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Lot's of companies offer Monitoring
Why should you choose us to do it?
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Outsourced IT vs. "monitoring" |
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Good question! Lot's of companies advertise computer monitoring services.
And a very small handful of those companies offer the kinds of services that we
do. Most, though, are offering a very low cost, low end service that is
certainly better than nothing but falls far short of the "outsourced IT"
business that we are in. Just like a junior Tech with a MCSE certification
goes around calling himself a "Network Engineer", many companies that do
some type of computer monitoring are calling themselves "MSP Providers". MSP
is still a very new and not terribly well understood business model... even
among professional IT Managers. If you have ever run a NOC or have been a
systems administrator, you may have some idea of what differentiates us from
the other guys. If not, it's mostly about knowing what kinds of questions to
ask to find out what you are really getting. 7x24x365 monitoring is not
the same thing as professionally staffed 7x24x365 proactive monitoring!
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Typical Network Operations Centers come out of a business
need to have enterprise services available 7x24x365. Most companies have at
least some computing equipment that absolutely must be up 7 days a week, 24
hours a day. But very few companies have the financial resources to
build and operate a
professionally staffed NOC. You can conservatively spent $250,000 just for
the hardware and software needed to do the monitoring. And you need to
figure on at least $300,000 in annual labor costs to keep it running. This
is certainly far out of reach for most Oregon companies and for most
businesses in the USA.
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Many companies that got into the "MSP business" did so by
acquiring free or nearly free monitoring software and installing it on a
windows or Linux server somewhere out on the Internet. The monitoring
service runs completely unattended, typically "pinging" devices to see if
they are alive and sending out e-mail or pages if it does
not respond in time.
Some products are a grade above this, using nmap, SNMP or another protocol to do
port or transaction testing, but the resulting product is the same.... no
one (an intelligent human) is actually monitoring your equipment. You don't
need to be a customer for very long before you realize what a nuisance all
of those false down pages you get are. Your pager goes off in the middle of
the night. You connect to your network and check the system that you were
paged about. Everything is fine, it turns out... just some spurious event
that confused the monitoring software (again). Where's the value in that?
This is not the business that Vigilance Monitoring
is in. Ping/port check monitoring is not the same thing as
professionally staffed 7x24x365 proactive monitoring! |
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There are a tiny handful of companies in the World that do
what we would call "high end" monitoring MSP. These services use professional
grade monitoring software like HP Openview or BMC Patrol or perhaps
proprietary software that they have developed themselves. They have a
professionally staffed 7x24x365 NOC that looks at messages that your
computers generate. If the NOC sees anything suspicious, they probably
investigate further and if the problem appears to be real, they call whoever
you specify as a source of solution for that particular event. The
differentiator here is that high end monitoring utilizes expensive, fully
featured monitoring software capabilities coupled with skilled
Technicians who evaluate the messages that come in and don't just send out
pages when something looks suspicious. This is a lot more like the MSP
business that Vigilance Monitoring is in. |
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Vigilance service availability
monitoring |
We do offer the kind of "low end" monitoring
capabilities mentioned earlier, if that's all you need. But letting
you know when your server is down is not the
core of our business. We do high end, proactive monitoring using the same kinds of
monitoring software that "the big guys" use to monitor their
own networks. It is our business to detect, report and/or correct
problems before they result in service interuptions. One
of the competitive differences that distinguish us is that we have much lower
overhead. We pass on our lower costs to you as big savings on professional
grade monitoring. We invite you to price the other guys and what you'll
be getting for your investment! Our least expensive
competitor charges more than twice as much as we do for services that we
don't think are even as good as ours.
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