Network and Application Monitoring

Why should you monitor your network?

The adoption of new technology and the movement of a company towards becoming a digital business has major implications for the network.

As more processes are digitalised with new applications, and as more applications are moved to the Cloud, there is

• More reliance on applications
• More reliance on users having a great user experience
• More reliance on the performance of applications

If the network can’t support the application performance you need then it can start to hold your company back.   Many mid-sized business suspect they suffer from application performance problems.

Equally, since only 30% of application performance issues are caused by the network, when poor application performance is wrongly blamed on the network then that too can hold your company back.

The answer to both these scenarios is to monitor your network and infrastructure properly.  Monitoring helps to spot basic issues, but also more subtle performance issues.

Why Monitor as a managed service?

Network and application monitoring is commonly implemented by:

• Running the servers on which to run the toolset
• Investing in skills
• Designing, installing and configuring a monitoring tool
• Keeping it running

This may not be the cheapest way to build a monitoring capability on which your business will rely.  It is certainly not the easiest.

For many businesses (especially those who elect to use managed services), a better approach is to take a managed service for monitoring the IT, applications and network infrastructure. This provides:

• Reduced time to set up
• Often, reduced cost, due to economies of scale
• Better overall monitoring
• Less risk of getting things wrong
  
  

Why Monitoring from SAS?

We’re well known to be market leaders in monitoring of the network and applications infrastructure.  Many customers bought our managed WAN specifically to get access to the advanced monitoring it offers.

In a nutshell

• We provide a managed monitoring solution which avoids you having to set up and configure servers and then design configure and maintain the monitoring yourself
• We have market leader Solarwinds at the core of our monitoring
• But we provide so much more, from integrated ticketing to critical path monitoring and advanced reporting - as you’ll see below

Most suppliers can see when a link is down. Some can see when it's over-utilised.

• We can tell you which application, user or device is the root cause of the problem, and follow the path of an application across the network.
• We raise 95% of key issues proactively
• We provide everything in a single pane of glass
• And our advanced reporting lets you drill down from summary to full detail as far back in time as you like because we don’t roll up your data.
  
  

What you get

We give you an advanced portal

Monitoring from SAS is Complete, Connected and Clear..

We use SolarWinds …

SolarWinds is a market leading monitoring tool that we use to monitor the health and performance of our customers’ IT and network estates, which we provide as part of our managed service. 

But we also provide so much more 

The key to our success in monitoring is the development we have undertaken over many years to build a complete, market-leading monitoring and management environment for use in Managed Services.   Here are some of the components we offer within our Managed Networks and Managed Monitoring services.

• Proactive alerts
• An Integrated ticketing engine to raise and track any issues as they arise – visible to customers and the NOC
• An Integrated installation sign-off module that captures details of installations, including photos.
• A complete inventory of Circuits, Hardware, plus servers, databases and applications where these are also monitored.
• Over 150 pieces of meta-data per site.

• A Single pane of glass dashboard that shows you everything in one place
• Critical Path Monitoring – simple, clear visual summary of the health of the whole application path, allowing drill-down to investigate problems arising.
• Advanced Reporting - See long term and predictive trends and drill down to the full detail 
• Triage page to help NOC to identify issues fast
• Integration into our end to end digital process that captures and supports your network from design, pricing through installation, in-life management, covering performance monitoring and central orchestration of the network, right through to advanced reporting and billing.

 Click here for further information about what's required in the best managed network provider.

Proactive Alerts

Proactive alerting is the ability to flag to you that something is out of the ordinary, rather than waiting for you to spot it.  Proactive Alerts are critical to a good user experience and to a high availability of your network and your applications.  Here is a short list to illustrate some of the things for which we provide proactive alerts.

1. DSL Line speed going out of specification
2. Node that has stopped responding
3. High Packet Loss
4. High (or low) utilisation of a critical link
5. Voice performing abnormally
6. A fan has failed in a router, switch, firewall or other device
7. A temperature sensor is reporting a high temperature
8. A power supply unit voltage is reported as being out of specification
9. A site has gone down
10. A site has been down for more than x hours, prompting the order of a 4G rapid site deployment solution – just in case it’s needed