Insights and Automation: 3 ways to modernize your MSP with LogicMonitor

How MSPs can leverage automation to enhance their service delivery and improve the productivity of their teams

Companies are embracing IT automation. As MSPs look to scale operations in 2022 and beyond, there are a number of technologies and methods available to improve efficiency and deliver a more seamless experience for end customers. Automation is one way to increase delivery velocity and onboard more customers with fewer engineering resources.

Download this whitepaper for actionable tips on how to use automated processes to save time, do more, continue to delight your end customers.

Assessment

The Modern MSP Blueprint: Evaluating Your Business Evolution Readiness

Break through the MSP ceiling with a self-assessment that actually moves the needle.

Your clients’ tech environments grow more complex every quarter. Meanwhile, your competitors are scrambling to reinvent themselves. Where do you fit in? Our MSP Evolution Assessment cuts through the noise to show you exactly where you stand—and what moves will actually drive growth.

You’ll be able to:

• Benchmark your current capabilities against industry standards
• Identify specific growth opportunities in your service delivery
• Prioritize investments that will yield the greatest returns
• Create a roadmap for transforming into a Next-Gen MSP
• Gain competitive advantage in an increasingly complex market

What we evaluate:

Our assessment examines your business across five critical dimensions:

1. Hybrid Infrastructure Capabilities
   How well you manage environments across cloud and on-premises systems
2. AI, Data Integrity & Innovation
   Your readiness to leverage AI and data-driven insights
3. Customer Retention Excellence
   How effectively you retain and grow your existing client relationships
4. Tool Rationalization
   The efficiency and effectiveness of your technology stack
5. Co-Managed Services
   Your ability to partner with clients’ internal IT teams

Once you’re done, turn your insights into real transformation. Contact our MSP experts to help you:

• Analyze your results in depth
• Identify your biggest growth opportunities
• Build a practical roadmap for evolution
• Implement strategies that deliver measurable results

Do the assessment

UMB is a leading system integrator in Switzerland that prides itself on delivering cutting-edge IT solutions, from infrastructure services to software development and data engineering. UMB has established itself as at the pinnacle of innovation and excellence within the IT landscape. They cater to a diverse clientele of mid-sized businesses both domestically and internationally. Despite their success, the rapid evolution of cloud services presented considerable challenges, driving the need for a more adaptable and efficient monitoring solution.

Keeping pace with cloud evolution

UMB’s devotion to operational excellence was hindered by the limitations of their existing monitoring tools, which had struggled to adapt to the fast-paced changes in cloud services. This influenced their ability to provide proactive solutions to their clients, along with impacting operational efficiency. It was essential to find a monitoring solution that could seamlessly integrate with the cloud and offer comprehensive insights into their infrastructure.

Streamlining monitoring with LogicMonitor

UMB turned to LogicMonitor to respond to these challenges, marking a turning point in their IT monitoring approach. With LogicMonitor’s ability to provide immediate, actionable insights and its easy integration into existing workflows, UMB has revolutionized their monitoring capabilities. The platform’s comprehensive coverage of IT infrastructure needs allowed UMB to focus on delivering enhanced services and client satisfaction.

Enhanced operational efficiency and client satisfaction

The adoption of LogicMonitor has had a profound impact on UMB’s operations, yielding numerous benefits:

• Proactive monitoring capabilities have significantly reduced potential downtime, improving service reliability for clients.
• Integration with IT management tools like ServiceNow has streamlined operations, increasing efficiency and SLA compliance.
• Plans to expand the use of LogicMonitor promise to further enhance IT service delivery and client satisfaction.

By addressing the challenges of cloud evolution head-on, UMB has optimized its internal operations and elevated the level of service provided to its clients.

Empowering businesses through innovation

Node4 is a leading provider of managed services. They support private and public sector organizations across the UK in achieving their strategic goals through technology and innovation. With a comprehensive portfolio that includes Business Applications, Modern Workplaces, Cloud, Networks, Data, and Security services, Node4 guarantees its clients are well-equipped to navigate their digital transformation journeys.

