MSP Monitors Hybrid Cloud Services to Deliver Exceptional Customer Service
The Organization: Cloud Geeni is a U.K.-based Managed Service Provider supporting over 200 customers across various industries.
Infrastructure: Proprietary cloud platform utilizing Microsoft Hyper-V, Azure, and Remote Desktop Services.
“Goliath is a superior admin tool that gives us peace of mind that we are constantly delivering a reliable, high-performing hybrid cloud managed service to our customers. Without Goliath we would only be reactive, responding to customer issues versus proactively identifying performance bottlenecks and addressing them before a customer is ever impacted.” – Andy Smith, Network Support Administrator of Cloud Geeni
The Business Challenge
Cloud Geeni is a fully managed cloud service provider guaranteeing their customers of all sizes 99.9% up-time and high-performing virtualized desktops and applications on their proprietary cloud platform. Their customer service commitment is high, promising their customers that they will not be burdened with the day-to-day maintenance of their IT delivery infrastructure, enabling their users to work freely with high-performing applications and desktops anywhere and at any time.
In order to deliver on this commitment, Cloud Geeni must be notified anytime something could negatively impact their customers’ overall performance. They need to know if a new application was added and isn’t maximizing current CPU levels, which could negatively impact end user performance. It is critical, as a service provider, that they are proactive and know the current state of their infrastructure 24/7 and how that infrastructure has changed over time. For example, they need to be able to monitor trends and warn their clients when additional resources (i.e. memory, CPU) need to be added to support their growing applications and workforce. Without the ability to be proactive, their whole business is at risk as customer retention becomes near impossible. Finally, if issues do arise, they need the visibility and metrics to troubleshoot quickly, isolate root cause, and implement a permanent fix solution.
Monitoring Hybrid IT Environments
Cloud Geeni has a proprietary hybrid platform compromised of Azure, physical devices, and Microsoft Hyper-V. This infrastructure supports Microsoft Remote Desktop Services for many of their customers. The complexity of the architecture makes it impossible to monitor and troubleshoot from a single console – unless they invest in a third-party tool which can look across all elements within the IT delivery infrastructure.
This is why Cloud Geeni turned to Goliath Technologies nearly 5 years ago, looking for a purpose-built tool that could anticipate, troubleshoot, and prevent end user performance issues regardless of where IT workloads or users were located.
Goliath runs on every single one of Cloud Geeni’s servers and desktops, monitoring and alerting when issues arise around:
- CPU usage
- Memory utilization
- Disk errors
By enabling these alerts, Cloud Geeni can address issues before they negatively impact the performance of their customers’ virtualized desktops. For example, one day they got an alert showing a spike in memory usage which would slow performance down. They were able to identify that this customer recently introduced a new CRM system which was consuming significantly more memory. Based on data-backed evidence, they were able to advise their customer that in order to prevent performance issues they needed to invest in more memory given that the new CRM tool was starting to spike Memory Use (see Figure 1). This is just one example on how Cloud Geeni is better managing their business by proactively addressing performance issues before their customers are impacted.
Figure 1: Charts like the one above quickly enables Cloud Geeni to show their customers when they are at risk of maximizing their Memory allocation. In the graph above you can see Memory Use is ok but it is at risk of getting into the red, indicating lack of memory, which can impact performance. Now Cloud Geeni is enabled to have a data-driven proactive conversation communicating that if more load is added they will need to increase memory to maintain their level of performance.
The Result: Increased Efficiencies and Data-Driven Conversations
Beyond helping Cloud Geeni become more proactive with their customers, by leveraging Goliath they are also able to be more efficient and foster data-driven conversations with their customers.
If Goliath wasn’t used, Cloud Geeni would require more support staff manually checking multiple systems and screens daily to ensure everything was working as expected. Not only does this manual effort increase risk of error, it also has a significantly higher cost due to additional headcount. Goliath leverages embedded intelligence and automation to guide the team on what metrics to monitor and how to monitor and alert on them for over 250 key conditions, events, and failure points. Andy Smith, Network Support Administrator of Cloud Geeni, said that, “By leveraging Goliath, it’s as if we hired multiple full-time troubleshooting experts who not only solve issues but also proactively identify and alert on them before end users are impacted. This not only saves us dollars, but at the end of the day provides an even higher level of customer care for Cloud Geeni.”
Finally, another advantage for Cloud Geeni is they can have data-driven conversations with their customers about the ongoing needs and growth of their environment. Cloud Geeni shares reports with their customers showing trends about usage and performance. For example, they can now go to their customer and show with factual evidence that over a period of time memory use has increased, indicating that in order to keep performance high, an investment in more hardware is needed. Prior to Goliath, these conversations were more difficult to share as they didn’t have the reports to cross correlate performance with metrics. These conversations typically result in customers investing more with Cloud Geeni, and they have hard evidence on why that investment is needed. This not only drives revenue for Cloud Geeni, but it also makes those customer conversations much simpler.
When Andy Smith was asked to describe Goliath in three words he said, “superior admin tool.” He also commented that “Without Goliath’s monitoring, our support would be more labor intensive. We need to know of any performance issues before our customers are impacted or we aren’t delivering on our customer commitments.”