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Managed Services

M

marley1

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 18, 2000
Messages
5,447
Hey guys -

What are you doing to manage device on clients network? Like devices reporting back to you? Mostly concerned with servers, reporting event, drive failures, etc back to my office so I can get the issue before it comes into a problem.

Dell called us wanting to sell us this service but it costs us like $700/month + a yearly price per device.

I want to incorporate this into a service contract and really stay ahead of problems.

What do you guys use to report stuff back? I know the Dell servers using the OpenManage can report back I just never set it up.

Mostly all my gear I sell is Dell based for servers, switchs, desktops/laptops
 
Nagios, Zenoss, Kaseya (you have to pay for this).

I currently am using Zenoss on a 1.8ghz p4 with 768 of ram.. works great.
 
For my previous employer I setup a Nagios server that we setup to monitor client's networks. Worked well for being free. Have to install SNMP and some Nagios agent on the servers, all the printers, switches, routers, APs, firewalls, etc we just setup SNMP.

Where I work at now we're rolling out Level to our managed services clients. Zenith InfoTech also has a Managed Services offering that you can brand and re-sell to clients, haven't looked at it yet. Just noticed it while I was looking at their BDR, ARCA and BoxOffice solutions.
 
System Center Operations Manager 2007. There are SCOM management packs for Dell (and other brand) servers.
 
mmtom said:
System Center Operations Manager 2007. There are SCOM management packs for Dell (and other brand) servers.
Click to expand...

But can you setup SCOM to manage/monitor anything besides MS products? Can you have it report back to your own server at the office to monitor your hundred different client's networks?
 
Captain Colonoscopy said:
But can you setup SCOM to manage/monitor anything besides MS products? Can you have it report back to your own server at the office to monitor your hundred different client's networks?
Click to expand...

Yeah, there are management packs for lots of things (not sure about switches). I believe R2 is going to include support to monitor linux boxes as well.

You can also monitor other networks. You would need a SCOM gateway server on each client network, as far as I know. The gateway would report back to your master SCOM server.
 
My company is an MSP and we use Kaseya. Basically you have a dedicated server as your Kaseya server, install agents on client's workstations and servers, from there the agents report in to your K Server.

Just like you, we standardize on selling Dell hardware. With that said, once Openmanage is installed, you can use Kaseya to monitor anything on the server. For example on PE2800 servers, we monitor all 8 fans, RAID, hard drive status, power supplies, temperature, chassis intrusion, etc.

Using Kaseya, you can monitor disk space, event logs, custom logs, any windows performance counter, and with some time invested, you can create your own custom monitoring scripts.

Honestly there isn't much you can't monitor using Kaseya and you simply can't beat the fact that you don't need to install any additional hardware at any site along with having true centralized management from a single console.
 
PRTG is great we use it at several clients. 10 Monitors are free, you have to pay to use more.
 
SJConsultant said:
My company is an MSP and we use Kaseya. Basically you have a dedicated server as your Kaseya server, install agents on client's workstations and servers, from there the agents report in to your K Server.

Just like you, we standardize on selling Dell hardware. With that said, once Openmanage is installed, you can use Kaseya to monitor anything on the server. For example on PE2800 servers, we monitor all 8 fans, RAID, hard drive status, power supplies, temperature, chassis intrusion, etc.

Using Kaseya, you can monitor disk space, event logs, custom logs, any windows performance counter, and with some time invested, you can create your own custom monitoring scripts.

Honestly there isn't much you can't monitor using Kaseya and you simply can't beat the fact that you don't need to install any additional hardware at any site along with having true centralized management from a single console.
Click to expand...

easy to setup? i want something with minimal investment - time and cost.

i dont wanna have alot of configuration

open source stuff is great but i want the support if needed.

SJ - whats a rough price on Kaseya? Do you need to install something on each workstation or just on the server and the server probes the rest??
 
marley1 said:
easy to setup? i want something with minimal investment - time and cost.

i dont wanna have alot of configuration

open source stuff is great but i want the support if needed.
Click to expand...

No such item exists. Paid or open source, the solution is only as good as the time you put into configuring it.

Sure you can slap together a Kaseya Server, install agents on workstations/servers, do some basic monitoring, but if you want real value, you need to invest time into proper planning and configuration to get the long term benefits of the software.

marley1 said:
SJ - whats a rough price on Kaseya? Do you need to install something on each workstation or just on the server and the server probes the rest??
Click to expand...

I don't know if I am allowed to disclose pricing, but lets say you'd better budget $10K to $15K for 100 agents for the "Core" software. Factor about 20% per year for maintenance and support. Agents should be installed on any servers or workstations that you want to monitor or manage

I'd like to clarify one other thing, Kaseya isn't just about monitoring, its more about "managing" servers and workstations. For example, say a workstation is running low on disk space, not only can you be alerted to the issue, but you can automatically run a script that will perform tasks like deleting temp files or compressing files.

Now say you've got this working on one machine, its a few simple clicks to apply that same procedure to all of your monitored workstations whether it be a hundred or a thousand.

Remember the adobe and flash player flaws? It only took a couple hours for us to update hundreds of workstations with the latest Acrobat reader and flash players. Same thing for Microsoft Patches, we can deploy any patch in to hundreds of systems in mere minutes with a few simple mouse clicks.

The above examples only scratch the surface of what Kaseya can do.
 
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