Does this mean taking them off billable projects or customer-focussed activities?
Are you effectively losing money because N-central isn’t optimised?
In 2016 Inbay helped an ever-increasing number of partners to get the most out of their N-central investment. The following were just some of the results:
- Customer A: Fixed 97% stale and misconfigured alerts for all servers and network devices.
- Customer B: Fixed 99% stale and misconfigured alerts
- Customer C: Fixed over 300 stale and misconfigured alerts
“Our support team was being flooded by proactive alerts, many of which could have been screened out as not relevant or as having a very low threshold. This alert ‘noise’ was having an impact on our ability to proactively manage customer networks and was starting to cause customer satisfaction issues. Plus, of course, our staff were not being as productive as they could be.”
Steve Martel, Senior Vice-President of Services, Winxnet
Both starting out on your N-central journey and along the way as a seasoned user, you need to spend time fine-tuning and configuring N-central. If you don’t, as with any RMM tool, you might not see all of the benefits you expect – and you could also be losing valuable billable hours as your technicians divert their attention elsewhere.
Why is it important?
If it is not done, you risk the following:
- Your support team may be less productive than they could be
If your team is being overwhelmed by N-central alerts, many of which could have been screened out as not relevant or having a very low threshold, they may not have time to manage customer networks as effectively as they should be.
- Your most skilled people could be diverted from billable projects or customer-focussed activities
Setting up and maintaining N-central is of utmost importance for your service delivery. But if you are tying up your own highly skilled resources with fine-tuning tasks, you may be sacrificing revenue-generating projects or customer-focussed activities.
- Customer service levels may be impacted
The constant distraction of alert ‘noise’ could be preventing your team from delivering the high levels of proactive service that your customers expect – quite apart from being frustrating for the team.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
As SolarWinds MSP’s Certified NOC Partner we offer a unique Audit and Fine Tune service for N-central to quickly and easily identify and optimise key areas that may have been preventing you from getting the most out of your investment.
This service includes:
- Installation review of your N-central server: verifying it has been installed correctly, is running in the appropriate hardware environment, and has scope for additional capacity as demand grows.
- Configuration and Integration: inspecting the server to ensure it has been set up according to N-central best practices. This includes reviewing customisation of filters, notifications, service templates and scripts as well as PSA and LDAP integration.
- Deployment: checking the deployment of probes and agents to all client devices and the discovery jobs of all IP-enabled devices, with monitored data fed back to N-central.
- Monitoring: reviewing the presentation of monitored data and utilisation of dashboards, and providing advice on using customised views to align with NOC and service desk functions.
- Management: carrying out a review of N-central’s management function and configuration recommendations for self-healing and scripting via Automation Manager.
On average, MSPs who take the time to ensure that they really get the most out of N-central can reduce monthly manual labour time spent by up to 70%.[1]
But don’t just take our word for it – this is what one of our N-central Audit and Remediation customers has to say:
“Following the completion of the project, we saw a 25% reduction in the number of alert tickets and an increase in our ability to proactively address server and network problems.We have also leveraged the best practices learned through the engagement and have updated customer onboarding templates, based on some of the findings. The clean-up effort gave us a significant lift to leveraging N-Central in a more efficient manner – and improved staff productivity.”
Steve Martel, Senior Vice-President of Services, Winxnet
Find out how we can help you really put N-central to work for your business
[1] Monthly manual vs. automated time spent based monitoring and managing 200 servers, 1000 desktops and 150 network devices. Solarwinds N-able Automation Cost Savings Review.
