How to use data and automation for insight and accountability
Being able to identify when, where and—most importantly—who made changes to your customers’ systems is critical for every MSP. And when a two-day site outage threatened a $15k/month relationship for Doberman Technologies, former CEO Ian Richardson knew he needed to find the culprit to mend a valuable customer relationship and restore his reputation.
“Liongard preserved a $15,000/month account, and turned that account into a $20,000/month account. Liongard not only helped preserve a very large account for us, it grew revenue.”
Challenge: Identifying the source of a costly 2-day outage to save a valued customer
One of Doberman Technologies’ customers, a significant healthcare practice, experienced a massive, two-day outage. The healthcare practice lost the ability to schedule and effectively provide services for patients across their 20 locations.
“What makes this outage worse is that, in the healthcare industry, there are strict regulations and laws about data and protecting the patient’s information,” said Ian Richardson, Founder & former CEO. “How are we able to go ‘back in time’ and see the issue and when it happened?”
Doberman engineers uncovered a third-party vendor performing maintenance on a Line of Business Database Server. This server hosts three primary applications to all locations of the healthcare practice, impacting their daily business.
“Liongard showed us when the login occurred, who it was, where the changes came from and what actions caused the database corruption event.”
Once alerted to the issue, the third-party vendor had to become involved to repair the application. The healthcare practice wanted answers for this costly disruption, and Ian knew where to find them with Liongard.
Solution: Automation offers insight and accountability
Liongard continuously captures data throughout customer environments 24x7x365 and stores the data up to 1+ years. Its inspectors run daily to capture data and identify configuration changes, automatically generating a historical timeline of events. This Change Audit feature is critical for business continuity and gives users the ability to essentially go back in time to find what changed, and when.
Doberman engineers leveraged the historical data within Liongard to identify how to resolve the outage, as well as pinpoint its exact time, place and cause. This turned out to be crucial when the third-party vendor denied fault.
It was also proof of value to the customer. “They didn’t understand the level of visibility we have, and that we can show, ‘Look, these are non-editable logs; this is in place to have accountability,’” said Ian. Having “Visibility” is a vital part of the Doberman Technologies value proposition and is underpinned with Liongard.
“Visibility is essential to the conversation with our customers. It changes the conversation from ‘Why are we paying you?’ to ‘Thank God we are paying you!’”
Impact: Strengthened customer relationship and new revenue
Having visibility into their entire IT environment—including critical systems like SQL servers—plus accurate data and a historical timeline view were key to Doberman Technologies resolving the outage.
Liongard helped Ian provide value to his customer and SAVED the $15K in MRR—all while demonstrating that they’re executing their core principles of effective IT management: Reliability, Continuity and Security.
“If I was to describe Liongard, I would call them a key data partner for managed service providers. We use Liongard to get visibility into our environments, as well as maintaining a status quo in the environments.”
See what unified visibility can do for your MSP
Data you can count on comes from Liongard. Our historical data, plus automated alerts, Integrations and Inspectors help you standardize, secure and scale across your organization. See how Liongard works, or schedule a platform walk-through today.
About Doberman Technologies
Since 2005, Doberman Technologies has provided managed services to small businesses in Lansing, Michigan, with a strong vertical focus in Healthcare. Healthcare providers currently make up 75% of their 60 managed customers. A team of 10 employees manages 2,000 devices that enable 1,000 end-users locally to help the Michigan community grow. Their mission is to be the premier IT Managed Services Partner for Michigan small business clients. Reliability, Continuity and Security are their core principles of effective IT management and are vital to growing the business and building strong relationships with their customers.