Identifying the challenge

As Node4 expanded its cloud service offerings, the company recognized that its existing monitoring tools were insufficient for the rapidly growing cloud technology landscape. The need for an advanced, user-friendly monitoring solution became clear, especially for supporting services like PaaS, SaaS, and Kubernetes. Node4 required a system capable of managing its diverse services and providing a seamless experience for both technical and non-technical users.

The LogicMonitor solution

Node4 partnered with LogicMonitor to enhance its monitoring capabilities and support its ambitious future strategy. LogicMonitor offered a comprehensive solution that was not only technically superior but also easy to use and visually appealing. This made it ideal for Node4’s diverse client base and internal teams.

Key benefits realized: 

1. Enhanced monitoring capabilities: Enabled monitoring of a broader range of technologies, including SaaS tools like Office 365
   
2. Operational efficiency: Reduced critical alerts and P1/P2 incidents by 50%, improved MTTR, and streamlined incident management
   
3. Cost and complexity reduction: Simplified IT infrastructure management by consolidating multiple monitoring tools
   
4. Improved client experience: User-friendly dashboards and real-time insights facilitated proactive management and strategic planning.

A future-proof partnership

Node4’s partnership with LogicMonitor has driven significant improvements in IT operations, enhancing system reliability and operational stability. As Node4 continues to grow, the integration of advanced features like Application Performance Management (APM) and log analytics with LogicMonitor will further strengthen its service offerings and support its mission of delivering “Change That Matters.“

IT powerhouse Bechtle Suisse, a leading IT supplier in Europe with over 1,100 Swiss professionals, faced a challenge: rapid growth through acquisitions created a fragmented IT landscape that hindered efficiency and scalability. To overcome these hurdles and solidify their position as a regional IT service leader, they turned to LogicMonitor’s unified monitoring platform.

The challenge: A fragmented IT landscape 

The integration challenges Bechtle Suisse encountered included slow Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and limited scalability due to restrictive SNMP-only monitoring coverage. These issues affected service quality and constrained the company’s potential for growth.

The solution: Implementing LogicMonitor for streamlined monitoring and improved service delivery

Bechtle Suisse turned to LogicMonitor, seeking a robust platform capable of seamless integration across diverse IT environments and scalable enough to support an expanding customer base.

Partnering with LogicMonitor transformed Bechtle Suisse’s IT monitoring. Jérôme Toulet, Innovation and Process Manager, noted significant improvements, particularly in incident handling and Service Level Agreement (SLA) delivery. The platform’s extensive metrics per device enabled quicker and more accurate root cause analyses, enhancing overall service reliability.

The adoption of LogicMonitor led to a 50% reduction in customer onboarding times and administrative tasks, optimizing resource allocation and accelerating deployment processes.

Strategic advancements and future integration plans

Looking forward, Bechtle Suisse is set to leverage LogicMonitor further to enhance their competitive edge in the IT service market. Plans include expanding monitoring and reporting capabilities and integrating new technologies into their service offerings. This proactive and automated approach to service management will allow Bechtle Suisse to efficiently meet emerging IT trends and technologies, ensuring continued leadership in the IT services sector.

Challenge

NTT Com Managed Services is an agile, innovative organisation that offers end-to-end global managed services to a variety of customers. Headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, the provider serves customers with a consolidated next-generation process and delivery framework for its solutions. Its customers can take advantage of a single contract, set of SLAs, and one point of contact for all their services.

To manage its vast array of systems and components, NTT requires granular visibility into its IT environment, along with current, accurate configuration data. The provider relies on its ServiceNow configuration management database (CMDB) to provide a single system of record for its IT organisation.

“The core of our business is managing elements from the operating system, including Windows, Linux, DSX, all the way up to databases, middleware, Active Directory, web servers, and application servers,” says Oscar Garcia, COO, NTT Com Managed Services. “We also have another line of business that is tightly coupled with our organisation that includes the management of on-premise infrastructure, as well as components that are running on the cloud, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.”

