How to Identify Better Ways to Manage Your Managed Service

November 28^th 2024, Würzburg

This blog post gives you an insight into the challenges faced by Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in building a suitable technology and software set-up to optimally deliver and manage their services.

Introduction: Managing a Managed Service

Managed Services Providers (MSPs) play a crucial role in keeping IT operations running smoothly for their customers. From managing IT security to overseeing entire infrastructures, MSPs take on the heavy lifting so businesses can focus on what they do best.

But here’s the deal: having the right tools in place is non-negotiable. Transparent, efficient, and seamless operations depend on them. The problem? The tech landscape is constantly evolving, and customer demands are only getting bigger. This makes building the perfect tech stack a real challenge for MSPs.

It’s not just about managing costs—it’s about showing customers that their networks and hosting environments are secure and under control. MSPs need to highlight how their systems monitor operations, reduce risks through vulnerability management, ensure compliance, and keep services running reliably. Without these capabilities, long-term service assurance becomes nearly impossible.

For MSPs, it’s all about staying ahead of the curve and proving they’ve got everything covered, no matter how complex the environment gets.

Current Challenges for MSPs

Multi-Element-Framework Management

Managed services in today’s world are vastly more complex than ever previously imagined.

Managing cloud and hosting services is no small feat. With platforms for enterprises and public/private sector services growing rapidly, keeping up with performance and operations has become more complex—especially with advancements like virtualization and Software Defined Networking (SDN) adding new layers of challenges.

In the past, companies relied on what we’ll call the “old-school” method of managing these environments. This meant stacking multiple management systems, each designed for specific tasks like performance monitoring or node management. While it got the job done, this approach came with hefty costs—think multiple software licenses and dedicated hardware for every single function. Add in annual maintenance fees, and it’s clear why this model isn’t ideal anymore.

On top of the cost, this approach often creates operational headaches. Different systems might not sync properly, making it nearly impossible to troubleshoot issues or pinpoint root causes. Even worse, the lack of visibility and control over these environments can leave teams guessing at what actually happened during incidents.

Managed Services Providers (MSPs) sticking to this outdated method often find themselves in a tough spot. High costs and inefficiencies can eat into profit margins, and SLA breaches can lead to service credits that hurt not just the bottom line but also customer trust. For MSPs, failing to adopt an integrated, streamlined approach isn’t just inconvenient—it’s bad for business.

Increasing Customer Demands

The world of software is more complex than ever, and MSP customers aren’t making things any easier.

These days, customers are setting the bar higher. They want 24/7 SLAs that cover both networks and applications. Seamless partner integration and proactive service management are must-haves, not nice-to-haves. They expect full transparency with “you-see-what-we-see” operations, better control to prevent change-related issues, and intuitive tools like single-pane dashboards and self-service portals.

On top of all this, service providers are feeling the heat. They’re being asked to deliver faster response times, nail first-contact-first-fix resolutions, and provide more functionality and automation to keep SLAs in check. Meanwhile, they need to keep costs down (CAPEX and OPEX) and still find ways to differentiate their offerings to win over new customers.

It’s a tough balancing act, but getting it right is what separates the leaders from the rest. The challenge? Rising to these expectations without losing sight of efficiency or profitability.

Facing the Challenges – The Optimal Technology Set-Up

Status Quo – Does Your Technology and Software Set-Up Meet Your Needs?

• Is it fit for purpose?
• Does it meet my SLAs?
• Can it differentiate my managed service portfolio?
• Does it enable me to offer customers proven, sustained high availability and service performance?
• Will it provide greater upsell functionality to boost customer retention and attract new customers?

If the answer to these questions is unsatisfactory, you should take a closer look at your set-up and start with an audit analysis of your entire toolkit to determine the following:

• Identify all vendors tooling in operation
• Identify exactly what functional task each tool is providing, and to where each tools capabilities extend
• How each tool is provisioned including hardware requirements
• Cost of licenses used on a customer managed service solution
• Annual cost of hardware support
• Annual cost of software license maintenance support
• Operational support costs for each tool
• Benefits that each tool brings to your managed service solution
• Does the identified tooling in use provide the expected End-to
• End management requirements? Identify any gaps in your management service-tooling portfolio
• Does the tooling in place today complement your roadmap strategy of tomorrow?

