Manage service providers (MSPs) have come along with in a relatively short time. Not so long ago, remote monitoring and management (RMM) could pretty much sum up their entire business—they remotely monitored client servers that were on premise, often via non-permanent connections through a series of manual, time-based checks before providing regular management reports.
Learn how you can achieve more with less using the right monitoring and management solution.
Monitoring in those days was time-consuming, often inconsistent, and the reporting was a regular drain on valuable technical resources—MSPs added value by providing a break/fix-type service where engineers would attend the client site to provide specialist skills or replacement hardware to resolve detected issues.
MSPs Move Toward Hosting
With many of the early RMM solutions relying heavily on SNMP (in fact, some still do), there are now a breed of solutions that are slim agent-based, which are often required in order to provide the depth of monitoring and automation that today’s clients demand. There are still a number of clients that prefer to (or are forced to by regulations) own and host the hardware, although this is definitely on the wane.
The use of MSPs is increasingly popular, with many clients looking to regard IT as a commodity not unlike how the domestic market views utilities such as gas or electric. After all, you’d have to be quite extreme to have your own generator at home to provide the electricity your family requires, so why have your own IT teams and hardware? With the advent of the internet—and cloud-ready solutions, in particular—specialist companies have sprung up providing clients with the choice of outsourcing each facet of their IT to different providers.
How RMM Tools Add Value
Remote monitoring and management solutions are smarter now than ever before, serving both on premise and hosted clients seamlessly. They have morphed from simple monitoring and alerting tools capable of providing inflexible notification to tool-specific consoles to slick monitoring and automation solutions that vastly reduce repetitive processes, handle recovery, and deliver exception-based notification, often as automatically sculpted help desk tickets.
With as much as 80 percent of manual tasks simply providing verification that things are running okay, the right automation solution is key. Well-implemented solutions provide the capability to catch problems early enough to stop them from leading to larger problems or even service outages. These products are capable of supporting many platforms and applications, and come with built-in self-service reporting that allows clients to generate real-time historical reports detailing the health of the services being provided.
Fortra makes it easy to supercharge your managed service offerings. Whether you host client systems or monitor remotely, the right solution helps you achieve more with less.