To gain the level of insight required across all these environments, NTT needed a monitoring solution that was tightly coupled with its CMDB. Its existing monitoring system provided some automation but supported only one-way integration with the ServiceNow CMDB. To fully connect the two systems, NTT had to manually specify in the CMDB system the specific components that would be tracked in its monitoring platform.

Solution

After experimenting with several solutions, NTT migrated to the LogicMonitor platform. LogicMonitor delivers automated hybrid infrastructure monitoring and analytics, integrating smoothly with the provider’s CMDB for enhanced visibility across all of its environments.

“LogicMonitor is much more evolved because it allows us to provide only basic setup information, it then automatically discovers everything that’s running on a configuration item (CI), and pushes the information back to the CMDB,” says Garcia. “It makes the process much simpler. With just a few parameters, we can monitor a CI.”

NTT’s previous monitoring solution provided only one-way functionality, however, LogicMonitor offers bi-directional integration with the ServiceNow CMDB. “Things that are discovered within LogicMonitor can be pushed back to our CMDB, so we can enrich it.”

Deployment of the solution was an easy, seamless process that progressed smoothly. “We used the APIs extensively to automate the process,” says Garcia. “One of the reasons we chose LogicMonitor was because we were impressed with how easy is it to onboard new technologies and devices for monitoring.”

“One of the things we like the most is that we don’t need to worry about making sure that older parts of our network environment can still be monitored when a new release comes out,” he adds. “With LogicMonitor we don’t have to keep our labs up and running with older operating systems and legacy components, which is great.”

Benefits

The ability to closely integrate LogicMonitor with the ServiceNow CMDB has helped NTT unleash several positive outcomes. Adding and modifying new customer offerings is now simpler and more efficient, improving the organisation’s business agility.

“The integration improves our operational efficiency,” says Garcia. “When we need to import a new customer and create their CIs in the system, we can quickly get the monitoring up and running as we are spinning them up. This process used to be very time-consuming for our engineers.”

The solution also helps NTT increase the quality of its network insight and operations because integrating ServiceNow and monitoring helps ensure that data is reliable.

8 years later, happier than ever

The Australia-based NTT ANZ team migrated to LogicMonitor in 2015 after replacing their previous incumbent monitoring platform, Zabbix. At the time, they were struggling with context switching from a monitoring and performance perspective of their managed services “heterogeneous storage environment” – consisting of 3Par, NetApp, EMC, Nimble, etc.

These operational inefficiencies were trickling downstream into customer dissatisfaction and NTT ANZ needed a solution to help solve this pain. NTT ANZ also still had several federal and local government customers with thousands of managed CIs remaining in Zabbix and was searching for a single pane view for all of their customers. 

The Solution

LogicMonitor’s single pane of glass view has been a huge win for NTT ANZ, and with the completion of LogicMonitor’s data center in Sydney in 2021, the team was able to accelerate the growth of customer migrations. 

The Results

With the solutions LogicMonitor has provided for 8 years and counting, NTT ANZ is able to increase the number of customers in LogicMonitor and has tripled their overall resources being monitored. By partnering with LogicMonitor, NTT ANZ has been able to compete and win larger and larger deals in their region with improved support, visibility and ease of onboarding.

Originally published March, 2019. Updated February 2023

VectorUSA designs, builds and maintains efficient, effective and secure data, voice and video networks to provide custom tech solutions for schools, ports and terminals, hospitals, commercial enterprises, and government agencies. 

The Situation

VectorUSA is headquartered in California with multiple locations within the state, one of which being in Rancho Cucamonga where their internal data center is located. Before LogicMonitor, if the company experienced any connectivity issues with their ISP, or if a system went down in the middle of the night, the team was not alerted by their on-prem monitoring solution. Since this solution could not alert them externally when an ISP issue was at hand, there was a great risk of losing valuable data or service for their customers. 

