Using RMM for the DLH Aloha POS Agent

DLH has released its latest version of the Aloha POS agent for restaurant, retail, and hospitality customers of NCR using the legacy Aloha POS system.

The problem statement is that hundreds of NCR customers are still operating their organization’s point of sale systems on what is known as the legacy POS system. This legacy POS system and structure has been around since the early 2000’s and comprises a decentralized system for capturing sales. Over the years many different types of solutions plagued restaurants and retail operations trying to establish a consistent protocol for extracting the POS data in a timely manner to provide integration with data from other operational systems, payroll, HR, etc. And even now as organizations are attempting to move towards a more modern solution there is a gap to transition while maintaining integrity and conducting necessary comparisons during their transformation or segue to next challenge

Aloha POS customers are using the DLH Aloha POS agent for purposes from basic to advanced in order to facilitate better operational data pipelines and confidence in reporting. More advanced options that are seen are using the data to enable AI journey initiatives which includes better and near real-time forecasting, BOH AI initiatives such as computer vision, and other innovative efforts particular to the organization.

The biggest use case we see with the agent is for developing a restaurant data warehouse for restaurant operations reporting. The mutual customer can also use other payroll and HR and/or other POS connectors to integrate all of their restaurant data seamlessly under the DLH platform to enable a data warehouse or data lakehouse footprint. The DLH platform works with advanced data team customers who may have Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric or Synapse and can get the integrations working in less than a few hours.

Since the DLH Agent is priced for restaurant, retail, and hospitality customers on a per location basis, the solution aligns with existing operational expense costing that is familiar and just feels right.

Implementing the DLH Aloha POS Agent

The agent is available to customers today. DLH implores customers to use an onboarding process where alignment with their existing POS administrators work with DLH’s customer success team to ensure a successful initial deployment after understanding their current needs, footprint, and scope of their ultimate goals.

Benefits of Implementing the DLH Aloha POS Agent

The main benefit is that as a NCR Aloha customer using legacy Aloha POS or migrating to the latest Voyix configurations, DLH.io has you covered. By continuously extracting data you can examine your data in day parts, in near real-time, or like most groups for reporting a day behind. By moving this data into a data lake or a data warehouse you give your team complete access to the raw data by store, by date, etc. And your team does not have to worry about maintaining yet another data feed, or pay expensive software costs for onboarding a hodge podge solution.

Why should I use the DLH POS Agent?

Using the agent puts the control into your team's hands. By using the agent you can rely on a battle tested solution that can be deployed using RMM strategies and align with your legacy support and any Legacy or current implementation standards most companies have an infrastructure and a Windows support team that has implemented the Aloha configuration manager by necessity and has owned the solution for years usually. the POS agent extends your infrastructure teams capability by allowing a Windows native solution to integrate side by side with the NCR Aloha solution which expedites time to solution and time to delivering data to your internal customers

Is the Aloha POS Agent Remote Management (RMM) Enabled?

Out of the box the DLH Aloha POS Agent comes with a deployment capability that allows your team to use its RMM best practices for distributing the agent to any of the configuration management servers in a matter of minutes. Once the DLH Aloha POS initial configuration is tested on one server it can be replicated to all of your Aloha backend servers quickly and easily manually (not recommended) or by RMM (Recommended).

Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) for Windows servers is a specialized software solution that enables IT professionals, system administrators, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to monitor, manage, and secure Windows-based servers, workstations, and network devices remotely from a single, centralized console. It shifts IT from a reactive "break-fix" model to a proactive approach, identifying and resolving issues before they cause downtime. Since most organizations using Aloha POS have already installed their standard RMM system on each Windows server they are already able to perform the following:

Proactive Monitoring & Alerting: Continuously tracks key metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, disk space, and network performance, generating alerts for thresholds.

Patch Management: Automates the deployment of Windows OS patches and third-party application updates to ensure servers are secure and compliant.

Remote Access & Troubleshooting: Allows technicians to remotely connect to a server (often in the background without interrupting the user) to fix problems, check logs, or run diagnostics.

Automation & Scripting: Uses PowerShell or other scripts to automate routine maintenance tasks, such as clearing logs, restarting services, or cleaning up temporary files.

Asset Management: Provides a comprehensive inventory of hardware and software across all managed servers.

Most organizations either have an internal infrastructure Windows Server management team (or person) as well as the capability to deliver RMM. Aloha POS agent customers needing assistance are covered by the DLH support team who can assist with any matters related to deploying the agent across a multitude of servers / brands.

Is there a data relationship diagram or entity relationship diagram (ERD)

DLH is the only partner company in the world that supplies an ERD diagram showing the relationship between the data that's provided by the Aloha POS system. This data is used by hundreds of Aloha POS customers across the globe. DLH feels very strongly about how the Aloha POS data should be implemented but the core data relationships can be seen in the screenshot and more exploration interactively can be done by navigating to the dlh.io website at this link, https://datalakehouse.io/docs/connectors/applications/aloha-pos

How to download the Aloha POS Agent?

As a customer of DLH, and working with our customer success team, you will be able to download the Aloha POS agent through a secure provided link in our support portal. The download includes instructions which are in plain English with step-by-step instruction and screenshots as well as examples for setup, configuration scheduling, and implementation with even the most advanced Aloha POS configuration management deployments.

What to expect from the DLH.io Aloha POS Agent?

Once you download the POS agent you can expect to work with our customers success team and within 1 to 2 days the configuration can be deployed to a single machine documented for your Brand's deployment best practices and configurations and data can be flowing into your data lake or your data warehouse solution, or inside of DLH as a hosted data warehouse solution where data is immediately queerable by your team. DLH currently has customers with dozens and even hundreds of Aloha POS locations and the POS agent runs multiple times per day providing complete visibility to data in day parts and day behind reporting for those brands.

Conclusion

If your organization is using any version of Aloha POS or Voyix, DLH.io has the necessary solution and tools to capture data for organization-wide reporting which is especially important to the CFO, VP of IT, and General Managers of the brand’s locations. Attempting to build a solution internally will actually reduce the overall effectiveness of most brands, due to cost, time to delivery, maintenance, and potentially restricting the amount of data retrieved, requiring additional development and double-work. Using an RMM solution is recommended, and the Aloha POS agent is fully supported by the DLH customer success team. Any Aloha POS customer can have all location data centralized in approximately 2-4 weeks depending on the size of the organization. Having all the data available for analysis and analytics, dashboard, and AI use cases is now more important than ever and every brand’s leadership should consider impacting their organization positively with data automation solutions, using their internal teams for more strategic endeavors to increase time to value and lower total cost of ownership.