Recently I had the pleasure of talking with Logically’s Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Kurth. We talked about a wide range of topics, and one of the surprising things that jumped out for me was the problems small to midsize businesses (SMBs) are having with remote monitoring and alerting.
If your business is familiar with IT outsourcing, you’ve probably heard about remote monitoring and alerting. Remote Monitoring software is a tool that brings robust technology management capabilities to businesses of all sizes. It monitors the health and performance of an organization’s IT assets 24/7/365. Remote Monitoring systems also provide proactive maintenance and alerting to maintain a stable environment which allows rapid remote remediation when things go wrong. Remote monitoring and alerting are core services that make up IT managed service providers (MSPs) like Logically deliver.
Businesses without remote monitoring are reactive, which means that they don’t find out there is an issue until it’s too late and an end-user reports a problem. This leads to a level of unpredictability which can be costly in dollars, downtime and frustration. With remote monitoring, problems can be detected and resolved before they impact end users. So why don’t all businesses implement monitoring and alerting if it’s a proactive tool? Usually it’s because they don’t have the IT staff or systems management tools.
The lack of IT staff is not the only struggle SMBs face. Knowing what to be on the alert for, and then knowing what actions to take in remediation can require deep technical expertise which many organizations don’t have either. Even larger enterprises with fully functioning Network Operations Centers of their own find it challenging to monitor their systems 24/7/365.
Jeremy explained that the biggest challenge for remote monitoring is overcoming the overwhelming noise and “alert storms” that can happen when a problem occurs. It requires expertise, understanding and the resources to “really get it boiled down to an efficient system” so that you can “react to the right and appropriate things.” In fact, Jeremy says that Logically “takes it to the next level” by using their technology product development team to constantly add more automation to their monitoring and alerting service.
As an example, Jeremy said that the automated remote monitoring and alerting service (an integral part of Logically’s Oplogic intelligent service delivery platform) closed over 2,400 tickets via “self-healing remediation” in one week. For example, if a disk drive falls below an available capacity threshold, OpLogic automatically detects it and automatically initiates a process to optimize the hard disk until available capacity is within spec. The speed of remediation can be so fast that their clients don’t even have time to get an alert, instead they get a report afterward showing all the tickets closed automatically on their behalf.
In fact, Jeremy says that looking forward, they are working an additional AI and Machine Learning enhancements to maintain environments even more efficiently for their clients. Utilizing partners like Microsoft to adopt and implement their increasingly intelligent and predictive vendor/solution “alerting” for things like predicting drive failures is going to be a focus moving forward.
Do you want to better understand how proactive monitoring, alerting and remediation can help your business? Check out the video of our interview with Jeremy Kurth to learn more about remote monitoring and alerting, and learn more about other key MSP services.
