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BrightGauge will be closed July 4th, 2012

Good afternoon everyone! We wanted to let you know that we will be closed tomorrow for the July 4th US holiday. For those who are celebrating, have a great one! We'll be back in the office on ...
Good afternoon everyone! We wanted to let you know that we will be closed tomorrow for the July 4th US holiday. For those who are celebrating, have a great one! We'll be back in the office on Thursday continuing to work on the Custom Gauge Builder and other great features and integrations coming out this month! Happy 4th of July!
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Open APIs in the MSP Community

Recently a few blogs mentioned Connectwise’s efforts to urge usage of their growing APIs. A solid blog was written by Channelnomics and I encourage our readers to check it out (read post here). I wanted to offer my thoughts on how we, as the MSP community, should be understanding what Connectwise is promoting and why we all should be encouraging our core providers to invest in Open APIs. Lets first describe what we mean by “Open APIs”. Having an open API means that a core software technology company (like a PSA, RMM, Billing, SPAM filter, etc) creates, maintains, and supports well structured Application Programming Interfaces that allow third party companies to request/push data to/from that system. “Open” also means these companies publish documentation on how to use their APIs and encourage almost any third party company to develop products using them. And lastly, and should almost go without saying but you never know, “open” means that these companies actually publish useful data through their APIs. If you’ve noticed just by browsing the Internet this concept has become very popular recently. The Social Media world wants to make the Internet more personalized and the only way to do so is by having different products pass data to and from each other all day long. In the enterprise software world, openness has also been popularized by companies like Salesforce.com. For Salesforce.com, encouraging 3rd party companies to build off their API has been a great means to building an ecosystem around the Salesforce.com product (which is great for stickiness or client retention). In our industry companies like Connectwise have been taking the most verbal lead recently in promoting this same openness and encouragement of third party products. I suspect its because they have taken much flak over the years about their APIs (which now are pretty good... trust us...we are all over them) but I’m sure also for a little bit of that “stickiness” goal. Unfortunately a few core products in our industry are not investing much in their APIs right now. Why should you care if some of your core technology products do not invest in open APIs? The real benefits of this Open API movement isn’t just with the core technology providers. The benefits we, as users of their products, receive FAR outweigh their business benefit of creating/maintaining them. To explain my point there are two main benefits we should all realize: Focus On Quality - If your core provider embraces Open APIs it means they truly want to focus on their solution and let others build around them. Focused software is better software just like the old saying goes: “the jack of all trades is a master of none” Embracing Innovation - By opening up APIs to other third party companies (like BrightGauge) these core systems are also fueling the engine of creativity and innovation around their systems. More innovative products means more valuable products for MSPs and their clients. These two reasons alone, if embraced by a company, also really shows their humbleness and confidence in their product. It proves to me that they are making good on the promise to make great software and that goes a tremendously long way for me in a decision on which system to go with. Of course Connectwise is not the only system with open APIs. There are other companies in our industry who also support great APIs and some to mention are Kaseya, GFI, Continuum, and AutoTask. If you are running any system that is not truly investing in their APIs we hope this is enough encouragement for you to drop them a note and really understand their reasons. Focused software and great third party products will create tremendous value for the MSP community and their respective clients.

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Gauge Review: Avg Time to Resolution by Priority

This past week we released a new gauge as a spinoff from one of our current gauges, Average Time to Resolution. What we found in talking with partners is that their clients were not only happy with seeing the overall response times, etc but they wanted to see how the response times were doing by the severity (or priority) of the tickets in action. Thus we created this gauge: In the screenshot above you'll see this chart for a MSP that has quite a few priorities. Obviously with more priorities the chart can become cluttered so it will be a balance of which MSPs will want to add this gauge to monthly reports for which clients. We started first with the Average Time to Resolution to test out how partners and their clients react to the look and feel. We'll then add Average Time to Acknowledgement as that's another great indicator and visual of how fast MSPs are reacting to high priority tickets. Would love to hear your thoughts as always! This Gauge is available for our Connectwise on-premise customers as the Connectwise API does not deliver SLA information yet.
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Custom Gauge Builder Introduction

