Ran across a great article about common mistakes for a Managed Service Provider.   I thought it was so great I wanted to expound upon it more and focus on the technology monitoring aspects.   Selling the monitoring and management aspect of IT as a service is incredibly challenging in its own right, but having the correct management solution in place could be the difference between success and fail.  Below is a list of my Top 7  challenges I see MSP customers struggle with.

1. Flexibility requirements – Some MSPs are not niche focused on a type of technology monitoring, therefore they have to monitor switches, routers, servers, applications, etc.   Other MSPs have no control over the vendor, type, and version of the technology they monitor – which causes serious challenges.   Monitoring for MSPs must be “Future Proof”
2. Scalability requirements –  You might start off slow, but everyone intends to grow big – either by quantity of customers, devices, offerings, or just historical data.   Being able to rapidly respond to growth means that sales never has to wait for engineering to catch up, which is extremely important.
3. Multi-tenancy requirements – A growing trend within MSPs is the requirement of client-side portal to view real-time status of the technology being managed.   This may consist of real-time IT dashboards, event consoles, or historical report browsing – but the common challenge is securely displaying this data which creating administration silos.
4. Large up-front setup costs – A smaller level MSP may shy away from purchasing a full solution set because of its upfront purchase requirements.   Many solutions offer the “monthly – by device” license model that can be converted to a perpetual model later.   This allows customers to grow the solution with their service and not have to bet the farm.
5. Process requirements – MSPs have to address and integrate with every single customer and every single customer has different ways to do things.    The confusion created by this process and knowledge management issue can cause a lot of downtime and unhappy customers.
6. Historical Reporting requirements – Reporting is absolutely necessary for most MSPs, the ability to trend and do capacity management allows problems to be fixed before they become outages.   Being able to provide post-mortem reports for outages to customers is extremely important.   Providing BSM/SLM real-time dashboards or reports may be necessary.  The challenge is all about storing the data, writing the reports for the data, and displaying the data.   The variety and requirements of these reports can daunting, so addressing and documenting this is extremely important.
7. Automation requirements – Clients of MSPs, contract with them because they are too small or inexperienced to achieve the maturity of that of the MSP.  Most MSPs have that “secret sauce” approach which differentials themselves from their competitors and enhances their standings in front of the customers.   The problem being is the “secret sauce” is usually complex and challenging to automate, which is were the real value is.

Hopefully this will help current and future Managed Service Providers in recognizing the challenges they will face.   The beautiful thing is that these are common place and many software solutions address them easily, for example…   Monolith.

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