Meeting the Monitoring Needs of Managed Services Providers

Transcription

1 SELECT CUSTOMERS Meeting the Monitoring Needs of Managed Services Providers MSPS AND THE MONITORING IMPERATIVE Abstract In this white paper, GroundWork describes the MSP business model, unique MSP functional requirements, and the GroundWork Monitor Enterprise (GWME) features that address these requirements. Introduction Managed Services Providers deliver IT services to their customers across a broad spectrum of services. Examples include cloud hosting, software as a service, colocation-based hosting, network services, and system administration, among others. MSPs have to provide personalized service while benefitting from economies of scale. They must be efficient and yet vigilant. Monitoring is the first line of defense between MSPs and irate customers. The service provider must not only deliver unquestionably objective metrics of the delivered performance of items within the service scope, but also must deliver transparent metrics about the performance of the service itself. Furthermore, it is beneficial to have the service deliverer and the monitor of those services have a healthy separation for accuracy and improvement. For example, when delivering a network service, it is important to measure and report on the bandwidth and error rate of traffic. The MSP must also measure whether a request to increase or decrease available bandwidth is processed and made effective within time intervals agreed by the relevant SLA. A confident and transparent way to demonstrate the integrity of the requirement measurements and reports is to provide the customer with continuous access to them. TYPICAL MSP MONITORING SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS The following are common functional and commercial requirements of Managed Services Providers for monitoring systems and their vendors. 1. Access: Many MSPs need to monitor components and applications on customer-owned premises. Access from outside the customer s firewall will normally not be granted to the MSP. Thus any service delivery infrastructure including monitoring that is located on customer premises should initiate all communications to the master system at the MSP s location. For monitoring, there are three main communications threads: monitoring results configuration updates software upgrades Since the contents of the data coming from the customer can often include host names, IP addresses, and other sensitive technical information, all internet traffic between customer premise and MSP should be encrypted. 1

2 We have been using Ground- Work Monitor Enterprise Edition as the heart of our monitoring MSP offering for several years. Now with the Release 6 series, Ground- Work is adding the features that we need to make our service operations more efficient, controlled and secure. The new service portal, rolebased access controls, GDMA passive monitoring agents, Java Discovery and Monitoring Agent, and Flex pricing all help us grow our service business more quickly and easily while improving our customers monitoring results. Paul Schuster, Director, Business Operations, Matrix Technology AG. Pricing and Pricing Model Priced per monitored device Tie software cost to revenue No pricing surprises Cost related to support level 2. Visibility: The monitoring solution should provide comprehensive views of service performance from the standpoint of both MSP personnel and end users. The customer user interface contains the real-time display of all relevant information, usually in the form of customer-specific dashboards. The MSP should ensure that each customer will be prevented from viewing the data of any other customer by providing role-based access controls. MSP operating staff must have visibility to the state of service delivery for every customer. MSP personnel can view service levels in exactly the same way that customers do. Failures to meet agreed service levels should trigger notifications and escalations within the MSP organization whether or not they are also provided to the customer. (It is recommended that the customer also be notified of all service-level failures immediately.) Most MSPs provide their customers with a mash-up dashboard that includes a multi-dimensional view of the customer s entire service experience. Typically, this includes panels containing monitoring information, a panel listing open support tickets, a panel permitting the customer to place service orders, a billing summary, and the most recent Service Level Agreement report. This can be made available on a customer service portal, securely integrated with the monitoring solution. Regarding the design of customer service portals, the right picture is literally worth a thousand words. Convincing graphic displays that accurately and concisely show the state of all managed objects can be informative while concise 3. Control and Integration: The MSP should be able to easily manage the requirements of customers of varying size and with varying needs. For example, an MSP may have ten customers with hundreds of components each or thousands of customers with a handful of components each or a mixture of the two. The number and employment of different components can be very dynamic, especially in the cloud. Faced with this reality, MSP customers have asked GroundWork to efficiently meet the following control and integration requirements. Easy deployability. Agents should be deployable with the load image of physical or virtual server software and be able to automatically phone home, or autoregister, and configure the monitoring system to reflect their presence and what they are pre-programmed to cover. The control system should be able to change all of the agent s control directives in encrypted communications sessions initiated by the agent. Monitoring servers installed on customer premises should be able to be controlled in the same way. Central control. All controls should be centralized so that the MSP s operations personnel can make single and group changes quickly and easily. Role-based access adds another layer of security. Non-unique names and addresses. The monitoring solution may need to address issues involving non-unique host names and IP addresses since these conventions may be non-unique across customers. High availability. The monitoring system located at the MSP may need to handle short-duration losses of connectivity between the customer premises and the central monitoring system resulting from either network of monitoring server failures. (Failure modes and effects analysis for all service components is recommended.) 2

