It is well known that any partnership that is built on mutual gain has more potential to last longer and progress further. How to define this relationship, however, can be difficult when dealing with constantly changing technology and differing client bases. The relationship between a managed service provider (MSP) and a business is one that can be prone to these difficulties, especially if the service level agreements (SLA’s) are not defined precisely.

The critical factor for a successful MSP is being able to predict and be proactive to problems rather than reactive. This is what will differentiate you from a break/fix method, but also increase your customer satisfaction. If an MSP can predict hardware malfunction or server thresholds, the advice that can be given is invaluable in the MSP/Business relationship. The fundamental principle behind this is increasing the user experience inside the business.

The end goal, to increase user experience, should be the focus for MSPs; this is a crucial factor for a successful business. With a happy user experience, there is an increase in staff productivity which can help the business grow. Changing the MSP’s goal of keeping the equipment in an ideal state to increasing or maintaining user experience, can help solidify business relationships.

The higher the communication and visibility that a user has, can help facilitate the belief they are in an actual consultative working relationship; currently, 48% of businesses working with an MSP would prefer a higher level of consultative relationship. This will increase the businesses perceived value for money with the SLA because you are working intimately with the MSP regardless of the situation. Further, the level of service is increased because the MSP has a better understanding of why client requirements are present. When those two factors are taken into consideration, the business has a higher return on investment, and the MSP is doing a better job, this is mutually beneficial.

The change in mentality from equipment state to customer satisfaction requires the MSP to adjust their monitoring and reporting. The adjustments may include things such as 3rd party SaaS monitoring, software licensing management, even topographical readings. A customer is happier when their internet/service is down if they know why, i.e. poor weather. Further, the ability to predict trouble can facilitate better relationships, through hardware monitoring an MSP can predict when hardware may need replacing.

Presenting meaningful data to businesses through meetings can increase the level of control and transparency that a client has over their system while simultaneously growing the business relationship. To gain the data an MSP can use opTrend, it provides cutting-edge predictive analytics. The AI-driven application identifies resources that are showing abnormal activity based on historical behaviour and provides an organisation with correct trend analysis of critical resources. This assists in the early detection of potential failures and resource exhaustion.

An application that builds its own baselines will be more accurate than any model that is provided by a vendor. Using six months of data, a baseline is constructed that is a custom representation of the device while taking into account the time of day and also the day of the week. This builds an accurate snapshot of what your system should be doing at a given time and assists in identifying outliers that aren’t considered normal.

The graph above demonstrates the power of the application; the blue lines are the expected ranges, the green is the overall mean, and the black is the recorded value. The graph indicates that on December 6th, the system was in heavy use, but it was expected and not considered an outlier, this may be due to a system back-up for instance. However, from December 9-13 there was a significant increase that is not regarded as normal. Using this information, although no major fault may have occurred, an MSP could extrapolate potential vulnerabilities in the future.

Knowing what is on your network is equally as important as understanding how your network operates. An often overlooked component while gathering performance data is accounting for scheduled outages.

If scheduled outages are not accounted for, there can be negative effects on your reporting and your efficiency. Preparation can stop events from expected outages taking up valuable diagnostic time by engineers. Further, the performance metrics will look better while being more accurate.

Using opCharts, scheduled outages can be planned and tracked. By leveraging the powerful tools at your disposal, you can view, display and warn about planned outages. This creates a historical record of start time, stop time and which user created the outage for review purposes. Communication between teams is increased by having a regular maintenance window that is agreed upon by all.

To create or view existing scheduled outages select the Views drop-down menu and select Scheduled Outages.

This will display a list of all the scheduled outages that are in the system. If you would like to add a new outage, simply click the New Outage button.

This will open a window to input a new Scheduled Outage.

Once these are filled in and saved there is a scheduled outage in place and you are one step closer to having the most reliable data.

The standards for many organizations are still in the proverbial “dark ages” when it comes to keeping track of what is on their network. As a support engineer with Opmantek I speak with multiple engineers every day. It isn’t unusual for me to hear that engineers at large, fortune 500 companies are still using text documents, spreadsheets, and even sticky notes to manage their device inventories. The challenge with this is in how long the manual process takes. Manually updating records often leads to maintaining inventory records inconsistently causing the information to be incorrect and outdated.

