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Lot's of companies offer Monitoring
Why should you choose us to do it?

Outsourced IT vs. "monitoring"

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!

 

What is a NOC?

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.

 

Low end monitoring

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!

 

High end monitoring

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.

 

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.
 
         


Vigilance Monitoring is a Division of Easyrider LAN Pro, established 1990.