TL;DR:
MSPs struggle with documentation because they support dozens of siloed client environments, each with different tools, histories, and quirks. Engineers can’t hold all that information in their heads, and inconsistent standards, time pressure, and "internal‑only" mindsets make documentation unreliable or outdated. Even when documentation exists, it’s often scattered, hard to version‑control, and impossible to report on across customers. The result is knowledge loss, operational risk, and inefficiency. MSPs need documentation that’s centralised, standardised, accessible, and structured enough to support both deep technical detail and cross‑customer insights.
1. Stale or Out‑of‑Date Information
Documentation in an MSP environment ages faster than anyone expects. Client networks evolve, vendors push updates, configurations drift, and engineers make changes under pressure. The changes may be handled by formal change control but often these changes then stay burried with the change control software, and not reflected in the customer documentation. Without a disciplined review process, documentation becomes stale sometimes dangerously so.
Out‑of‑date information is worse than no information at all. Engineers follow instructions that no longer apply, waste time chasing incorrect details, or make decisions based on assumptions that were true six months ago but not today. This leads to rework, longer resolution times, and avoidable mistakes.
The root problem is that MSPs rarely have a formal documentation lifecycle. Updates rely on individual engineers remembering to "update it later", which rarely happens during busy periods. Over time, the gap between reality and documentation widens until the documentation becomes untrustworthy - and once trust is lost, engineers stop using it altogether.
Freshness checks, scheduled reviews, and clear ownership are essential to keeping documentation accurate and usable.
2. Multiple Environments and Technology Stacks
Unlike an in‑house IT department that focuses on a single, unified environment, MSP engineers support dozens of clients, each with its own history, architecture, vendors, and quirks. Every client brings a different and often fragmented technology stack: different firewalls, different cloud tenants, different naming conventions, and different levels of maturity.
No engineer can realistically retain the details of 20–40 distinct environments. When documentation is weak or missing, they’re forced to rely on guesswork, tribal knowledge, or ad‑hoc messages to colleagues. This slows down resolution times, increases the risk of mistakes, and creates single points of failure when only one person "knows" a particular client.
Strong, centralised documentation becomes the only way to maintain consistency and quality across such a diverse portfolio.
3. Inconsistent Documentation Standards
MSP engineers rarely work across all clients; instead, each engineer tends to specialise in a subset of the customer base. Over time, those engineers, and sometimes the client’s own internal IT contact or account owner, develop their own preferred ways of documenting things. The result is a patchwork of styles, formats, and expectations.
Some clients end up with beautifully structured documentation. Others get sparse notes, outdated spreadsheets, or whatever the lead engineer happens to favour. This inconsistency makes it harder for colleagues to step in, slows down escalations, and increases the risk of errors when engineers switch between clients.
Without enforced standards and templates, documentation quality becomes dependent on individual habits rather than organisational practice.
4. Staff Resistance and Time Pressure
Documentation is rarely rejected on principle, engineers often resist it because they’re under constant time pressure. MSP work is reactive, interrupt‑driven, and full of context switching. When an engineer is juggling tickets, escalations, client calls, and urgent fixes, documentation becomes the task that always gets pushed to "later", which often means "never".
The result is a cultural pattern: engineers see documentation as extra work rather than part of the work. When they’re measured on ticket closure speed or utilisation, the incentive to skip documentation becomes even stronger. Over time, this creates a cycle where incomplete documentation forces engineers to spend more time rediscovering information, which increases pressure, which further reduces documentation quality.
Resistance isn’t laziness - it’s a predictable outcome of workload, incentives, and tool friction. To break the cycle, MSPs need documentation processes that are fast, integrated, and clearly valued by leadership - or even better, the customers themselves.
5. Customer Access and the "Internal Only" Mindset
Many MSPs treat documentation as an internal asset - something meant for engineers, not customers. There’s often a fear that giving customers access will expose messy internal notes, create support questions, or reduce the MSP’s perceived value. As a result, documentation stays hidden behind the curtain.
The unintended consequence is that customers rarely review documentation, don’t rely on it, and often don’t even know it exists. When customers don’t expect or request documentation, engineers feel less pressure to keep it accurate. It becomes a purely internal chore rather than a visible, valued deliverable.
Yet when customers do engage with documentation - during onboarding, audits, business reviews, or internal IT planning, quality improves dramatically. Engineers write with an audience in mind, customers gain transparency and trust, and documentation becomes a tangible part of the service rather than invisible background work.
The irony is that customer access doesn’t weaken the MSP’s position; it strengthens it. Shared documentation demonstrates professionalism, reduces misunderstandings, and turns knowledge management into a visible output that customers appreciate.
6. Knowledge Loss When The "Client X Expert" Leaves
In an MSP, the combination of multiple client environments, siloed customer groups, and uneven documentation habits means that critical knowledge often ends up concentrated in the mind of a single senior engineer. They become the "Client X Expert", the only person who truly understands the history, quirks, and hidden dependencies of that environment.
