Selling Monitoring Services - Anyone Doing It?

Question

Hi everyone, we have a large wireless network with telecom tower sites linked together via microwave.  We serve network services (including Internet, WAN extension, VoIP) to many customers (residential and commercial) via proprietary radio links (Motorola Canopy).  Our biggest customers are gas and oil facilties in remote locations.  We use Orion to monitor the major microwave links, all switching and routing gear, UPS and environmenatal status, our servers, etc (currently 320 nodes, 618 interafecs, 46 volumes).  We also monitor the link conditions of some of our more important customers up to the physical interface on our radios.

Recently some of our customers have asked us about monitoring some of their gear at their remote sites as well - ie. we keep an eye on stats in their routers and VoIP gear.  I'm just curious if anyone else uses Orion to monitor customer owned equipment.  What would pricing range for this kind of service (charge by node, interface, level of service??).  Also, do you give customers access (via user accounts) to Orion web pages and their equipment stats?  How about Alert messages sent to them?  What kind of statements, wording, etc. do you use when approaching customers or describing what you offer?

I understand for privacy and legal purposes you may not be able to give too much detail.  Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer.  Any help is appreciated.

Aaron

vhcato · Answer

Aaron,

I wouldn't say that there's anything really special about the views that we created for our various business units and such, but the idea behind providing access to multiple customers is to come up with a formula that works, and hopefully make it "cookie-cutter". In our case, what we did was create a view with all the resources we want to display for each of the various customers and saved it as a template. When we started building the individual views, we start by making a copy of the view template, giving it an appropriate name, and applying a view filter based on custom properties such as division or facility. We then created a local Orion user account with the same account limitation and selected the associated view as the "Home Page View" and "Default Summary View". These account credentials are then passed in the URL from the login page, which allows seamless, filtered access to Orion while reducing the number of local Orion accounts to manage.

One downside I see with this methodology is that if you want to make a change to the resources presented with them, you have to go in and change each one of the views individually. Ideally, one would create a single view that is shared by multiple customers, and simply limited via account limitations on their respective Orion accounts. This way, you're really only dealing with a single view. I tried to go this route initially, but ran into a bug where the account limitations were not being honored by such views as syslog and events. I believe this was resolved in later releases, so we will be revisiting this when we upgrade our environment. Again, keep in mind that this means of access relies on the fact that there are no security issues with multiple customers being able to see the views of others, being that the account creds are passed via the URL.

Just for grins and giggles, I attached screenshots of one of our internal customers' summary views. I had to page down several times to get the whole page, but you get the idea. Like I said, nothing real Earth-shattering here, but there are a few resources on here (described below) that we created for our environment. We will be changing these up a bit as part of our upcoming upgrades.

* The "Down Nodes" resource is not the one that comes out of the box, but is actually a report from Report Writer. The report shows nodes that are currently down, as well as any notes (Status Info) that have been entered via the web about the node by Network Services personnel, or our Data Center Operations folks who handle our first level WAN monitoring tasks.
* The "Down Interfaces" resource is also a report from Report Writer that is basically the same as the "Down Nodes" resource, but it also displays any interface that has experienced greater than 100 receive errors for the last hour.
* At the bottom of the first resource column is a resource showing the US Doppler Radar map representing a 1 hour animated loop of precipitation from weather.com. This is actually the same map found here http://www.weather.com/maps/maptype/dopplerradarusnational/index_large_animated.html, but I stripped away all the ads and other unnecessary stuff, and shrank it down proportionally to fit the width of the resource column.

There are some much more extensive customizations that we've implemented in our environment, but they are not necessarily specific to the topic at hand. Hopefully you've been able to get some ideas from some of the info in this thread.

Customer Summary View.zip

acherman · Answer

Wow guys.  That is great info!  Vic, maybe vaque, but lots of info.  Tells me that I'm likely only scratching the surface of what you are doing with Orion.  If it's not too much trouble would you mind posting (or emailing for privacy sake) screenshots of some of your custom views?  I like your login page - lots of info and options, gives me some ideas.  Right now I just have the default Orion login page.

Thank you once again for the info...

Aaron

Congo · Answer

We do exactly what you are looking for here. We sell 24/7 monitoring services, provide a unique login/view, send alerts, and then call out the appropriate people after designated times/troubleshooting. However, I am not aware of pricing of how we do so. I do know that we base this somewhat on average ticket resolution time, so there is a start if you have a ticketing system.