Opmantek’s Open-AudIT software delivers IT auditing and inventory management automation as well as many other useful features. Keeping track of your organizations computers, printers, telephones, or any other network device is made easy with Open-AudIT. There are many ways to get information into Open-AudIT, one way to do this is to simply enter your networks subnet(s) and valid credentials and watch Open-AudIT start to populate with your network information. With this information you can keep track and report on what software the devices have installed, warranty information, software licenses, hardware information, configuration changes, and much more. Open-AudIT monitors any changes made to your network, i.e software updates, devices removed, or added etc. This is accomplished by running scheduled scans of your network daily, weekly, or any other time designated by you then, compares the audit results over time to previous scan results.

Customizable fields and queries allow you to keep track of any other information you feel is relevant to your organization. Open-AudIT comes preloaded with many queries out of the box. Device types, installed software, hardware changes are a few of these. If a query is needed that is not pre-packaged, Open-AudIT allows you to create and customize queries to address any of your specific needs. Quickly migrating from your current manual inventory and device management process is designed to be as automated as possible. Open-AudIT can import inventory information from various formats including XML, CSV, and others. For those still managing your inventory with spreadsheets and other files, this feature allows for the seamless implementation of your inventory records into Open-AudIT.

This software offers so many more features than just what was discussed here and did I mention… You can even use the community edition of Open-AudIT for free to get a feel for how it works! The community edition gives you Network Discovery, Device and Software Auditing (including Device Port and Storage Appliances), Configuration Changes Detection and Reporting, Hardware Warranty Status, Inventory Management, and Custom Fields. If you really wanted to keep your network monitoring and inventory management system up to date along with having other useful features, you can upgrade from the Community edition to the Professional or Enterprise editions. With the professional and Enterprise editions, you get Interactive Dashboards, Geographical maps, Scheduling of discoveries and reports, and enhanced reports. These editions also come with Commercial support to provide you with any assistance you may need in implementing and customizing Open-AudIT to your specific needs. The Enterprise version is highly scalable for large organizations and includes additional features that improve and simplify administration. Enterprise also includes File Auditing, Baselines, and Configurable Role Based Access Control including Active Directory and LDAP support. More information on the different versions of Open-AudIT can be found on the Opmantek website.

Having all of your device and inventory information in one place while replacing most of the manual process behind maintaining that information can save countless hours. Custom fields and queries allow you to be in control of what information you want to collect, report on, and view. Configuration changes let you know when a device has been removed or added. I don’t believe sticky notes or spreadsheets can do that. Make the switch to Open-AudIT and see how easy it is to know what is on your network.

What does it do?

Open-AudIT is an application to tell you exactly what is on your network, how it is configured and when it changes.

Open-AudIT is designed to be run on a server (Windows or Linux) and to scan your networks for devices. Once a device is found, Open-AudIT runs a series of commands upon it and stores the resulting data in a database. This data is then available for various reporting purposes. Open-AudIT comes with a list of over 50 reports with any number of additional reports able to be created by the user.

But Why?

Why would you want to go to the trouble (“trouble”, hah, see the blog post about downloading, installing and discovering in under 10 minutes here) of keeping track of every device and its configuration? Well, here are some contrived examples…

Would you know if someone installed a bitcoin miner program on their desktop PC and left it running every night? With Open-AudIT, you would not only be alerted when this new software was found, but you would also know which user account installed it and exactly when.

What about if someone bought their laptop into the office and plugged in – would you know? That laptop could be a security nightmare and now it’s sitting on your network. Open-AudIT will see this new device and the “New Devices found in the last 7 days” report will show you. The Dashboard in Professional and Enterprise will also populate its graph. You will know. Your network will be safer.

And then there’s software licensing – that’s a given. Naturally, Open-AudIT can report on exactly what software packages are installed. It’s simple and easy to see if you have bought the required number of licenses.

Features?

As a result of Open-AudIT storing the data about a device, it also recognizes and stores and changes affected upon a device. If software was added or removed, for example, Open-AudIT stores this and can report upon it. This is taken even further by the concept of a Baseline, which exists in Open-AudIT Enterprise. Baselines enable you to compare one device against another and report the differences.

Open-AudIT has an extensive role-based access control mechanism which allows administrator-level users to define the access rights of other application users. If you have multiple departments in your company and would like John from Finance to be able to view all assets, but not be able to change them, for example, this is simply and easily achievable. Open-AudIT can also leverage Active Directory and OpenLDAP for authentication and authorization.

In addition to the standard array of attributes retrieved, Open-AudIT can also be configured to retrieve and store the details of files and/or entire directories of files.

