Viadex cuts after-hours alerts 83% with Autotask

A global footprint across it supply chain and managed services 

Founded in 2001, Viadex focuses on supporting globally dispersed businesses, with multiple data center instances and geo-dispersed users. They plan, deliver and manage global projects across four continents and over 190 countries.   

The business is composed of two core areas. The first is IT supply chain services, helping businesses with their procurement and logistics across the world. The other side is managed services — a growing part of Viadex’s offer, particularly as they expand from offering infrastructure services to end user device support. 

Diverse customers, diverse demands 

Viadex’s managed services customers are diverse. They range from small companies operating in one country, to global businesses working across different geographies.  

The demands of these customers are also varied. For some Viadex is managing their infrastructure, firewalls and Azure services supported by their own internal service desk. For other customers, Viadex provides it all including end user support.  

 We’re bolstering their internal IT teams to take the pressure off them.

Gemma Honey, Senior Delivery Operations Manager at Viadex

“By doing that, they can focus on more applications and development work that’s actually really important to their business.“ 

To support their clients effectively Viadex uses many Kaseya services, with a particular focus on Autotask and RMM as the “cornerstone” to their service delivery.  

Autotask and RMM for efficient service delivery 

For Viadex, Autotask is their go-to central hub. It’s integrated with their other systems – such as IT Glue – to bring all the information together in one place. 

For Gemma, the benefits are clear. “It cuts down on the amount of time that we’re asking the team to spend switching between different dashboards and tooling,” she said. “Everything’s just there. That’s all their ticketing, all their inventory, and all alerting from other tooling. It all goes into Autotask.”  

When dealing with customer queries, that means faster resolution times due to not needing to navigate multiple systems. “It’s having everything in one place, saving the context switching and saving time. In that instant, the engineer can decide what needs to happen pretty quickly.”  

For monitoring “RMM is everywhere,” says Gemma. “It’s used for any monitoring and if a customer has a server or an endpoint it goes through RMM. Because it links into Autotask it’s really easy to see a complete history of what’s gone on with that device. 

“The fact that they’re linked and you can do password sharing and things like that, it just really reduces the amount of time that people need to be in various different portals.” 

Managing the team — and their workload 

Driving efficiency in how their engineers work is important for Viadex. “With Autotask it’s quite clear what we need them to do,” says Gemma. “There are dashboards, there are queues. You can give different people different views of the same information dependent on their role and what’s important to them on the day-to-day. That way they know where to look and what needs to be done.” 

By unifying all work behind the one system it gives a complete view for the management team too. From an operational perspective the team can view SLA dashboards and see how the service is performing at a glance.   

They don’t have rigid targets like how many tickets are solved, instead choosing to monitor overall performance indicators.  

“I can see on average how many tickets people are touching and metrics like that,” explains Gemma. “So if there’s a noticeable drop, then we probably know something’s wrong and need to investigate. Or if there’s higher numbers of tickets sitting in different queues then we can understand we’re busier than usual and can adjust to that. Do we need to pull people from different things, and focus them on other areas, or is a bigger issue at hand – for example a P1 – that means we might need to pull in resource to address? These dashboards allow us to understand those priorities.” 

Optimizing 24/7 delivery with automation and Kaseya’s SOC 

Over the last year Viadex has been optimizing Autotask and tightening the criteria for when it alerts engineers to potential issues. With RMM data being fed into Autotask for thousands of devices, getting the balance right between automation and manual intervention was vital.  

Firstly the team looked at what data was being captured to ensure it met their needs. Then they focused on using workflow rules to ensure alerts were optimized. One objective of this exercise was to reduce on-call alerts at night.   

Gemma cited a particular example of a device that triggered an alert but the issue resolved itself within a couple of minutes. Waking an engineer up for this sort of alert is not productive. 

Viadex is very focused on trend analysis so put this approach to good use. If it’s a recurring issue every night, then it warrants investigation. That ticket can be left open but the status changed to a priority that won’t wake the engineer. They can then investigate and resolve the cause during normal working hours.  

That work by Gemma and her team has really paid off. Thanks to using Autotask’s workflow rules there was an 83% reduction in after-hours alerts in a four-month period.   

On the security front Viadex uses Kaseya MDR which is backed by a 24/7 AI-enhanced SOC. That means there’s a team constantly monitoring for security issues and only those that require Viadex’s involvement result in an engineer being called at night by the SOC. 

In both cases, this means engineers are only being alerted in the night for active issues that really demand their attention. That in turn leads to happier engineers and the ability for them to focus on what really matters.  

Expanding on a successful partnership 

Viadex is actively working on new initiatives with Kaseya – in managing their business and in providing revenue opportunities for services they can re-sell to their customers. Viadex is now implementing Compliance Manager, BCDR and penetration testing to offer compliance as a service as part of their managed service offering. 

Gemma explains many customers are keen to improve their security, driven largely by the Cyber Essentials scheme. Kaseya tools give the Viadex team a way to capture their customers’ requirements, be confident in the response required and ensure their customers pass the certification process. Viadex can also manage and have confidence in its approach when working with more complex standards. 

In bringing more services online, Gemma cites the power of integrations as a key factor for choosing Kaseya. “Ultimately, you just need to be able to access one portal and get to anything as long as you’ve got the right permissions,” explains Gemma. “So for me, that’s really big. For us, everything ends up in IT Glue or Autotask. So as long as you’ve got those two, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s happening with your customer thanks to those integrations Kaseya offers.” 

Gemma explains that a strong working relationship helps Viadex succeed. She cites a proactive account manager relationship and an environment where Viadex can provide feedback from real world use of Kaseya products and know that it will be heard by the relevant teams. 

Kaseya’s been really great,” says Gemma. “They keep us really involved. They understand us as a business and explain to us what’s suitable for what we want to offer and the customer we want to target. It’s a good partnership.