3 GWMEE advantages to MSPs Passive monitoring agents Polling servers Centralizes control Resolves conflicting names, IP addresses Survives failures Automates system maintenance Integrates with ticketing systems Integrates service desk systems Works with external CMDBs System maintenance. The most common monitoring system maintenance (i.e. adds, changes, and deletes) should be automated if possible by directly integrating the monitoring system with a centralized source of system changes. Common methods include a software distribution system, a configuration management system, the order entry system used by the MSP, or the cloud provisioning system. In many environments, the failure to automate monitoring system maintenance results in higher operating costs and embarrassing service failures because of untimely or inaccurate monitoring coverage. While some individual organizations can get away with a lack of process, MSPs who do so are courting disaster. Ticketing systems. Integration with Ticketing or Service Desk Systems should be supported if role-based access controls implemented within the monitoring system are supported by the Service Desk System. Customizable. Every MSP will have unique preferences and workflows that are their own secret sauce. The monitoring solution should be able to incorporate and adapt to the needs of the user with integration options and dashboard customizations both on a data and display level, such as via portlets. 4. Pricing and Pricing Model: MSPs usually offer their services in a subscription model with terms as short as a few minutes to as long as ten years. Frequently, the subscription is based on a number of devices, circuits, servers, images as well as the term. MSPs frequently find it convenient if their monitoring software is priced the same way. The cost per component monitored should be a fraction of the value received by the MSP s service for monitoring the component. Furthermore, any system used by MSPs should allow for continual operational efficiency improvements, which can result in improved profitability. The consolidated dashboard is huge for us. If we had to look at a different console for each customer, something might go down, and we d miss it. With GWME, hopping from console to console is a thing of the past. Joe Reinig, Senior Systems Engineer, Blue Tangerine Solutions RESPONSE TO REQUIREMENTS GroundWork Monitor Enterprise meets all of these requirements, in some cases with multiple features. 1. Access: GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agents (GDMA Release 2.2) meets the requirements described above and is available for Suse, Red Hat, CentOS and Ubuntu Linux plus monitors Solaris, AIX, Windows and other systems. GroundWork Monitor Child servers which fan out the gathering of metrics - are suitable for installation on larger customer premises. They are available for Linux, VMware and Windows. All can originate encrypted communications sessions to master enterprise monitoring systems located at the MSP s operations center. Report servers are optionally available, to free up more resources for continual data gathering. This array of agents and polling servers permits the MSP to use different monitoring architectures to comply with different customer access control policies and provide different levels of monitoring capacity at different costs. GroundWork consultants can advise MSPs or their customers on the configurations needed to meet specific requirements. Some options for custom premise monitoring architecture are shown below. 3

4 Alternative Monitoring Architecture for MSP Customer Premises MSP Operations Centers Internet PPS PPS A A A A A A A A A Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, JMX SNMP, WMI A A A A A A A A A Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, JMX, SNMP, WMI Customer Premise Type 1 Passive Server Agent Architecture Customer Premise Type 2 Polling Server for Agent-less Architecture Customer Premise Type 3 General Purpose High Capacity Architecture Notes: In Type 1, GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agents (GDMAs) are installed on end customer servers and start by phoning home to instantiate secure communications and autoregister themselves. Autoregistration allows a new device to identify itself, enter the monitored environment, receive a GroundWork Profile, and start sending metrics automatically. All traffic between the agent and the MSP s GWME system is encrypted and initiated by the installed agents. No monitoring server is required on the customer s premises and no communications are necessary between the monitoring agents. Periodically, the distributed agents initiate requests for updated control directives and, if required, new monitoring plug-ins. These requests are fulfilled by the global monitoring server if any changes have been made since the last request. In Type 2, a GroundWork passive polling server (PPS) has been installed on the customer s premises. (PPS systems are more commonly referred to as GroundWork child servers.) It can poll network devices and other components containing SNMP MIBs and can also make any other polling checks supported by active agents and installed plug-ins on servers. GroundWork Monitor child servers are available for Windows, VMware, and Linux and have the same type of secure, selfinitiated communications as the GDMAs in Type 1 do. An MSP may use Type 2 architecture if the components to be monitored are network devices or if the customer declines to install passive agents. This approach may also be preferred if the MSP is able to install a server on the customer premises as part of the service definition as would be the case for example with lodging facility network service providers. In Type 3, the previous concepts are mixed to gain the benefit of higher scalability. An MSP might prefer this approach if the service makes use of a service delivery appliance and is managing network, servers and applications at significant scale. Other Methods are possible. For example, child servers that contain all the information needed to be autonomous can be used for individual customers. In this federated model, only the MSP has access to their aggregate data for internal, operational needs. Cloud-based infrastructure and applications can be monitored using any of the above techniques as well as by polling servers located at the MSP operation center by using the cloud API. GroundWork s Cloud Hub can be used for this purpose. 4

