By Vikas Aggarwal 2

innovation

The administrative burden for managing this burgeoning infrastructure will only increase for MSPs, unless they adopt processes and software to automate most of the burden. To automate processes, you need to integrate the different workflows seamlessly, which requires the software products to have flexible APIs. The order entry, provisioning, monitoring & billing workflows are all candidates for integration and automation. There have been significant advances even within the monitoring and management solutions to reduce the administrative burden with the use of templates, threshold baselining and creating of service models.

The other innovation has been in the field of data analytics. The IT customer’s demands have always been dynamic, and IT departments have reacted by provisioning for the peak demand, resulting in wasted idle resources. This is one of the key drivers for the adoption of cloud and virtualization – to take advantage of this excess idle capacity. But the usage of all IT components is dynamic, not just computing resources. Even the usage of application resources is dynamic by the hour and it is increasingly important for IT departments to understand the behavior pattern of their network and applications in addition to the computing resources. The number of users, the response times, the queued messages, the database query rate – all vary by time of day and understanding the usage pattern and deviations from it will help isolate the root cause of degradation in IT service performance much faster, and ultimately, higher customer satisfaction. More importantly, by using behavior patterns, this greatly reduces the amount of false alarms for IT Operations, and lower TCO.

Automation and Analytics are smart product features focusing on reducing the administrative burden in today’s distributed Cloud environments. Keeping MSP’s business necessities in mind, these innovative features are pragmatically relevant and a must for all MSPs in today’s business environment.

Vikas Aggarwal is CEO of Zyrion Inc., a provider of Cloud and Application Performance Monitoring software for large to mid enterprises and Service Providers. You can read more about Zyrion’s monitoring solution here. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmntor’s annual platinum sponsorship.