Martello BLOG : Microsoft 365 Monitoring

Why Adding End-to-End Service Delivery is the ‘Ace in the Hole’ for MSPs

Your path to creating an elevated version of your current Microsoft 365 services is one that you already know is needed to create predictability for you and for your customers- predictability yields profitability.  The reality is that Microsoft is more focused today on the commodity customer than your specific business needs as an MSP. This is one of the reasons most MSPs tend to take the backup/DR/cybersecurity angle. But to truly get your Microsoft 365 services to be ‘elevated’, you need to create better visibility for yourself, resulting in end-to-end service delivery.

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.

To ensure the quality of Microsoft’s service delivery it is crucial to take certain proactive steps. The following helps to ensure your customers can fully reap the benefits of their Microsoft 365 services.

Proactive Support  – In most cases, MSPs can at the very least determine which users are impacted and fix the issue if the problem is within your control. Should the problem be with Microsoft, you can at least communicate the issue to any affected users. Depending on the software solutions used, it should also be noted that this kind of detection, investigation, and response can be accomplished proactively before users are impacted.

Public Cloud Management  –  It should be mentioned that much of the technologies used to deliver these kinds of advanced services to Microsoft 365 customers can also be ported to a wide range of public cloud services as well.  So, take the first three services listed above in tier three and think AWS, Azure, etc.

End-to-End Service Delivery  – The true ace in the hole; this offering puts you squarely in the middle of being responsible for everything and anything between the user’s endpoint and the  Microsoft service  (e.g. Teams) and includes proactive monitoring of devices,  networks,  infrastructure,  intra-organizational services, routing, authentication, and anything else that may impact your customer’s ability to reach Microsoft services.  It also incorporates the monitoring of services from the user’s experience; for example, you’d monitor Teams call quality in addition to just making sure Teams is up and running.

Service Level Management  –  The monitoring aspect of End-to-End Service Delivery this offering provides you with insight into what is and isn’t working (think along the lines of red/yellow/green monitoring and alerting). The difference here is the focus on internal resources and some level of monitoring services within the Microsoft 365 cloud. This offering lacks granular insight into the user experience.

By offering Microsoft 365-related services in tiers, you create more opportunities to reach a greater number of customers based on their specific service needs, resulting in increased revenue from a service designed to not just help the customer, but also make you more profitable. Regardless of what service tier your customer requires (just covering the basics, focusing on more ongoing daily management tasks, or something even more advanced) providing end-to-end service delivery serves as the cherry on top and the differentiator separating you from the competition and keeping your customers the most satisfied.  Download our ‘Elevating Microsoft 365 Managed Services’ eBook and learn more about Martello’s solutions for MSPs here.

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.