How do you monitor SaaS vendors?

RichardLetts

We have provide a number of software products to customers and users here. The software products may be provided by a cloud vendor (e.g. Amazon or Azure), or by a private cloud run by the vendor.

i.e. the relationship is:

Student <-> Department <-> Central IT <-> Saas Vendor <-> Amazon Web Services

so, when a student calls in to Central IT (my department) reporting a problem with software someone (maybe us) provides to the department from a SaaaS vendor how might we know where the issue is.

Unlike a lot of AWS monitoring tools (say) the application isn't deployed by us, so we have no visibility into vendor's cloud solution.

thinking of the future.... How do you monitor this?

jm_sysadmin

Today I like netpath best as most of these are basic web applications. I have a few stragglers that run more traditional applications, there I do whatever I can. Are the ports open? Do they reply correctly (I can check a few for specific text replies), can I access any API that should be there? There is no single answer, but the more important it is, the more I am willing to watch the traffic and figure something out to build a monitor.