Author: Uwe Ulbrich
Managing Director – connect on LinkedIn
In today’s world, it is essential for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to deliver high quality service to satisfy and retain their customers in the long term. In this blog article you will learn how you can use Rimscout to guarantee high-quality service level agreements (SLAs).
SLA compliance made easy with Digital Experience Monitoring
SLAs are agreed upon to define clear and binding agreements between service providers and your customers. These define certain criteria and deliverables that the service provider must deliver, such as maximum downtime or response times. But how can an MSP ensure that they meet these SLAs and provide proof of this to their customers?
This is where Rimscout steps in. Rimscout is a tool that specializes in monitoring cloud services and enterprise applications, helping MSPs control and improve the quality of their services. Digital Experience Monitoring with Rimscout enables MSPs to monitor compliance with their SLAs in real time and take appropriate countermeasures immediately in the event of deviations. Digital Experience Monitoring follows the approach of focusing not on servers and switches, but on the user experience of individual users when using digital services. Rimscout monitors not only the individual components, but also the user experience, which is influenced by the interaction of all parts. Learn more about the importance of Digital Experience Monitoring on our blog soon.
Effective service monitoring: Customized alerts and tests for MSPs
Rimscout offers a wide range of functions and options to monitor the quality of your services and ultimately improve it through enhanced data. This includes, for example, monitoring the network performance of individual clients and measuring the availability of your selected services. Rimscout can be customized to your needs as a MSP by creating your own tests and alarms, thus offering a high degree of flexibility in monitoring your services.
For example, if you operate a hosted ERP system as a managed service, you can view the current connection quality to this system in Rimscout in real time. In addition, the status display gives you an initial assessment of whether and how well the respective service is currently available. In this way, you as an MSP can not only immediately remedy performance problems, but also generally identify and improve weak points in the IT infrastructure or proactively optimize capacity planning.
The current connection status is displayed by colors in the Rimscout Health overview. Green indicates a stable connection, yellow indicates that the threshold values have been exceeded, and red indicates a critical connection with noticeable performance issues.
Leveraging historical data: Optimize service quality over time
Especially with the increased use of cloud services today, monitoring user experience is here to stay. However, if a customer experiences latency issues, this has a direct negative impact on the user experience of individual users. Rimscout’s Digital Experience Monitoring approach provides an overview of the current connection status of the monitored services and complements this with an insight into the individual network environment of the respective clients. This enables you as an MSP to quickly identify and resolve acute performance problems.
In addition to real-time data, collected historical data is also available, e.g., to ensure the service quality of the last month or to analyze for recurring patterns. By continuously monitoring the network, the user data can also be used to make valid statements about whether the problems are with the managed service or perhaps with the user’s Internet access.
The availability of historical data makes it easier to identify any patterns. In this case, a user experienced a sudden degradation in Microsoft Teams audio and video with no previous pattern.
Digital Experience Monitoring with Rimscout in 3 easy steps
But how exactly can you as a managed service provider set up efficient digital experience monitoring with Rimscout?
- 1
Rollout of the Rimscout clients on the customer side
Rimscout works through an interaction of the Rimscout Client and the Rimscout Portal. The Rimscout Client is software that is installed on customer systems, where it monitors the performance of your services and applications in real time through various connection tests. The results of these tests are transferred in real time to the web-based Rimscout Portal, where they are visually presented for analysis.
- 2
Definition of custom tests for specific managed services
Digital Experience Monitoring is only customized if it can be adapted to your needs as an MSP and the needs of your customers. In Rimscout, you can define your own custom tests to monitor the performance of specific services. In addition to individual tests, test sets can also be defined. This allows you to control which tests are run at which intervals by which clients. Some services, such as Outlook or Microsoft Teams, are already covered by Rimscout’s default tests and can deliver initial results as soon as the clients have automatically registered in the portal.
- 3
Definition of alarms to match the agreed SLAs
In the health overview, you can directly view the status of the connection performance based on the color coding. However, in most cases there is no capacity to monitor the health overview manually. As a relief, you can define alarms in Rimscout to be informed about performance problems occurring. You are alerted either via a separate e-mail or by integrating it into an existing monitoring or alerting tool. This ensures an optimal quality of service through a fast response time. Alerts can be configured to match service level agreements, giving you timely notification before SLAs are breached.