How MSPs can become more proactive and efficient, improve client satisfaction and drive growth

Monitoring client workloads can be an enormous, time-consuming challenge for MSPs, but doing so efficiently and effectively is critical to enabling the growth of their business.

For MSPs, there are three primary goals that define a successful approach to workload monitoring:

• Proactively identify performance and security issues ― before they affect users
• Improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction
  
• Scale the business — grow the customer base without adding headcount
  

A proactive approach is important because it ensures that problems are addressed before the client is impacted. With so much time spent with ‘eyes-on-glass,’ it’s no wonder that MSP operations teams are under stress ― with manual, repetitive work based on disparate tools, disparate data sets and user interfaces. All of this is reactive, not proactive. Yet most monitoring tools today still point to symptoms that require tedious, manual investigation by skilled staff, rather than enabling a proactive approach.

Improving operational efficiency and improving customer satisfaction are two sides of the same coin. If an MSP can become more efficient internally — by reducing the time needed to respond to issues or restore service ― that has a positive effect on service quality for the client. Efficiency is a key driver for MSPs in selecting monitoring solutions.

Scaling the business — as MSPs seek to grow their revenues and customer base, the ability to scale their labor model is critical to achieving higher operating margins, and ultimately, a higher valuation for the business. If new technical staff needs to be added every time the client base expands, profitability is hard to maintain ― assuming that skilled technicians can even be found. The only viable way to achieve scale is with automation. Automation for MSP operations takes multiple forms, but especially includes the adoption of ML-based techniques to detect anomalies faster and apply automatic remediations.

Acronis now offers ML-based monitoring and smart alerting, purpose-built for MSPs. Delivered as part of the Advanced Management pack for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, these capabilities enable a highly proactive and automated approach to monitoring.

By applying machine learning, the solution detects behavioral anomalies on clients’ workloads and automatically applies fast, precise remediations. This enhances service reliability by reducing outages and eliminates much of the manual repetitive work that stifles MSP operations teams.

The result? Less downtime and higher service quality for clients ― and reduced costs, greater efficiency and new revenue opportunities for MSPs. 

Acronis’ ML-based monitoring and smart alerting solution monitors performance metrics, hardware, software, services, processes and critical events on workloads — with manually defined rules, using ML models to alert and perform auto-remediation steps more precisely. Out-of-the-box scripts help MSPs automate repetitive tasks like provisioning, configuration and maintenance.

Now MSPs can improve client protection by keeping systems up-to-date, while automating routine work, decreasing the management burden and reducing total cost of ownership.

Our all-new ML-based monitoring covers a broad range of metrics in the following categories:

• CPU, disk and memory usage
• Anti-malware statuses and installed software inventory
  
• Network usage, alarm severity and alert messages
  
• Threshold conditions on selected parameters
  

ML-based monitoring performs continuous anomaly detection on monitored endpoint metrics to identify anomalous behavior and generate alerts for the operator.

ML-based monitoring helps MSPs achieve a proactive approach to managing clients. The Acronis Advanced Management pack now includes several new features:

• ML-based anomaly detection — detect hard-to-find problems that traditional monitoring systems miss
• Automatic threshold-based monitoring and alerting — surface simple-but-critical problems for early resolution
• Smart alerting — flag problems early (so the client doesn’t have to) and reduce the number of tickets generated  
  
• Live dashboards for key performance metrics — see performance issues at a glance
  

These additions complement the wide range of automation and efficiency features already present in the Advanced Management pack for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud.

With ML-based monitoring, MSPs can improve efficiency by reducing ticket handling times and save on operational support costs. At the same time, clients will see improved service quality with faster response to problems and fewer service degradations.

For the operations team, ML-based anomaly detection reduces time spent investigating false positive alerts and even heads off some tickets altogether. Combined with auto-remediation, the Advanced Management pack helps eliminate manual repetitive work and shortens ticket handling time, reducing the demands placed on internal support staff and allowing you to target resources more effectively.

With the operations team running on Advanced Management, everything becomes leaner and more efficient. Staff are freed up to help clients and run new revenue-generating activities. When MSPs no longer have to keep hiring service technicians every time new clients are added, the business can grow and scale without sacrificing profitability.

Advanced Management’s ML-based monitoring and smart alerting streamlines MSP operations and increases the efficiency of IT teams.

With enhanced visibility over data protection, assets and applications, MSPs can proactively predict and solve problems before they impact clients. The solution also reduces the number of generated alerts, defines alert severity and performs automatic remediation, relieving the burden on the MSP’s team and enhancing their service delivery.

Learn more about the Advanced Management pack for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, or start your free trial today.