As an IT managed services provider, you supply infrastructure and support services to your clients. But do you also deliver monitoring and analytics? If not, you should. Here's why.

It's easy to think of a managed service as something that includes just implementation and support. But that's a mistake. There's more to consider than just the tasks of setting up a server, PC or cloud service and keeping it running.

Why Monitoring Matters

You also need to monitor the service you set up. Well, you don't need to, but doing so will double down on the value you deliver to your customers and the reward you reap for yourself.

Monitoring means collecting information related to the service you offer, like usage trends, server load and network topology data. Once the data is collected, you can then run analytics on it.

Those analytics can benefit you and your customers in several key ways, such as the following:

How can you collect metrics and make them actionable?

In most situations, the process is as simple as implementing a log aggregation and analytics tool, which will collect logging data from multiple services, store it in one place and provide tools to help you analyze that data.

I won't endorse a specific log aggregation tool here here, but there are lots of options out there if you Google.

Implementing log aggregation may require some doing on your part, but if you're the in the managed IT services business, it's certainly something you can handle.

The effort will be well worth it.