Integrated Security, Performance and Availability Monitoring Improves Operational Efficiency for MSPs
MSPs have to scale and manage their operations at lower costs and greater efficiencies than their customers can achieve in-house. Using AccelOps’ all-in-one monitoring solution, MSPs can reduce costs and improve their overall effectiveness by monitoring all aspects of their IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network, security and applications, in a unified manner. This eliminates the blind spots and operational overlaps that reduce service levels and increase costs when operations are managed as independent silos, resulting in a more efficient, consistent and profitable service delivery operation.
The Challenge
Regardless of industry, geography, skills or target customers, all MSPs rely on the ability to monitor and manage IT infrastructure and deliver on Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) for their customers. Consequently, MSPs require carrier-class software that scales across multiple customers, networks and sites. IT professionals can no longer rely or afford multiple, specialist tools that were designed to monitor specific infrastructure elements, such as networks, applications or security. They need visibility and control of their customers’ entire IT infrastructure – physical, virtual and cloud– all from a single pane of glass.
In response to changing business conditions, MSPs must be able to scale existing services and deliver new services quickly and without undue financial commitments from their customers. MSPs have to be responsive to incidents and customers demand that their provider have real-time alerts, notifications and responses to security, performance and availability issues to avert outages and resolve issues without involving multiple functional experts. They also need processes and support for incident management and trouble ticketing, configuration and change management, log management and compliance reporting.
The AccelOps Solution
AccelOps monitors servers, storage, networks, security devices, applications and users across the entire IT infrastructure – on premise, in the cloud or a hybrid of both. This integrated platform eliminates the capital expense, maintenance and support, and training costs associated with multiple monitoring tools.
The AccelOps virtual appliance solution requires no agents and offers MSPs and hosting providers an intelligent and cost-effective way to meet service levels, and offer new services. The AccelOps virtualized collector architecture allows MSPs to remotely monitor customer environments across their data centers, private or public clouds. Unlike hardware appliance based monitoring solutions, the patent-pending Elastic Monitoring capability of the product allows MSPs to rapidly scale to their customer environments as business needs change by simply adding or removing virtual appliances to the cluster.
Native multi-tenancy provides flexibility and security for MSPs and cloud service providers, allowing appropriate views for individual customers and business groups through role-based access controls; operators can switch from a particular customer or business line view to a global view with a single click.
AccelOps combines security, performance, configuration and change information on a single unified platform, ensuring that critical information necessary to solve problems is just a click away. AccelOps also provides an industry-first technology that enables MSPs to extend monitoring to new or custom environments while maintaining speeds of natively compiled code. This allows MSPs to quickly react to changing customer environments and offer the highest service levels without disruption.
How It Works
Once the AccelOps virtual appliance is deployed, MSPs simply need to provide the range of IP addresses and appropriate access credentials for their customer. The AccelOps product then automatically discovers and populates the built-in Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with the physical and virtual infrastructure, including information such as servers, storage, networks, software, patches and users, and maps their inter-relationships and geo-location. The information is directly gathered from your customers’ infrastructures without requiring agents.
With auto-discovered knowledge about the environment, the product immediately starts monitoring up-down status, resource utilization, automatically builds normal baselines, thresholds and trends for infrastructure and application performance and alerts when deviations from normal thresholds occur. Built-in change management tracks configuration changes and correlates them to IT events, making change-related root-cause analysis a breeze.
Real-time Analytics Provide Faster, More Reliable Incident Detection
A patented real-time analytics engine anchors the AccelOps monitoring application. AccelOps collects, parses and stores events, logs and metrics in a high-performance, flat file database. Collected metrics include device health and performance, Virtual Machine (VM) performance and health, and network flow data. The application cross-correlates this information across security, performance, availability and change management domains. From this, AccelOps’ analytics capability supports both real-time alerts for any out-of-bounds conditions and forensic analysis of historical records.
AccelOps allows MSPs to remotely troubleshoot their customers’ entire infrastructure using customizable, drill-down views. They can customize customers’ views and permissions and limit visibility to their environment, while providing them with proactive service reports customized for their environments.