As mentioned a few weeks ago in the “Free My Data” blost post, the BrightGauge team has been working on a new feature called the Custom Gauge Builder (internally known as project: “Data Liberation”). Though the name paints a good picture of the functionality, I want to provide more perspective on how this feature came into play and what our MSP partners can expect. Gauges, as they mean to us, are visualizations of data that can be added to reports (and those reports can be scheduled out on a predetermined schedule). You can also think of gauges as as charts, widgets, gadgets, etc. Every week we develop and release new gauges based on MSP feedback and therefore as every week goes by more and more gauges are available in BrightGauge to be used in reports. With this approach, creating and scheduling reports is extremely easy, fast, and simple. MSPs, big and small, at times have unique data they want visualized in unique ways for their clients and therefore we have wanted to give the power of “gauge building” to our MSP partners but in a way that’s as easy as the reporting process. So this past January we set forth to create the simplest and most intuitive Custom Gauge Builder that can build gauges from any dataset from any data source we currently integrate with (SQL, mySQL, APIs). What can our partners expect with this feature? An easy Query Builder for all data sources The ability to drop in your own SQL Query to build a gauge Edit/change anything about existing Gauges To make this process easy, fast, and simple is a heck of a challenge and we’ve been spending loads of time on the front end designing the process. We have met with our sister company Compuquip Technologies and discussed with our Advisory Council to discuss our thoughts and review preliminary designs. Fortunately both discussions led to a collective response of “YES! This is awesome. Get going on it” With the flow and designs behind us we are rocking and rolling now in development and in upcoming posts I will share some screenshots with you all. We’re targeting early June release right now.
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Gauge Review: Tickets Opened by Type and Sub-Type

Recently we released a new Gauge for both our AutoTask & ConnectWise partners that is a spin off of some current Gauges that currently exist within BrightGauge. For the past few months some of our most popular gauges were “Tickets Opened by Type” and “Tickets Opened by Sub-Type”. These were two different gauges (bar charts) that were often used in the same report. A few months ago a partner of ours commented on the fact that since the Sub-Types relate to a one particular Type it would be even more beneficial to see both sets of information together in the same visualization, the same gauge. So we set out to do so by creating a bar chart (example below) where the bars represent the count of an individual Type and their corresponding Sub Types break each bar into separate sections. Jaime Wheeler, our director of development, calls this the “taste of the rainbow” gauge since there could be many different sub-types creating many different color schemes. But you’ll see in the example above that when separately out well enough the eye is drawn to the right part of the gauge, the most active type of ticket being opened. Note: When you hover over each section it pops up the name of the subtypes that make up each one. This Gauge is a great way to tell the story to your customer on what type of tickets are being opened and break those types down into even more specific categorizations for them understand what is causing the most active need for support. Hope everyone takes advantage of this Gauge and takes advantage of these fields within their PSA system!

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Removing Common Barriers from MSP Success

We haven’t written much on this blog about the MSP industry or lessons learned from our MSP practice, Compuquip Technologies, but I have to share what I thought was one of the better “advisory” posts I’ve read in a while. On Friday David Castro, from Kaseya, wrote a great blog post titled “Removing the 3 Most Common Barriers to your MSP Success”. I encourage you to check out the entire post but let me share his three concepts here. Directly from the post: Ineffective pricing. Too many leave profit on the table by charging solely by cost plus pricing; they don’t know their true cost or willingness of their customers to pay, so they are undercharging. I wrote a 3 part blog on this. Failure to specialize/verticalize. Too many are generalists; the most successful MSPs are gurus (w/ certs and vertical credentials) and sell by vertical (banks, such as Safe Systems) or by competency (business continuity, such as Data Balance). Read case studies about your MSP peers here. Failure to accelerate AWAY from break-fix. Read the BSM article here. Need I say more? If ANY of them want to exit, they will have suboptimal valuations UNTIL they move to managed services. When I was at Compuquip with my brother we never claimed to be experts in the MSP field even with a strong track record of success (50+ employees, high average monthly contracts, yearly growth). My brother and his team continue to grow the business and much of that he attributes to learning from others in the community. I applaud David and Kaseya for writing solid, down to earth, posts to help the community. Keep them coming!
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Gauge Review: Patch Statuses

No IT reporting tool could be complete without having a standard Patch Status visualization or report. That being said, because of this report’s popularity the gauges are the more simple gauges to explain to MSPs. How it works? First we split up Patch Statuses into two separate gauges, one for workstations and one for servers. Then, based on our new data syncing method, BrightGauge checks within your RMM the status of approved patches and if those approved patches have been applied to each machine within a customer. This is showing in real-time based on the freshest data (and therefore patches) available and approved. The visualization of this data is a pie chart and when you hover over each section you can see how many patches are actually making up that part of the pie. What’s really awesome is that you can also drilldown on each section of the pie chart for more information. We have some more gauges coming out around Patch Statuses how they are being applied over a period of time as well. But we walked before ran....and this status gauge is one the most popular being sent out weekly and monthly!
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BrightGauge Roadmap Update