Identifying the Towers of Technology

A major challenge is the identification of the towers of technology required for the infrastructure management of customers’ managed networks.

Each identified tower of technology needs to have a suite of functionality that enriches the towers capabilities and has a flexible integration interface for both feeding and extracting specific data source.

Let’s take a closer look at the individual components:

Network Management

Network management is a term many people associate with visualization of the wide and local area network topologies. It is of course so much more than just a pretty picture. Managing a network should take into consideration all entities in the End-to-End communication delivery path of a given network, or indeed service. Infrastructure hosting LAN interconnectivity at both layer 2 and 3 to WAN/MAN handoff to end-user delivery all need managing from a network management perspective.

Visualization of the End-to-End paths is essential, and understanding the operational node status of each component along the communication delivery path for system events or alarming is of equal importance. Being able to pinpoint the root cause of a network failure, or service degradation, in a fast, accurate, and timely manner is paramount to maintaining consistent high levels of service assurance.

Network Configuration and Change Management (NCCM)

A network configuration and change management system is NOT a suite of Perl scripts some smart engineer has coupled together that backs up the configuration of a customer’s network on a daily basis. This approach is not only dated, but is riddled with risks around continued support and operation. NCCM is a key functionality around the control and governance of the network node configuration that resides on all of the components delivering End-to-End network services. Having the ability to auto-discover the inventory of a given network in a vendor-agnostic way in order that you can collect key vendor component data is a prerequisite for an NCCM asset discovery inventory system.

NCCM capabilities should extend beyond the vendor-agnostic asset discovery function to include configuration backup and restoration functionality, configuration, policy compliance, and governance with alarm and event notification for tracking both authorized and non-authorized configuration changes. This is more relevant than ever, when approaches like Netconf/Yang are added to the increasing portfolio of configuration options.

Configuration policy compliance and governance policing will drive high-levels of service availability through the knowledge of knowing what has been changed, where, or on what components has the change been made to, and who made the change, provides the control around the customer’s networks required to police and maintain contractual service levels.

Lifecycle Management

Lifecycle management in any environment is critical to maintaining a consistent level of operation and performance however, in a managed services environment it is critical that you firstly, know the status of the managed components from a hardware and software inventory viewpoint for EOL (End-of-Life) EOS (End-of-Sale) and EOSS (End-of-Service-Support) status, and secondly, that you mitigate vulnerabilities announced by vendors in the configuration or software o/s elements to police security risks and maintain the levels of support required in the managing of customers networks.

An MSP/CSP does not want to be paying service credits on a failed network component that has gone End-of-Life and is now unsupportable from a hardware or software replacement/support viewpoint.

That is why lifecycle management is another key ingredient to the successful management of customers’ networks, customer retention, and maximization of profit margins. Lifecycle management systems must integrate with the CMDB, or asset inventory database, in order that accurate up-to-date reporting can be visualized. Auto-discovered dynamic asset management CMDBs is crucial in maintaining accuracy around the inventory database.

Performance Management

Performance management has always been a prerequisite for any managed services environment but enriched capabilities available today mean that the investments in legacy systems need to be re-looked at as they are no longer fit for purpose in most cases from a customer’s requirement perspective.

Network and availability performance measurements now need to be overlaid with contractual SLA metrics that report and alarm when thresholds are being breached, capacity utilization performance indicators with predictive capacity planning functionality that allows a capacity management team to visualize when capacity thresholds will be breached in the future based upon historic trending information allowing teams the time to mitigate future performance issues before they become service-affecting. It benefits from enhanced application performance with the use of IP SLA, application awareness and usage via Netflow, and media scripting with enriched analytics and real-time reporting. The support of Network Streaming Telemetry that has recently gained a lot of attention ensures the future viability of a platform solution like StableNet^®.

