MSP earns customer trust with network insights from Auvik

Streamlined Processes

ITque plans to add more clients yet keep their technician numbers relatively steady, and maintain—or increase—their quality of service. “It’s not about overloading techs with unreasonable demands,” says Forman. “The goal is to provide a heroic level of service to the most companies with the fewest people.”

“If we can resolve an issue in three people hours, then we should be able to create a process that brings that down to two hours, then one hour,” he says.
“Then we look at automating it so it can be applied across customers at scale. It truly is about working smarter instead of harder.”

Faster Troubleshooting

Before using Auvik, the team’s biggest challenge was triaging support issues, funnelling them to the appropriate level of troubleshooting in the fastest amount of time, then solving the issues quickly.

“Traditionally, customers claiming ‘the network is slow’ has been a huge wormhole,” says Forman. “Where do you even start trying to figure that out? Being able to avoid the customer complaint altogether—because you fixed an issue before it affected them—is amazing. Auvik helps with that. If the call does come in, being able to determine root causes quickly is important. And Auvik helps with that too.”

“The bottom line is that the faster we can sniff out problems, the more efficient we can be. In that respect, Auvik is extremely valuable for troubleshooting network environments.”

Forman goes on to explain that he’s used many different network tools in the past. “What I’ve found to be very nice about Auvik is that it’s detailed and technical, but intuitive enough that I can visualize very specific information and troubleshoot complicated routing issues very quickly. During the two-week evaluation phase alone, Auvik saved us dozens, perhaps hundreds, of hours in troubleshooting time and proved to a prospect that we know what we are doing.”

Actionable Insight

In one situation, a client’s domain controllers were pinned at 75 to 100% CPU usage across all cores. They couldn’t run any diagnostics because the CPU was so busy that even just opening Explorer took 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Using Auvik, ITque examined SNMP data from the routers and switches showing network usage statistics per port on the switch stack, firewall, and routers. The numbers revealed that the client was never exceeding 10% of their total capacity at peak usage. Average usage showed 3 to 5% on the server ports. Clearly the issue was not network-based as the client had believed and had been troubleshooting for months with zero success. Turns out, the real culprit was a rogue anti-virus agent installed on the client’s servers. The client was impressed with the detective work and upgraded their service contract with ITque.

“We invest in our tools to win business, serve business, and keep business,” he adds. “Auvik is playing a big part in helping us reach our goals of bigger, more efficient growth.”