Martello BLOG

Why MSPs Need End-to-End Visibility

The “shared responsibility” model of the cloud puts most of the control with Microsoft, despite the MSP being responsible.  As shown below, Microsoft puts very little responsibility into the hands of the customer (or, in your case, the MSP), which is why most MSPs stick to the basic onboarding-related tasks as their Microsoft 365 offering.

But the customer’s reliance on Microsoft 365 has changed in the last 14 months… and so have their expectations. Today’s customer expects that users aren’t just connected, but are productive; that services aren’t just running, but running well. End-to-end service delivery helps to meet – and exceed – this expectation using a combination of technologies:

• Digital  Experience  Monitoring  (DEM)  –  Using synthetic transactions, it’s possible to replicate end-users actions and proactively monitor Microsoft 365 services at a practical and granular level (think scheduling a Teams call, or trying to download a file from SharePoint), testing the user’s route to the Microsoft cloud 24/7.
• Real  User  Monitoring  (RUM)  –  Using individual user Teams’ call data and network connectivity metrics,  it’s possible to correlate this with infrastructure and network monitoring to create a complete picture of the network path between the individual user and Microsoft 365.
• Service Management – Monitoring both internal and external services, infrastructure,  and networking across on-prem,  cloud,  and hybrid environments, while leveraging RUM and synthetic transaction data, an end-to-end service map is created that helps to easily identify and drill down to the root cause.

The addition of end-to-end service delivery for Microsoft 365 to an existing service offering accomplishes a few things for the MSP:

1. Elevates your Microsoft 365 service offering to provide better cloud services performance.
2. Reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) and support costs.
3. Provides new tiers of services that can include a custom Microsoft 365 SLA or even an Experience Level Agreement, end-to-end service performance, as well as additional consulting hours to address identified internal service delivery causes.
4. Differentiates your services against those MSPs who don’t have the ability to demonstrate their understanding of both what is causing outages and performance issues and why they are occurring.
5. Applies beyond Microsoft 365, including public cloud and on-premise service delivery management.

But it’s not just the MSP that benefits; the customer also sees tangible benefits by using this service:

• Enjoys improved reliability in their Microsoft 365 investment.
• Experiences an MSP that provides end-to-end proactive support and analysis of service bottlenecks.
• Creates a happier, more productive, and more profitable customer.

Martello’s end-to-end monitoring provides MSPs with true Microsoft 365 service delivery management for their customers, reduces support and overhead costs and allows them to stand out from the competition. Learn more about Martello’s solutions for Managed Service Providers and make sure to download our eBook ‘Elevating Microsoft 365 Managed Services’.

Managing Microsoft 365? See What You’re Missing

If a customer has an issue with any part of Microsoft 365, MSPs just don’t have the native visibility to identify the root cause, let alone respond to and remediate the problem. Most of the time, it’s little more than checking Microsoft’s Service Health status to see if Microsoft knows it’s having a problem.

Most MSPs only have visibility into the user accounts that exist (you know which user’s accounts have been created, who’s been provisioned what license type, if the user has been assigned more than one license, who has installed copies of Office, and what machines are they installed on, etc. The problem is that there is no visibility into any of the networking, systems, applications, resources used, network and security controls, application services, or identity – all of which can be the source of issues. To deliver some of the third-tier value, you’ve got to have complete visibility into what’s going on – ideally, from end to end.

Let’s say you’ve got a customer using their own personal device from home and are going in through a VPN to the office. The route through the customer network, exiting through the customer’s ISP, traversing the internet, and eventually getting to the Microsoft cloud, authenticating, and finally connecting to Microsoft 365 servers and services. If the user opens a ticket saying Teams is slow, the call quality is bad, or they’re having difficulty starting a meeting – where exactly is the problem coming from? Without end-to-end visibility, the MSP is as blind as the customer is.

Sure, you can always check the Microsoft Service Health Status or their corresponding Twitter feed, both previously mentioned, but the reality is, the best-case scenario would be if the user opened a service ticket today! The problem is that users – especially when using SaaS applications – rarely open tickets for something like experiencing a slow application. There’s obviously a point when the user has had enough and opens a ticket as a last resort. But when Microsoft 365 is slow, users will find a workaround, complain to their boss or colleague, or try to “fix” the issue themselves – all the while the MSP doesn’t know anything about this, because there’s no tool provided by Microsoft to identify this kind of issue. The result is that your customer hears about users having issues and you either don’t know about it, or there was nothing you could do about it. Either way, your customer isn’t going to like the answer.

There are countless facets that make up the path from user to Microsoft 365 that can affect service delivery, so to ensure a quality service, you first need visibility into the entire path and the ability to correlate the information gathered about every aspect of the user’s connection to Microsoft 365.

Martello provides you with 24/7 proactive digital experience monitoring to effectively manage the service quality of the Microsoft 365 suite of services. This means that you will be able to proactively manage any service incident before it affects your customers to ensure consistent and reliable service delivery. Learn more about Martello’s solution for managed service providers here and become Microsoft 365 managed services industry leader.