Nimsoft Service Delivery Portal for MSPs

Sophisticated, On-Demand Reporting that Fuels Competitive Distinction

Introduction

Is your ability to communicate with clients a strategic asset or a liability?

Whether a client is looking for resource planning guidance, wants to find out how the infrastructure is performing currently, or is simply looking for assurances that their MSP isn’t asleep at the wheel; timely and credible information sharing is critical. Ultimately, the quality, timeliness, and sophistication of a service providers’ communications with clients plays a central role in both the inherent value of services delivered, and in how those services are perceived by clients.

These communications present a significant challenge for many Hosting Providers and Managed Service Providers—who have long been hampered with static, ad hoc, periodic reporting capabilities found in traditional monitoring solutions. Not only do static reports provide little value in planning or understanding real-time status, the time spent fielding inquiries and generating ad hoc reports continues to place a drain on internal resources. Nimsoft’s Service Delivery Portal offers service providers a better way to manage communications with clients.

The Solution

The Service Delivery Portal (SDP) is an online portal that service providers and clients can access to get comprehensive, intuitive, real-time views of service-level monitoring information. With SDP, service providers can leverage sophisticated reporting capabilities to gain better insights into resource planning and optimization, provide access to real-time infrastructure status, deliver higher levels of service, and better demonstrate the value of services being offered.

With Nimsoft’s Service Delivery Portal, service providers can…

• Improve communications. SDP enhances the service provider’s ability to share service level management information with clients. With SDP, organizations can provide monitoring information faster, easier, and with more sophistication than they could before.

• Better demonstrate value. By providing continuous, on demand access to a reporting portal, service providers can offer more effective views of ongoing efforts, and establish higher levels of client trust and confidence.

• Gain distinction from competitors. As opposed to the static, periodic reports offered by traditional monitoring tools, SDP enables organizations to offer real-time, dynamic, and intuitive reports that offer significant competitive differentiation.

• Streamline reporting activities. By providing clients and internal teams with self-service access to real-time reporting information, service providers can dramatically reduce the time and effort normally dedicated to fielding report requests.

Improve resource optimization and service levels. Through this comprehensive, sophisticated reporting, organizations can more effectively optimize ongoing operations, right-size infrastructures, and anticipate future capacity needs.

With SDP, users can access an array of real-time reporting insights—including dashboards, alarms, quality of service reports, and SLA reports.

Provide Clients with Convenient, Real-Time Access

With SDP, both internal staff and client users can access the portal from any system with a Web browser. Clients can log into SDP to view the state of their monitored IT environment any time they wish, relieving service providers from the strain of servicing ongoing report generation requests. Once in, users can access an array of on-demand dashboards and reports that offer an intuitive view of the IT monitoring services provided.

Gain Intelligent Control over Portal Access

With SDP, service providers have complete control over who can access the portal and the types of views users receive once they’ve logged in. With SDP, administrators can…

• Control access. SDP enables service providers to provide internal teams with aggregate views of the entire client base, and detailed views of each client’s monitored infrastructure. In addition, clients can be granted access to customized portal views. Further, views for both internal and client teams can be customized based on individual roles and responsibilities.

• Control security. The SDP offers robust capabilities for granting secure, multi-tenant access to the portal for clients. With SDP, client data is securely segmented in the Nimsoft server’s central database, which resides in the service provider’s operations center. As a result, service providers can effectively grant portal access to all clients, while ensuring each client will only see their company’s information.

• Control design. The appearance of both the main SDP login page and individual client portal pages can be customized. Service providers can brand the portal login page with their own logo and color scheme, and they can customize the portal pages, so, once logged in, clients see pages that feature their company’s logo and colors. 

Deliver Comprehensive Monitoring Views

With SDP, service providers can offer a complete array of real-time reporting insights—including dashboards, alarms, quality of service reports, and SLA reports. SDP features a complete array of pre-packaged reports that can be used immediately, and it also offers complete flexibility for developing reporting views that are customized to specific infrastructure and business objectives.

From the portal page, users can access any and all of the following types of views:

• Real-time alarm displays that provide an at-a-glance view of all active alarms and their associated severity level.

• Dynamic dashboards that show the real-time health of the individual servers and network devices being monitored.

• Custom dashboards that offer a rich set of data and display customization features, enabling service providers and their customers to tailor their view of the entire IT infrastructure to their specific needs and preferences.

• Dynamic quality of service (QoS) reports that provide insights into server and network device resource utilization trends.

• Custom QoS reports, which extend the out-of-the-box dynamic server and network reports, enabling users to leverage the 1000s of data metrics collected by the 100+ Nimsoft probes, gateways, and adapters available.

• Service level agreement (SLA) reports that feature trending analysis, SLA breach forecasts, and intuitive pinpointing of SLA-endangering issues—enabling service providers to more consistently comply with SLAs.

Complementing the Nimsoft Enterprise Console

The Nimsoft Enterprise Console is the key operations interface for Nimsoft administrators, offering robust capabilities for event handling, automation, remediation, and much more. Nimsoft SDP functions as a complementary extension of the Enterprise Console, offering administrators an easy way to facilitate ongoing, on-demand, and real-time information sharing, both with internal stakeholders and clients. 

In addition, if desired, administrators can leverage SDP’s basic administration capabilities, such as event handling, to enable clients and internal staff to collaboratively engage in troubleshooting and remediation.