When that engineer goes on holiday, changes roles, or leaves the company entirely, the MSP is suddenly exposed. The team scrambles to reconstruct information that was never written down, incidents take longer to resolve, and the customer experience suffers. In extreme cases, the MSP can lose credibility or even the client relationship because no one else can step in with confidence.
This isn’t a personnel problem - it’s a documentation problem. Relying on individual memory instead of shared knowledge creates single points of failure that are entirely avoidable. Strong, centralised documentation ensures continuity, protects the business, and prevents the operational chaos that follows when a key engineer walks out the door.
7. Security, Access Control, and Versioning Gaps
Even when MSPs manage to produce detailed documentation, keeping it secure, accessible, and version‑controlled is a challenge. Many documentation platforms used in MSPs lack proper diffing tools, making it almost impossible to see what changed, when it changed, or who changed it. Without clear version history, engineers can’t easily roll back mistakes or understand the evolution of a configuration - which is critical in environments where small changes can have major consequences.
Access control is another weak point. Engineers need the ability to view and update documentation across all the customers they support, but access is often fragmented across multiple systems, shared drives, or client‑specific portals. This creates friction: engineers waste time hunting for information, switching tools, or requesting access they should already have. Worse, inconsistent access controls can lead to security gaps, where sensitive information is either too widely available or locked away from the people who need it.
When documentation is scattered, poorly versioned, or inconsistently secured, it stops being a reliable source of truth. Strong access policies, unified platforms, and proper versioning aren’t "nice to haves", they’re essential for accuracy, accountability, and operational safety.
8. The Illusion of Documentation in Popular IT Service Tools
Many enterprise platforms give the impression that they "include documentation". They have CMDBs, knowledge bases, asset records, and automated discovery tools. On paper, it looks like documentation is built-in. In practice, however, these systems rarely go deep enough for MSP needs.
These tools are excellent at collecting surface‑level information such as device inventories and basic configuration data, but MSP engineers need far more technical than that.
The result is a dangerous mismatch, the tool makes it look like documentation exists, but the depth engineers need simply isn’t there.
This creates false confidence for managers, auditors, and even customers. They see a populated CMDB and assume the environment is well‑documented, when in reality the critical knowledge still lives in engineers' heads, Slack threads, or scattered notes.
9. The Cross‑Reporting Gap
Engineers often produce excellent, detailed documentation for a specific server, tenant, or cloud platform. They capture configuration nuances, security settings, historical decisions, and environment‑specific quirks. This depth is invaluable when troubleshooting or onboarding new engineers.
But when management wants to step back and ask a cross‑customer question - for example "Which of our clients has Windows Servers running with the Windows Local Security Option X enabled?" traditional documentation systems fall apart.
Why?
Because documentation is written per customer, per system, and per engineer. It’s narrative, unstructured, and context‑rich, which is great for humans, but terrible for automated reporting.
10. Lack of a Single Source of Truth
Most MSPs don’t have one definitive place where documentation lives. Instead, information ends up scattered across ticket notes, SharePoint folders, OneNote pads, vendor portals and emails.
When engineers can’t trust that there’s a single, authoritative source of truth, they stop looking, and they stop updating. This creates a vicious cycle: the more fragmented the documentation becomes, the less it gets used, and the less accurate it becomes.
How XIA Configuration Server Helps MSPs Overcome These Documentation Challenges
Most MSP documentation problems come down to one thing: engineers are expected to manually document environments that are too large, too diverse, and too fast‑changing to capture by hand.
XIA Configuration Server solves this by automating the collection, standardisation, and reporting of configuration data across all your customers.
- Keeps Documentation Fresh and Accurate
- Creates a Single Source of Truth
- Reduces Knowledge Silos
- Enables Cross‑Customer Reporting
- Provides Versioning and Change Tracking
- Improves Security and Access Control
- Complements Human Documentation, Doesn’t Replace It
- Makes Documentation a Visible Deliverable
Conclusion
MSP documentation fails not because people don’t care, but because the job is structurally difficult. Dozens of clients, hundreds of systems, constant time pressure, and fragmented tools create an environment where documentation is always behind, always inconsistent, and always dependent on whoever happens to remember the details.
The result is operational risk, slower troubleshooting, frustrated engineers, and customers who never see the value of the work happening behind the scenes.
Fixing this isn’t about telling engineers to "document more". It’s about giving them systems that make documentation accurate by default, centralised by design, and genuinely useful to both the MSP and the customer. When documentation becomes reliable, accessible, and actionable, it stops being a chore and starts becoming a tangible asset. Many MSPs even turn this into a value‑added service, or a fully chargeable offering, by providing customers with professional, automated configuration documentation powered by
XIA Configuration Server.
This is exactly where automated configuration documentation tools like
XIA Configuration Server make the difference - by capturing the deep technical detail that MSPs can’t maintain manually, keeping it up to date, and making it searchable across every customer you support. With the right approach, documentation stops being a problem to manage and becomes a strength you can build on.