As a benefit of being open-source, users can add specific attributes for retrieval to the audit scripts. Opmantek is always open to including more attributes – all you need to do is ask! There is also the feature to be able to define “custom fields” which users can populate manually. If you need to store some piece of information about a device, Open-AudIT likely already does so, but if not, can be made to do so in a few mouse clicks.

Once you have the data, you can use the Restful JSON API to export it – or CSV, XML, HTML – whatever you like, because it’s your data. The API supports the standard create, read, update and delete functions on all endpoints.

When Open-AudIT scans a network, it is called a “Discovery”. Discoveries can be scheduled and hence automated. Set and forget. Along with automating discoveries, you can automate reports to be run and emailed to you on whatever schedule you choose. Why not send yourself a report containing all new devices found on your network in the last 7 days? This can be done in just a few mouse clicks.

The feature list is extensive and enables tracking of all IT assets, whether they be on your network or not. Need to record the details of a phone given to a user – not an issue. Open-AudIT can do that. What about the PC that’s not physically connected to the network – Open-AudIT still has the ability to audit the machine and store the details. From their location, to how they’re configured, to who is in the Administrators group, to when a piece of software was installed, to ensuring file changes (/etc/htpasswd ?) are recorded. Open-AudIT can tell you exactly WHAT is on your network, HOW it is configured and WHEN it changes. Easily. Automatically. Simple.

How does it work?

Open-AudIT works best when you supply a list of credentials that it then uses to query devices. Open-AudIT makes use of Nmap to scan a network and report any responding devices. These devices are then queried to determine their attributes. Even if you don’t have the credentials for a device on your network, Open-AudIT will still have a record of it thanks to Nmap. If a device is found, working credentials determined and it is a ‘computer’, an “audit script” is copied to the device and run. The script gathers extensive information and sends it back to the Open-AudIT server. If the device is a switch, router, printer, etc and it has SNMP enabled and Open-AudIT has working credentials, it’s attributes will be queried using SNMP and no audit scripts will be used.

Once the data is in Open-AudIT, it is yours to query at will. The database structure is open and documented with examples to get you started (if one of the built-in 50 reports don’t do just what you need).

How is it built?

Open-Audit Community is built using free and cross-platform tools such as PHP, MySQL, and Apache. In addition, Open-AudIT uses VBscript and Bash for its audit scripts. Both Professional and Enterprise use the same codebase with available features enabled by the license. Both Professional and Enterprise are compiled binary code with support offered to users by Opmantek.

Licensing

Open-AudIT started as a free software project. To this day it remains so. In recent years Opmantek Software has become the owners of the codebase and monetize this by creating add-ons in the form of Open-AudIT Professional and Open-AudIT Enterprise.

The original Open-AudIT is referred to as Open-AudIT Community.

Open-AudIT Community is the “engine” of Professional and Enterprise. It is Afferro GPL licensed and will always remain free software.

Open-AudIT Professional and Enterprise are commercial closed source programs, licensed by Opmantek to customers and users. Opmantek supply a free 20 device license to users. Professional and Enterprise build upon the foundation of Community and offer extra features and benefits. These can be seen in the table below.

Cyber Monday is here and we are getting excited for some bargains!

While Opmantek are offering 25% off an Open-AudIT Professional 100 device subscription with the promo code ‘CYBER17” until 5^th December 2017, we have also been trawling the internet for the best deals for technology products and services our small business customers will love.  Here are our top 5:

Adobe

Mirroring their sale from last year, Adobe has on offer a 20% discount off a year’s subscription to Creative Cloud. The offer is available via Adobe’s website until 1st December 2017.

CISCO

CISCO are offering an online Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal buy 2, save 55% off the list price of books, eBooks, video training, practice tests, and simulators with promo code ‘BF2017’.

VMware

VMware have up to 25% discount on a number of their virtualization products as well as their training and certification programs designed to grow skills so you can exploit the opportunities made possible by VMware technology.

Envato Marketplace

Envato Marketplace are offering 50% off 500 of their digital assets, templates and files.  If you are looking to replace your old wordpress theme, rebrand some documents or purchase stock videos and images for your marketing stash, check it out!

Udemy

Lastly, Learn a new skill with massive savings on all online courses until tomorrow night.  Get your IT team up to speed with NMIS core with basic courses in Perl starting from $15 and loads of other development, marketing and business courses available.

Happy shopping!