The world of IT infrastructure management used to be much more straightforward than it is today. Back in the day, if you had an issue with your network or any of your IT services, you could call up your data center manager or NOC (Network Operations Center) and get someone to fix it. While that model still works well for some organizations, others are finding that outsourcing their NOC services can give them access to better tools and more skilled staff at a lower cost than having internal staff handle it all themselves.
What are NOC services?
An NOC is short for Network Operations Center, which has been around since 1988. It’s typically a separate facility that houses critical systems, along with trained specialists who operate those systems 24/7/365. In other words, it’s an IT department without walls. If something goes wrong. Whether it’s an Internet outage or a server crash—they’ll be there to help get things back online ASAP. That’s particularly important for organizations with business-critical applications. For example, if you run call centers or have customers visiting your site on a regular basis, such outages could cause major problems for your business.
Flexis NOC Services for MSP / VAR
There’s no shortage of on-premises solutions that focus on network-as-a-service (NaaS) management, but there aren’t many purpose-built solutions for MSPs or VARs. Flexis delivers a single dashboard across your entire operation with multiple points of access via APIs, allowing you to integrate third party solutions into its dashboard and interface.
Even better, Flexis offers an easy two-click move from one vendor to another—with no downtime whatsoever. They also offer per call billing instead of an unpredictable monthly fee, giving you more control over your business. If it sounds too good to be true, give them a test drive! For free!
Scale Your Business With High Margin Services
If you have an IT company and are looking to expand, adding services can be a great way to do so. Some of these services come with higher margins than others. This is especially true for less-expensive maintenance plans, which offer a greater opportunity for profit. To help you figure out which are good options, here are some ideas.
Preferred Pricing
For those who want to know what next year’s tech landscape is going to look like, or who need a little extra help with their virtualization strategies, preferred pricing offers on-demand, proactive support. With all of our fixed price contracts, we negotiate your preferred pricing based on your needs. This can also be done by phone or through any of our account executives.
After you have signed on for preferred pricing and activated your account, you will be eligible for our preferential pricing. Preferred pricing is ideal for those companies that know they have complex network environments; they know what they want but are not sure exactly how it should work. They want to use professionals who have industry expertise to help them plan, design and implement a solution that meets their needs today as well as tomorrow.
Dedicated L2 & L3 Engineering Resources
As staff members typically have a higher level of experience, they will be more adept at identifying underlying network issues quickly. This means that you’ll likely be able to identify issues sooner and in turn cut down on downtimes. Allocating dedicated resources also frees up networking staff to concentrate on other tasks, giving you better overall coverage. In addition, once these individuals are familiar with your organization’s infrastructure, they’ll be more capable of troubleshooting future problems as well.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
One of my favorite monitoring solutions for small and midsize companies is SolarWinds’ Network Performance Monitor (NPM). It’s a Windows-based, all-in-one network monitoring tool with a lightweight footprint. It includes comprehensive support for SNMP devices from any vendor, as well as an extensive list of features that you would expect from enterprise-class network management software. If you want to monitor your entire IT infrastructure at once, I suggest giving it a try. Best of all? It only costs $15 per month to monitor up to 100 managed devices! Give it a try today.
Atera
At Atera, they believe that a world without digital borders is possible. They strive to support customers’ global operations with their network monitoring solutions. Their collection of NOC tools covers a broad spectrum of capabilities – spanning wide area networks (WAN), internet protocol (IP) networks, management systems, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), mobile technologies, storage protocols, cloud environments and more. Because Atera designs these products from scratch rather than adopting traditional off-the-shelf components into an assembly line model, they can offer truly innovative IT solutions for our clients. Furthermore, because there are no external components or 3rd party dependencies involved in their development process there’s no vendor lock-in either.
Datadog
This application collects a boatload of performance metrics for all kinds of resources, across all kinds of services, in a very friendly interface. While Datadog is already quite popular with developers, it’s becoming more widely adopted among operators for its ability to present monitoring data that makes sense to even novices. In addition to collecting stats about IT systems, Datadog can also pull information from numerous cloud applications like AWS CloudWatch, Google Stackdriver and Zendesk. Best of all? You can track your entire portfolio using Datadog’s open source capabilities. It’s another great example of a tool that has improved by opening up its capabilities to other devs!
Manage Engine OpManager
OpManager is easy to use, has very few system requirements, doesn’t cost much, comes with a free trial and easily scales from small businesses up to enterprises. You can choose from over 40 sensor plug-ins for it as well as have access to on-premise or cloud infrastructure. There’s even an API for full integration. What more could you ask for? The only problem I have with OpManager is that it doesn’t run on any mobile devices.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many vendors who offer best services and tools to make your job easy. It is imperative that you choose a vendor who can not only supply you with all of your needs but one who will partner with you. Your goals should align; they should be responsive to your needs and very knowledgeable in what they do. Choose wisely! The future looks bright!