5 2. Visibility: MSP customers are permitted secure access to the GroundWork Monitor Portal hosted on the MSP s global monitoring system for constant access to their monitoring information. Customer hosts are assigned to one or more host or custom groups. The portal administration application of GWME then limits the visibility of the customer s role to the hosts in the associated host groups. Mash-up dashboards created and hosted on the GroundWork Monitor Portal can contain components for any applications authenticated through the portal, including all GroundWork U/I components and reports. Other applications that are commonly authenticated through the GroundWork portal include service desk, service order entry system, CMDB, and the UIs of other monitoring systems such as Webmetrics. Any GroundWork Monitor Enterprise dashboard, regardless of role assignment, can be flagged so that no drill-down into underlying applications is permitted. This is frequently the only type of access that is needed for MSP customers and for certain concerned executives as well. Dashboards that are not flagged in this way permit users to drill into the underlying applications based on permissions for their role. Within GroundWork, this would permit the role player to perform any permitted actions on the pages to which access has been granted. For this reason, in several GroundWork pages, all actions are combined into a single portlet. By using the administration tool to create a page that does not include this portlet, first level drill-down into useful contextual information can be supported without permitting an MSP end customer to acknowledge alarms, schedule maintenance or disable checks. This level of access shouldn t be provided lightly, however, and is rarely necessary since read-only access is so easily provided through read-only dashboards that can be configured to contain any and all of the GroundWork UI components. Role-based administration permits the MSP to limit access to any views and dashboards that would be available to MSP personnel. 3. Control and Integration: GroundWork agents and child servers deployed as passive polling servers that are controlled by the central GWME located at the MSP operation centers. Newly deployed passive monitoring agents report to this system across the internet using encrypted communications. In response, they are configured into the GWME database and user interface. GroundWork Monitor provides integration modules that connect the Configuration and Control database to an external CMDB or other source of monitoring configuration information. Other integration modules can be used to create the online interface to an external Service Desk System. These interfaces are discussed in more detail in other documentation. The following figure shows a typical MSP monitoring infrastructure inside the MSP s firewall. 5

6 In addition to the GWMEE and the Standby Notification Server at the top of the diagram, several typical business applications are shown for illustrative purposes along with a web application monitoring client (Webmetrics) and a GroundWork Network Monitoring subsystem. The user interfaces for all of these applications can be wrapped in portlet applications for the GroundWork JBoss portal to obtain the benefits of secure customer-facing mash-up dashboards, secure cross links between the applications, and single sign-on. 4. Pricing and Pricing Model: GroundWork s pricing model is called Flex. Under Flex, Managed Services Providers pay one price for each host level component, i.e., switch, router, server, firewall, load balancer or application that is being monitored regardless of the number of GroundWork Monitoring components which may be needed to provide the coverage. So, if one MSP requires a passive polling server for every customer while another uses passive agents and no polling servers at all, the subscription for each will be the same price for the same number of devices monitored. This is particularly convenient for keeping the same price for monitoring across all customers if some use one technique while others use another. As an alternative to license+maintenance, subscription pricing permits the MSP to contract for monitoring capacity in direct proportion to the rise in service revenues generated by the MSP s services. The linear scaling of GroundWork Monitor capacity avoids unexpected and unplanned increases in monitoring fees to add capacity. Different prices per monitored node are offered by GroundWork based on different levels of service made available to the MSP. Cloud pricing can be made available upon request CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS The current version of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, when installed at the Managed Services Provider s location, can provide centralized direction and control of the monitoring infrastructure located behind firewalls on customer premises. Ground- Work passive monitoring agents and polling servers can collect and communicate monitoring results from network devices, servers, storage arrays, and applications which will then be correlated, conditioned, and displayed on dashboards, reports and user interfaces accessible to both MSP operations roles and customer roles. End-customers can visualize the real-time state of monitored devices including applications and the managed service itself using mash-up dashboards hosted by the JBoss portal server contained with GWME. GroundWork Child servers and passive agents can be combined in a number of different ways to address the needs of MSPs and their customers. We believe that the current versions of GroundWork Monitor and its associated agents provide the solution to all MSP functional requirements. To determine if GroudWork can help your managed service business, please give us a call or message at or sales@gwos.com. If you want to speak with the author of this paper, please Dave Lilly at dlilly@gwos.com. Dave Lilly, Chief Executive Officer of GroundWork, Inc., founded and ran, from 1999 to 2002, a managed services provider called SiteROCK that delivered outsourced event and incident management services based on comprehensively deployed monitoring systems. ABOUT GROUNDWORK San Francisco-based GroundWork, Inc. is the market leader in commercial open source network and management software, delivering enterprise-class network, system and application management solutions at a fraction of the 631 Howard Street Suite 320 San Francisco, CA Toll-free: (866) Tel: (415) Fax: (415) cost of proprietary solutions. info@gwos.com GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved. Nagios is a registered trademark of Nagios Enterprises.