At LogicMonitor, we know datacenter monitoring. We know it because we’ve lived it – I’ve been that guy responsible for making sure that a 24 x 7 x 365 web service was up. Most of our technical staff also came from a SaaS and web ops background (with lots of work in corporate IT worlds, too).
Recently, however, we’ve had quite a few managed service providers adopting LogicMonitor for their monitoring needs. Which makes a lot of sense. An MSP is just as dependent on the uptime, performance and troublefree operation of their datacenter equipment as any web based company. They also need to take advantage of efficiencies to scale the amount of systems they manage without increasing headcount (or free up headcount that was being used to deal with time consuming monitoring to more strategic tasks that build on their core competency.) LogicMonitor lets MSPs do this just like datacenters – without having to spend lots of time to make sure their monitoring is comprehensive.
MSPs are also using LogicMonitor features in ways we didn’t foresee – using role based access control to grant individual customers visibility to see just their own hosts, virtual machines and dashboards – even though the MSP may have hundreds of customers in their LogicMonitor account. Using LogicMonitor’s automated, scheduled reporting to deliver SLA reports directly to their customers.
It makes sense from a business perspective, too. Obviously Logicmonitor’s MSP monitoring helps Managed Service Providers scale their internal operations, and deliver better service, without adding headcount. But given that few MSPs are purely delivering managed services from their own infrastructure, it also means that LogicMonitor enables them to:
- offer monitoring for their customers infrastructure at the customer’s site. Whether this is done by provisioning the customer their own LogicMonitor portal, or by using the MSPs portal, the fact that LogicMonitor is SaaS based means that the location of the equipment being monitored is irrelevant. The MSP can employ the same monitoring tools for their own and the customers storage, routers, databases, etc – with the same ease of provisioning and minimal learning curve. Result: more efficient employee time; better customer responsiveness; happier customers (and better retention.)
- monitoring of customer’s site means that the MSP can offer NOC services, using their own NOC and staff resources to create an additional revenue center, by responding to alerts.
- visibility into the performance of customer’s equipment (if the customer elects to grant that visibility with the MSP) means the MSP is positioned to provide infrastructure right sizing and consulting. A graph of volume latency like the below demonstrates to the customer that they have exceeded the IO capacity of their current hardware. The MSP can address a customer issue in advance of pain, gain goodwill, and a hardware sale.
So the MSP get’s not only improved operations and efficiency internally, they can provide the same benefits to their customers; gain revenue from doing so (either by reselling or referral), and open up additional revenue opportunities for themselves in consulting, NOC response, and hardware sales.
Wins all around.