One thing that sets professionals in the tech industry apart from the rest of the world is the constant drive for automation. These are the people who look at processes and workflows performed by people and ask themselves how they can make it easier, better, and more efficient. Many MSPs prove their value to their clients by doing exactly that. This can be accomplished through improving the technology used by a company, or implementing software that will increase productivity and efficiency.
Customers are looking for these innovations, automations, and improvements through cloud applications including security, infrastructure transformation, CRM tools and other enterprise and customer-facing environments. Moreover, they want faster, continuous application improvements.
xOps Launches DevOps Services for MSPs
With those needs in mind, xOps recently announced specialized services and open source tools to help MSPs and customers meet these new client demands. One of these tools is the correlation and presentation engine, xView. The tool provides a single place to view monitoring and operational data across all systems. xView uses ServiceNow to track incidents and all of the alerts generated from the product are directly integrated with ServiceNow.
The team of engineers follows ITIL service management best practices for management of alerts and events. The company claims they have leveraged detailed runbook integration in ServiceNow to handle known issues and are continually building their knowledge base. In the spirit of automation, xView also brings machine learning to enable the prediction of problems before they occur.
The company also claims the open source tools provided by xOps offer a unique competitive advantage:
- All operational metrics, logs, alerts, and business data in one place, in real time.
- Tools to identify issues before they impact the customers.
- Self-healing systems through automated issue resolution.
- Elastic systems with automated capacity adjustment.
- Visibility across business metrics with predictive analytics to determine trends before the competition.
Broader MSP Tool Set
xOps also has several monitoring tools that can be customized for each MSP client. The standard set of tools include:
- Correlation and Presentation Engine - xView (xOps Open Source)
- Synthetic Monitoring - New Relic
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM) - New Relic
- System level monitoring - Zabbix
- Network monitoring - SolarWInds
- DB - Oracle
- Storage - Netapp
- Logs - xVIew (xOps Open Source)
xOps seems to be focused on helping MSPs manage their technical operations more efficiently and more effectively. The focus on DevOps means they take a different approach to traditional managed service providers. As mentioned previously, many engineers are always looking for ways to automate and innovate, including those employed at xOps.
They also look for ways to more closely collaborate with application development teams to foster better feedback loops and rapid resolution to any issue that may arise. If automation and innovation is the name of the game in the tech industry, it seems like xOps might be on the right path.
PS: xOps founder Larry Gordon has extensive experience in the IT services market. Our team first met him when Gordon was VP of global marketing and investor relations at Cognizant Technology Solutions, the massive IT consulting firm. More recently, he has launched, built and sold multiple startups in and around the IT services market.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
