MSPs cannot afford performance visibility gaps caused by rapid changes to clients’ infrastructure. As a result, performance monitoring is taking on more importance. The economics of this business require a future-ready monitoring solution, meaning one that is scalable, easy to deploy and works seamlessly across a client base that varies widely by industry and geography.
Flexibility is key to success for Service Providers that depend on monitoring to keep their clients’ businesses running like clockwork, even as their IT infrastructure evolves.
As a forward-thinking MSP, you know you need a monitoring solution that can keep pace with the speed of business, one that is easy to deploy, works seamlessly in hybrid infrastructure environments, can
scale automatically in line with growth, and extend monitoring to whatever is mission-critical for clients (commercial equipment, sensors, cameras, commercial freezers, business management applications, etc.).
- Automatically discover and monitor infrastructure
- Support for multi-tenancy and central data collection
- Extensive pre-built integrations
- Automated client-facing reports
- Customized Group Hosting
- Cloud-Based Solutions for Hybrid Monitoring
The following six tips will help you select the right performance monitoring solution for a multi-client environment:
1. Automatically discover and monitor infrastructure
MSPs monitor inherited environments and infrastructure. As clients integrate new technologies and endpoints, you need the flexibility to easily monitor them without having to put in extra work or manual configuration. Once deployed, your performance monitoring tool should be able to scan each client environment and automatically detect and add new devices and resources to the monitoring system in line with infrastructure changes and growth so you can immediately begin measuring infrastructure health and performance. This time-saving automation capability is built into the LogicMonitor Platform with NetScanTM and Active DiscoveryTM features. The LogicMonitor platform is agentless; it automatically detects all devices and resources in clients’ environments (NetScanTM ), the key attributes of each (e.g. how many network interfaces does a server have? – Active DiscoveryTM ), and auto-configures monitoring based on industry best practices so you can turn on full visibility in minutes.
There are also potential financial benefits to having an efficient, effective monitoring system in place. For example, you can use LogicMonitor NetScanTM and Active DiscoveryTM features to accurately auto-discover what’s in a prospect’s environment and deliver a quote effectively to address the client’s specific needs and environment during the sales process. This technique adds accuracy and efficiency to the sales and onboarding processes, leading to faster revenue and better client satisfaction.
2. Support for multi-tenancy and central data collection
As an MSP, you need a cohesive performance monitoring tool with central data collection that provides top- quality service and coverage for multiple clients. LogicMonitor offers a variety of valuable features that support multi-tenancy environments, including a Collector architecture and role-based access control (RBAC).
LogicMonitor uses a Collector – a secure Java application – in each location that has infrastructure to be monitored. The Collector then discovers and monitors the resources within the infrastructure using standard monitoring protocols. This Collector-based architecture provides several key advantages:
- Collectors are independent; they do not ‘see’ or communicate with
each other, which allows for secure segmentation of client environments - Collectors allow for ease of monitoring overlapping subnets
- Collectors are easier to manage than multitudes of agents deployed in every device and resource. Because LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based platform, updates can be automatic or controlled by your team. Maintenance requirements are minimal; there are no on-prem software agents or hardware systems to continuously maintain and update.
- The Collector automatically detects resources and devices in an environment and can turn on visibility in minutes
The ability to grant role-based access to clients to give them real-time insight into their infrastructure is also key. A performance monitoring solution should also allow for granular role-based access control that can be customized for user and client privileges including access to server data, shared dashboards, and API data. This allows you to spend less time worrying about manual reports, creates a greater level of trust, and helps improve client retention. With role-based access control (RBAC), your team can demonstrate the value of the monitoring with reports that provide insight to clients in real-time.
LogicMonitor’s data retention feature includes a granular storage engine that holds every sample of data collected for up to two years. Data retention is beneficial for analyzing issues within a system and helps users identify long-term trends.
3. Extensive pre-built integrations
When choosing the right performance monitoring tool, finding one that allows integration with existing technology stacks and ITSM tools is critical. LogicMonitor has out-of-the-box integrations with ServiceNow, ConnectWise and AutoTask (among many others) that allow you to streamline troubleshooting by updating tickets in external systems based on alert status. Other integrations are available out of the box for automation and orchestration (Ansible, Puppet) and ChatOps (Slack). If an out-of-the-box integration isn’t available, make sure your chosen monitoring tool has a robust, open API so you can build custom integrations for any workflows. The best news: with LogicMonitor, you have the flexibility to route alerts for a client to the incident management system they use, while alerts to your team can be routed to the ITSM tools you prefer and use in-house, even if they differ.
4. Automated client-facing reports
Clients in the C-suite don’t generally spend time inside the monitoring solution. They want access to information so they can make informed business decisions. That’s why you should look for a performance monitoring tool that lets you create custom reports from executive overviews to technical reviews. You should also focus on finding a solution that allows you to set and forget report delivery so you can put your focus on what truly matters – optimizing your clients’ uptime and performance – while automating the delivery of valuable dashboards and reports that allow for effective planning, forecasting and more.
5. Customized Group Hosting
The ideal IT infrastructure monitoring solution will offer MSPs flexibility, allowing you to attach specific tags/ properties to groups, hosts, or specific instances. This type of flexibility gives you the ability to group your hosts the way you want (e.g. by location, organization/client, device type, etc.) and set up alerting thresholds anywhere, from the global to the instance level.
But the possibilities with LogicMonitor go beyond monitoring IT infrastructure – our technology provides insights into performance metrics for businesses, retailers and their devops teams, ensures that companies are aware of potential system outages before they happen, helps users prevent downtime on their customers’ favorite streaming apps, and can even monitor temperature sensors so that their food stays at safe levels.
MSPs that use LogicMonitor have the opportunity for customization and creating differentiation for their clients. LogicMonitor’s flexibility lends itself to being a great solution for internal IT operations and large enterprise customers alike.
6. Cloud-Based Solutions for Hybrid Monitoring
According to a 2019 ‘State of the Cloud’ study by Flexera, Enterprise organizations run 33 percent of workloads in public cloud and 46 percent in private cloud. SMBs run 43 percent of workloads in public cloud and 35 percent in private cloud. The important takeaway here is the most IT environments are hybrid and cloud is growing as the preferred platform by organizations globally to deliver services and applications. LogicMonitor excels at monitoring hybrid infrastructure environments in public clouds, remote data centers/ private clouds, and on premises.
The other benefit of LogicMonitor is that it delivers hybrid infrastructure performance monitoring as software-as-a-service. Because the monitoring platform is already in the cloud and LogicMonitor is an agentless solution, no dedicated hardware is required. This allows for rapid start-up time, so you can get back to business that much faster. Upgrades are automatic and require no downtime, so clients are continuously monitored with no gaps in performance.
Because LogicMonitor provides cloud-based monitoring, your team will save valuable time by avoiding the maintenance overhead of on-prem monitoring products and reduce capital expense.
We’ll help propel you toward a future that makes monitoring a vehicle for you to see more, know more, and do more to drive your business and continue to be a strategic partner with your clients – contributing to their business agility and innovation by managing and optimizing their technology infrastructure.
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