Time flies when you’re having fun! I can’t believe we are half way through March and almost done with the first quarter of 2012. Not sure if you remember but in February I posted a list of what was remaining on our roadmap for the quarter (can be found here) and below I’ve provided an update to that list. This is the same list I used in the other blog post and all I’ve done is strike out what we’ve accomplished to date. I can tell you that the new data sycning method we released to took up a bunch of develop cycles but it was well worth it. Our reports are faster, our import process is faster, and overall everything is just more awesome! Fortunately we are still looking strong at accomplishing most of the list below. What will be sacrificed are the new integrations and the Custom Gauge Builder but not by too long (just another month or so). New Gauges Server Uptime Tickets Opened by Service Item (trailing 30 days) Service Backlog SLA Gauges – Add Drilldown behind SLA data points Tickets Opened / User Count Patch Status Approved but Waiting to be Deployed Tickets Opened/Closed by Location Survey Gauge of Response Percentage with Drilldown SPAM Gauge pulling from ConnectWise Configurations Report Builder Enhancements Adding WYSIWYG for paragraph with ability to hyperlink Ability to send report to any Team Member within your MSP Ability to sort by any field in Support Ticket Summary Exact Scheduling – i.e. detailed recurrences (think Outlook!) Option to Export report to PDF Option to send HTML within Email Report Deliverable Add Gauge reading tip and date range to Gauges attached Improving Header Design of Report Readable from when printed from browser Integrations N-Able Continuum Kaseya Service Desk Level Platforms
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Gauge Review: Avg Time Gauges

Currently we have three “average time” gauges (first three gauges on our Gauge page) that are among our most popular Service Delivery gauges. These gauges are also thought of, or described as, the Brightgauge SLA Gauges since they are counting the time from when tickets are opened to either Acknowledged, Resolution Plan, and Resolved. In this post we wanted to answer a few commonly asked questions about these gauges for our community and future partners: 1. How do these gauges get calculated? For AutoTask & Connectwise it is very similar how we get the numbers for these gauges. Each ticket within both systems calculates each time based on their own methods. All BrightGauge does is take those numbers for the particular day we are calculating and average them out with other tickets on that same day. For example, if two tickets are resolved on the same day and one had taken an hour and the other had taken three hours then the Average Time to Resolution would be two hours for that day (for that customer). 2. How does BrightGauge account for when we’re waiting for the customer or a vendor? Fortunately, Connectwise & AutoTask both account for those “hold times” based on statuses. You will have to refer to their systems to make sure your statuses are correctly set up so these scores are accurately accounting for hold and wait times. 3. Does BrightGauge calculate against our SLAs? These gauges are not calculating against any set SLAs or default SLAs. They are simply showing the time calculated over a 30 day trend. In a separate gauge, coming out next quarter, we will be splitting out by Priority and showing whether you have met SLAs or not. 4. How can I see which tickets are making up each score? You can now drill down behind each data point to see what tickets are used to make up that particular day’s score! This is a new feature that we released last week as part of our Q1 Roadmap. Personally, these are some of my favorite gauges as they help to tell the story of how MSPs are handling support requests coming in from their customers. Similar to Service Backlog gauge, BrightGauge is all about using raw data to tell a story in an easy to understand way for customers. There is no way in house IT teams are pulling this off... Note: This Gauge is not available for ConnectWise hosted partners. ConnectWise currently does not serve this data through their API and is not on their roadmap yet to do so. We’ve asked but feel free to do so as well!
Gauges, Product   |   Read

Gauge Review: Service Backlog

In the first of a series of Gauge Review blog posts I want to introduce and review one of our newest Gauges, Service Backlog (credited to Advisory Council member, Rick Phipps from Intrust Group). The simple formula for this Gauge is “Opened Tickets minus Closed Tickets” over a one month period and showing the previous 6 or 12 months in the actual chart. For example, if a customer opened 10 tickets last month and you closed 12 tickets that same month for the customer than the chart will register -2 for the month. Very straightforward math. Rick has been manually sending this type of data for years as a way to show his customers how Intrust is handling the volume of tickets coming in from that customer. Let’s take a look at a few examples below to see how this Gauge tells a story for your customer. In this first screenshot I’m showing Service Backlog for one of Compuquip’s “normal” customers. As you can quickly see its pretty even throughout the past 12 months and tells the story that Compuquip is pretty much taking care of support requests quickly. Something happened in December potentially but Compuquip quickly recovered and caught up in January. Informative, simple and shows that Compuquip services are working! Now take a look at this next customer. Right away you can see something is wrong because there have been way more tickets opened than being closed over the past 12 months. Its gotten better but Compuquip hasn’t caught up 100%. Having the benefit of knowing this customer I can tell you that the customer is over utilizing the service desk and field support team and tickets are dragging, not good for the level of service required. For this particular customer the original structure for support is not sufficient for the amount of support requests being generated. Compuquip is addressing this problem with them in the next quarterly business review. This gauge is a helpful tool in visualizing the support problem for this customer. This last screenshot is also interesting because this is a brand new customer for Compuquip. Though its only a few tickets accumulating over the past few months the trend did not start out great but not, again, Compuquip is catching up. And mostly thanks to this visualization that went out to this customer recently. Adding Service Backlog to your reports will help paint a better picture of the response time and level of service you are providing a customer. It’s one more step forward in providing MEANINGFUL information to your customer. Thanks Rick for the suggestion!
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A Quick Guide to getting started with BrightGauge Reports