Each key function should have a suite of integrated functionality that complements its technology tower; all of the towers of technology should be fully integrated so that functional correlation between all towers, and accuracy around the usage of the same delta time are fully synchronized.

The difficulty now comes in selecting the right tools for the right towers of technology as firstly, ensuring they have the correct functionality within each tool is of key importance, and secondly ensuring the tool selected also has the capability to integrate fully with the other technology towers.

This is where StableNet^®, the automated network & service management platform is unique because it has been designed and architected from the ground up to incorporate all of the above towers of technology in a single unified management product that makes it a compelling proposition for both MSPs and CSPs alike due to its enriched capabilities, cost-effective platform footprint, lean operating support model, and flexible deployment options.

StableNet^® Automated Network Management – The Intelligent Way to Manage

Proactive Service Management
StableNet^®’s powerful discovery combined with the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) builds up a proactive understanding of the network topology so that in case of any faults the process of identifying the actual problems and their remediation can be accelerated. Additional functionality like StableNet^®’s proprietary Dynamic Rules Generation (DRG) further enhances the capabilities of state-of-the-art Service Management.

ITIL^® Alignment
A key to achieving sustained high-levels of IT infrastructure service availability is to optimize IT management. ITIL^® best practices encompass problem, incident, event, change, configuration, lifecycle, inventory, capacity, performance management, and reporting. StableNet^® not only fully aligns to all ITIL^® best practice standards, it is a unified management system that encapsulates all of the ITIL^® best practice IT infrastructure functional capabilities making it a compelling proposition for MSPs and CSPs as it enables rapid transitioning from in-house to provider management with less risk, greater control, and cost efficiency.

Consolidated Service Visibility
Consistent service visibility that provides consolidated views of each service being managed by the service provider. StableNet^® provides visibility into the health and performance of each service being managed through the use of service Weather Maps. The service visibility Weather Maps can then be accessed by service teams or specific individuals focused on understanding the performance/customer experience of each service. Consolidated correlated views of service performance and experience can be provided at executive and customer levels for greater transparency and proactive awareness purposes.

Multi-vendor Support
Today’s IT infrastructures are typically heterogeneous environments comprised of multi-vendor hardware, software, and networking products. For a service provider this can represent a huge challenge in terms of tooling resource and cost efficiencies. StableNet^® solves these challenges with multi-vendor support and unified capabilities thus addressing the cost efficiency and multi-vendor tooling resource requirements.

Performance-based SLAs
The performance management capability of StableNet^® has a very powerful SLA management and reporting feature that is closely integrated with the event and alarm capability to alert the service provider to potential future capacity issues, or SLA threshold breaches, so as to remediate and take action before service level agreements are breached, thus ensuring the customer is proactively notified of potential future bottlenecks, or capacity/performance issues with adequate timescales for controlled timely changes to the infrastructure thus mitigating risk and accurately planning structured upgrades.

Service Solution Focused
Through the use of StableNet^®’s flexible agent technology extending the reaches of the entire service to visualize the End-to-End infrastructure performance can be realized. StableNet^® truly differentiates and compliments a service provider’s managed service. Its flexibility and enrichment capabilities provide customers with an exceptional service experience that enhances a service provider’s customer relationships, drives greater value-added business, and maximizes customer retention.

Unified Management Framework with StableNet^®

StableNet^® provided by Infosim^® is a Unified Management Framework, that means it is a single management platform with an integrated suite of infrastructure management functionality that provides the control and governance required for assurance of End-to-End networks and hosting environments. For the first time ever, Managed Services Providers can procure and provision a single management tool that will maximize their revenues, provide their customers with a differentiated service experience, significantly reduce SLA breaches that incur service credits, and more importantly maximize customer retention.

Find out more about the applications and functions of StableNet^®, take a look here or request a non-binding consultation or demo.