominant RMM tools — NinjaOne, Atera, N-able, ConnectWise, Kaseya — are really workstation-management platforms with server features bolted on. They excel at patching endpoints, opening tickets, and running scripts. They stop at “run this script” for anything deeper. The real server work — the virtualization, databases, mail, hosting panels, cloud planes — is still an RDP session or a terminal.

That means the senior engineers are still the ones executing every non-trivial action. The RMM just tells them which hosts to log into.

What OpsLantern does differently

Three things, mainly.

First, the action catalog. Every meaningful operation across every stack — service restart, disk expand, AG failover, snapshot consolidation, Postfix queue surgery, cPanel account transfer, Azure NSG diff — is a first-class, metadata-described action. Parameters are typed. Pre-checks are declared. Rollbacks are automatic. The engineer thinks “expand the LVM” and clicks; OpsLantern knows which commands to run, on which host, with which snapshot, verified which way.

Second, the Known-Error Database. Every log parser ships with a library of fingerprints — matched patterns mapped to explanations, ranked solutions, and one-click remediations. “Page checksum mismatch on MSSQL” does not send you to a forum. It sends you to a three-step plan with the exact command to run, authored by someone who has done it in production.

Third, seeded content. OpsLantern is useful the minute you install it. Hundreds of monitors, runbooks, hardening checks, and actions ship in the box. Your team extends the library — they do not build it from zero.

What we will not build

No endpoint RMM. No SIEM. No ticketing engine. No generic monitoring platform. We integrate with your existing stack for all of that.

The only workstation scope we accept is Microsoft 365 and Intune — because those are cloud control planes, not endpoint agents. They fit our model without diluting it.

Who this is for

If you run hundreds of servers, if your team is three to thirty operators, if you have ever switched between six browser tabs and four terminals to resolve one incident, if you have ever caught yourself pasting the same SQL query into SSMS across twelve customer databases — OpsLantern is for you.

Private beta is open now. We are taking the first fifty MSPs and in-house ops teams. Write to hello@opslantern.com.

Light on every server.