It’s 6 AM. Bob, an entry-level IT engineer walks into a cold, dark, lonely building – flips on the lights, fires up the coffee pot, and boots up. Depending on what he’s about to see on his computer screen, he knows the fate of the free world could rest in his soft, trembling, sun-starved hands.
Well maybe not the free world, but at least the near-term fate of his company, his company’s clients, and possibly his next paycheck. Bob is the newest engineer for a busy MSP, whose promise to its clients is very simple: your technology will always be up and working!
Fortunately for Bob, his MSP has a great ticketing system, so as soon as his coffee is hot and hard drive warm, he’ll login to his ticketing dashboard, right? Wrong! What?! Bob! What are you logging into?! Oh. Your monitoring application? Really?
Really. True story. Dramatized for effect, name changed to protect the reasonably innocent, but true story. Eric Egolf, the owner of CIO Solutions, a thriving MSP told us about it just last week. “The first thing the new guy does, intuitively, is open up the monitoring portal, before he ever looks at our ticketing system.” And the other engineers are following suit. Egolf says the ticketing system is great, but their comprehensive monitoring solution reveals the actual, real-time IT landscape for their entire client-base within seconds. And the most critical problems practically jump off the screen at the engineers, sometimes before a ticket has even been created.
Set an easy to use interface on top of the comprehensive monitoring solution, and Bob can often times very quickly isolate the problem, ferret out the root cause, and resolve the issue … before the asteroid plummets to earth and destroys America … or at least before a client calls screaming as if that did just happen.
“LogicMonitor makes my engineers smarter,” claims Egolf, “an entry-level engineer can basically perform all the functions of a mid-level engineer.” And without the increase in pay grade. That keeps costs down and clients up, and while that’s particularly a sweet-spot for MSP’s and cloud providers, the same formula holds true for SaaS/Web companies and in-house IT departments. Not good, but great monitoring is the answer.
That’s how you make an engineer smarter. Next blog post: How to Make an Engineer the Life of the Party. 🙂