OST improves customer success with Opsview
Managed service providers (MSPs) require full visibility of their customers’ IT to help them prevent incidents before their own customers are impacted. For this, they need easy-to-set-up, full-featured IT infrastructure monitoring.
At OST, customer satisfaction is the key to the MSP's success, but it was difficult to secure comprehensive insights into clients’ IT environments. Only by having this visibility could OST identify and resolve issues before customers find out something is wrong.
OST’s customer base can be running anywhere between 1,000- 10,000+ servers, so it needed effective IT operations monitoring and automated response- for a wide range of legacy and digital environments. The environment included mainframes, OpenVMS, and other decades-old but mission-critical systems; plus on-premises storage systems; and cloud native application infrastructure.
So OST was looking for an IT Operations Management (ITOM) partner to assist with its adoption of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and to create highly scalable, ultra-reliable IT infrastructure.
Choosing Opsview
OST initially chose to partner with Opsview a decade ago, with a free version of its ITOM tool. Opsview offered everything OST was looking for in an ITOM provider: A full-feature set at approximately a quarter of the cost of rival enterprise tools. As the company grew, it migrated over to Opsview Monitor Enterprise, which added support and extra modular features such as reporting, a data warehouse, and plug-ins to third-party platforms like the service desk.
OST has scaled its business with Opsview over the past seven years without having to consider different systems, according to OST’s MSP manager, Matt Glenn.
Over that time, as OST’s adoption of the SRE methodology became more important, Opsview seamlessly stepped in to support the insight, control, and automation it required. Its support for open-source Nagios plug-ins was also key, helping to provide visibility into a broad range of legacy and modern IT platforms.
Another key reason for choosing Opsview was because it supports such diverse infrastructure which is crucial for any MSP monitoring the enterprise space. Customer service A significant number of OST’s customers were undergoing digital transformation initiatives and rearchitecting applications to the cloud for cloud native deployments.
OST found Opsview’s single-pane-of-glass IT overview invaluable in ensuring that all applications running were performing well. Because Opsview has developed integrations to the cloud monitoring platforms from AWS, Azure and Google, all metrics could be seen from a central environment. OST felt a strong cultural affinity with Opsview.
“Opsview is somewhat similar to OST and we like having partners that we have a cultural connection to,” said Glenn. “We are both organizations that put our employees first, and that resonates with us personally.”
Automation success
OST hasn’t looked back since implementing Opsview for ITOM. Automation is key to the value of Opsview Monitor: It enables monitoring and remediation of any issues before they have been noticed by the customer. In total, this has generated time savings estimated at around 40%.
“When an incident is detected and there is an actual outage, our response time to those tickets is typically under five minutes and in a lot of cases it is within one minute. That is because Opsview immediately creates the incident in our service desk, then our paging system immediately pages someone and allows them to acknowledge it directly from their phone,” said Glenn.
"When they acknowledge the ticket, it is then communicated to the customer. On average, most of the incidents created out of Opsview are resolved in 10 minutes.”
By automating and spotting incidents early on, OST is also able to drive cost reduction. The money saved is reinvested in the company to further improve service levels and drive growth. “In driving down costs, we can have one person supporting a much larger number of systems than we could before,” said Glenn.
“This means that we can hire more knowledgeable and skilled people than before to drive customer satisfaction, enabling a great balance and growth.”
Having come so far already, Opsview is right behind OST as it continues its growth journey. “We are a smaller organization, and we provide services to organizations that are much larger than we are. So, we must go to them and operate at their level,” said Glenn. “Opsview represents to them an enterprise tool set with enterprise capabilities. It shows them that we’re enterprise ready.”
