Troubleshoot Ailing Networks Faster
By The Business Solutions Network
An MSP’s ability to quickly and accurately diagnose and resolve a medical device manufacturer’s network problems led to a managed services contract win and a 20 TB backup and disaster recovery (BDR) upsell.
Since its inception in 2011, ITque has strived to do more than merely monitor its customers’ networks. It constantly looks for ways to fix the problems it detects quickly. In just five years, the MSP has acquired 90-plus clients, roughly 80 percent of whom are on a managed services contract. What’s remarkable about ITque is that it currently has only seven employees, yet it’s projecting 65 percent revenue growth this year, and it’s planning to do this while keeping its technician numbers relatively steady. The secret, says DJ Forman, ITque’s CTO, is not making employees work faster or work longer hours; it’s working smarter. “If we can resolve an issue in three hours, then we should create a process that brings the resolution time down to two hours, then one hour,” he says.
A Medical Device Manufacturer Feels The Pain Of Network Downtime
Earlier this year, ITque’s CEO was approached by a medical device manufacturing company that had changed ownership several times over the 
years and was having trouble with its network. “The company does about $500 million in revenue and has four locations,” says Forman. “The ownership changes led to a lot of chaos within management and within its IT buying and decision-making. They started having problems with their servers connecting to the network, and downtime became the new norm. Sometimes the system would be down for two hours, and on other occasions the outage could last all day.”
During periods of downtime, the manufacturer would try to keep employees busy doing menial tasks, but it was still losing about $20,000 for every hour of downtime that halted its manufacturing processes. “If the client had a bad weekend of downtime, it could result in $1 million in lost productivity,” says Forman.
ITque performed a network assessment and deployed Auvik RMM (remote monitoring and management) at the prospect’s headquarters. “Within a couple of days of running our RMM tool, we had enough data to fill a hundred-page report,” says Forman. “We filtered the report to include only the most mission-critical information, and we presented a 10-page report to the executives at the manufacturing company. They signed up almost immediately.”
Fix The Network, Protect The Data
After inking the contract, the MSP installed the RMM software at two additional satellite facilities. “We installed Auvik in tandem with Continuum,” says Forman. “We use Continuum to monitor computers and servers, and we use Auvik to manage everything else. One of the bonuses of Auvik is that it is agentless and can detect any IP-enabled devices, such as printers, routers, switches, and wireless access points. Having this information gives us a more accurate view of our customers’ networks and enables us to quickly troubleshoot problems. Additionally, Auvik stores monitoring data, which allows us to review the logging history and detect trends, such as problems that occur at a specific day and time each week. Also, we can monitor all the devices being managed for each customer on a single screen; we don’t have to log in to each device individually.”
One of the biggest problems detected by the RMM tool was shadow IT projects, says Forman, such as wireless routers and other network add-ons that were installed by employees over the years with no one’s knowledge. Another problem was domain controllers that were consistently operating at 75 percent to 100 percent CPU usage across all cores. “Sometimes the CPU got so busy that just opening Explorer took 10 minutes,” says Forman. “Using our RMM tool, we were able to examine SNMP [simple network management protocol] data from the routers and switches and rule that out as a possible culprit. Next, we looked at applications running on the network and found a rogue antivirus agent installed on the client’s servers that was causing the problems. Without Auvik, it could have taken us an entire week to identify and troubleshoot the problem.”
Since implementing managed services, Forman says downtime has virtually been eliminated. “The only time something goes down now is if it’s done intentionally to perform routine maintenance,” he says. “More recently, we helped them standardize their BDR by installing Datto on a dozen servers, which currently hold more than 20 TB of data. Between their improved network stability and data protection, we’ve been able to earn the coveted position of trusted advisor.”