The Solution

Utilizing LogicMonitor’s ability to collect and report on data via cloud-based collectors, the team was able to clearly see which circuits were problematic and which were going up and down all night long. With these insights, the team was able to prove to the ISP that these issues were not related to VectorUSA’s infrastructure. With this resolved and the internet service provider stepping up to aide with these connectivity issues, the team was able to be alerted immediately when their internal systems suffered any downtime. 

The Results

With improved insights and hard data provided by LogicMonitor, VectorUSA has been able to conclusively show that the connectivity issues they were experiencing were on the ISP’s end, allowing them to escalate up the ISP management chain to secure a more consistent level of secure when these issues occur. By resolving this issue, VectorUSA has been able to continue to provide a reliable service to their entire client base. 

The Situation

CMA Technologies is an MSP headquartered in Louisiana that focuses on monitoring and end-to-end software and hardware work for their customers. Recently, they switched their antivirus software to SentinelOne, but suffered from overload issues on virtual machines which caused them to go offline without warning. When SentinelOne went offline due to overloaded VMs, it put CMA’s SLAs with their customers in jeopardy and increased the risk of potential security vulnerabilities. 

The Solution

The IT team was able to create custom modules to provide root cause analysis and provide alerts when and where a potential issue involving overloaded VMs could occur. They also created dashboards to improve visibility for this event for the entire organization. 

The Results

With LogicMonitor’s out-of-the-box functionality, CMA is now able to be alerted when a VM could go down. By leveraging LogicMonitor’s extensibility, the team can now proactively monitor when an issue is about to occur and take action accordingly. This outcome has helped to increase overall proactivity, reduce MTTR, and allowed the team more time to focus on research and development, rather than searching for the problem.

The Situation

Triton Management Services, LLC, owned by Aladdin Group, provides legal services and bonds throughout the United States and employs about 600 employees. As they are a small organization, their IT department has a primary focus on keeping costs low and below budget, while still receiving quality data. Due to budget limitations, Triton was not able to grow their IT team and needed to ensure a unified observability platform was set up to help save them time and money.

The Solution

With the size of their team, they’ve treated LogicMonitor as one of their employees by setting up automated reports that deliver the information required directly to them. They’ve also set up intricate escalation chains to only push alerts out to the correct people at the correct time. 

The Results 

Since implementing LogicMonitor, Triton has been able to focus their attention on necessary daily tasks. The automated reports and escalation chains have ensured the right people are focused on the right things, allowing for more time to be spent on innovative projects, while still delivering relevant performance data to the executive team.  By partnering with LogicMonitor, Triton has been able to operate an exiguous team while still saving money by coming in under their allotted budget, as well as focusing on business needs and priorities by automating their reporting and fine-tuning their escalation chains. 

Situation

Alfun is a France-based MSP, providing managed services, cloud solutions, adoption and change management, Azure migration consultancy and Backup as a Service. Their key business goals from an MSP perspective were to increase their customer base by >50% per year and migrate an increased number of customer workloads to Azure. Alfun’s previous monitoring solution for both on-prem and Azure resources typically took a week to onboard new customers and lacked dashboard visualization for key technologies. They had previously tried to create dashboards but abandoned this initiative due to high manual effort and complexity. 

Solution

LogicMonitor’s agentless solution allowed the team to rapidly onboard new customers’ hybrid environments, covering all key technologies. LogicMonitor has allowed for a more proactive monitoring approach and meaningful alerting. They’ve been able to significantly improve their ability to display and communicate data through dashboards for Azure, SQL, Veeam, Hyper V, NetApp and iDrac, which covers internal services as well as those monitored for customers. 

Results

Alfun is now able to onboard new customers in approximately 1 hour, providing monitoring and visualization into all key technologies related to customer environments and other services delivered by the business. This has improved their ability to meet their growth goals of > 50% customer growth per year, while also greatly increasing operational efficiency.