Monitoring as a Service: The MSP Opportunity Featuring a Hybrid IT Service Definition

This document describes a new managed service that helps MSPs monetize the rapidly growing cloud computing market. While cloud adoption is proceeding rapidly, especially for testing and development projects, the lack of visibility that enterprise customers have into public cloud services and hybrid IT creates a major pain point that cannot be solved easily and which acts as a significant barrier to cloud adoption for mission-critical workloads. Legacy monitoring tools are typically very difficult and costly to extend for seamless visibility into public cloud services, while the more cloud-centric tools have little or no coverage for the extensive tail of legacy IT systems that may remain on-premises for a considerable time yet.

ScienceLogic has extensive experience in monitoring a broad base of IT infrastructure elements–whether physical, virtual, or cloud–across networks, virtual, and physical servers, storage, and applications. Based around an MSP-centric, multi-tenanted monitoring platform, ScienceLogic enables MSPs to develop new service offerings that deal with any or all of these customer infrastructure elements–enabling either a broad-based hybrid IT monitoring service or technology-specific monitoring service to be introduced–without requiring extensive investment in software development or customizations.

With a broad-based service, multiple use cases, and multiple customer segments, the market may be quite broad in scope. This document addresses three main use cases that include traditional on-premises monitoring, public cloud monitoring, and the hybrid IT monitoring scenario. There are multiple service tiers that can be created for each use case, and these are defined below.

The value for an MSP that establishes this class of monitoring capability goes well beyond the revenue from the monitoring service alone. It extends into becoming a strategic platform for bundling this management visibility and proactive monitoring into a range of other managed services, including premium-level services in hybrid cloud, public and private cloud hosting, and cloud migration services. All of these services can be delivered with the same platform and utilized internally by operations teams as an essential ingredient of a high-quality operations center. This ensures that customers and operations teams are on the same page with consistent views of service delivery and performance.

While, in this case, the monitoring platform is the same, the services are marketed differently– not as monitoring services but as premium-level business services that happen to include enhanced visibility or stronger SLAs because of the bundled monitoring visibility.