When a Microsoft outage in early March took down a host of cloud-based services, including Office 365, Skype, OneDrive, and Outlook, the impact on users ranged from the inconvenience of being unable to Skype customers and friends to hampered productivity from being unable to access email or mission-critical documents. For many managed service providers (MSPs), the outage meant fielding calls from customers unsure why they were suddenly unable to access the applications they rely on to operate their businesses.
Although the outage lasted only a few hours, it came on the heels of AWS’s S3 facility’s multi-hour outage the week before and was followed by an eight-hour Azure outage less than 10 days later – all of which affected businesses to varying degrees.
Downtime carries significant costs for organizations of all sizes. IDC estimates 80 percent of SMBs have experienced downtime at some point, with costs ranging from $82,200 to $256,000 for a single event and a per-minute average cost of $137 to $427.
SMBs often look to an MSP to minimize the risk of downtime and its associated costs. But while an MSP can take steps to minimize on-premises outages, it has limited control over those of cloud-based applications.
But you can monitor cloud-based services. Cloud monitoring enables you to determine from the outset which remediation approach to take. Imagine knowing from the start whether the issue is internal, and thus can be resolved with your own resources, or cloud-based and thus outside of your control. While cloud monitoring will not resolve a cloud-based issue, it does provide the necessary information, and information is power.
With the right cloud monitoring solution in place, you will know your customer’s cloud services are down before a barrage of phone calls comes in from clients telling you to fix them. This significantly cuts the time it takes to do root cause analysis and allows you to get back to customers sooner. In addition, identifying the issue right away means not having to waste time and resources troubleshooting the problem while customer issues that are within your control are backlogged.
It also puts you in the driver’s seat. By having the information that you can then pass on to your customers, you can communicate with them as an authoritative source; both by reaching out proactively or answering inbound queries about the issue. This enables you to provide confidence and assurance to customers even if you are unable to resolve the issue.
Today’s MSPs and internal IT don’t have time to spend figuring out where a failure occurred. A monitoring solution that tells them where the issue lies so that they can focus on revenue-generating activities is essential.
Cloud Monitoring with Traverse
With Kaseya Traverse, MSP IT Operations and NOC teams can ensure the performance and availability of IT infrastructure and services their customers expect. Traverse unifies the management of physical, virtual, and private and public cloud infrastructure within one system, better aligning business services and infrastructure technology to identify quickly the cause of issues.
Traverse fully supports complex virtualized environments and public cloud environments of AWS, CloudStack, OpenStack, and other similar frameworks.
Traverse’s unique Service Container technology enables IT and business personnel to create unique logical, business-oriented views of discrete business services. Not only can reports be generated from these Service Containers, but real‐time status for defined services, including uptime, can also be provided as well as alerts when IT services fail or exceed user-defined thresholds. Correlation, root cause analysis, and predictive data analytics are also available.
Take Kaseya Traverse out for a spin at http://www.traverse-monitoring.com/free-trial and discover how it can transform the way you monitor your cloud resources.
Originally posted on MSPMentor.