Over the past few weeks we’ve spoken with a large set of our current partners and asked how they got going with BrightGauge. A few very similar themes emerged and so we put together a sample guide that most active partners of ours seem to be following. First, the most active partners all started by creating a few “test” reports and sending to their best and most trusted customers. This gave them a sense of confidence in how easy reporting can be as well as gave their best customers a preview of these new reports and a “voice” for feedback. All partners created and sent a “heads up” email to their clients so that there was no surprise to them. Here's a sample email an MSP sent to us. He used it as a “heads up” to his customers: Mr. Customer, We have recently invested in a new Reporting Tool that will significantly increase the value of the reports we deliver to you weekly and monthly! Over the next few days we will be sending you a few emails that contain a URL with a sample custom report. We’d love to get your feedback and thoughts as we will be rolling this out over the next few days! Please note that these reports are interactive with drill down capability so you can really get an idea for whats going on within your IT environment. We’re very excited to begin this roll out with you and excited to hear any and all feedback. Sincerely, Your MSP Secondly, MSPs replaced current reports that were being sent out monthly from their PSA & RMM system. Usually these reports were the standard, and "not so good looking", executive summary report, patch status report, or the ever popular manual report of closed tickets. When asked about amount of time, the average seemingly was 30 minutes to create new reports and discontinue the older reports. And again everyone that we talked to used a “heads up” email to send to all their clients ahead of time. Here is another sample: Mrs. Customer, We have recently invested in a new reporting tool that will replace our current monthly reports being sent to you. Starting next month you will be receiving reports via email with the URL link inside of them. We’re very excited with our new reporting system and feel you will see a significant increase in value from these new reports! These reports are interactive, can be viewed from any mobile device and will be sent to you in the same recurrence your current reports are being sent now. If you still would like access to the current reports, please let us know but all information will be present in these new reports. Kind Regards, Your MSP Finally, once the MSPs felt comfortable, they then started to create some serious value by sending one-off reports on a consistent bases. Weekly & Daily reports started popping up for their clients, as they were comfortable receiving more information about their IT. This is where we’ve seen some very interesting reports such as those we described in this blog post: Top 3 Most Interesting Use Cases of BrightGauge/

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How to Generate Powerful Autotask Reports

You know what clients love? Partners who are trustworthy and transparent about what they’re doing. Know what’s even better? When that foundation is set naturally, without clients having to ask. It’s likely a priority of yours to foster a really strong sense of trust between you and your clients, which is great. Trust breeds long-term relationships and repeat business, putting you on a path towards success. And a really simple, yet powerful way to build that trust is to get in the habit of consistently sending out client reports. It’s not as tedious or time-consuming as you may think, and the payoff is substantial. Determining what to report on Let’s say you’re using Autotask Professional Services Automation to track your support tickets, SLA data, engineers’ hours, and more. That’s some pretty important data! How do you show your clients what you do with that data to keep them running efficiently? This is where Autotask reports come in. Consistent reports give you the opportunity to visually display your value to your client and reinforce the reasons why they are paying you. Autotask reports also show that you’re proactive and committed to helping them run their business - a.k.a., you’re a partner, not just a service provider. However, while we are clearly in support of showing off your data management skills, we should caution against dumping too much Autotask data (or any data) on your clients. The key is to choose the right data. There are a few questions to ask yourself whenever you’re choosing the Autotask data to report on: How does this fit into my client’s SLA? Referring to the SLA you and your client agreed upon is an excellent way to refresh yourself on what matters to them. For example, if the SLA specifies a satisfactory support ticket response time, you’re going to want to include your Autotask Average Time to First Response on each report you send. Does this impact my client’s bottom line? Only include the Autotask data that’ll have the most impact to each specific client. They may not need to know nitty-gritty details like Hours Today by Engineer, but would probably appreciate an update on Projects Opened vs. Closed. Am I spending significant time on this? If it’s not something that matters a whole lot to you, it’s not likely to matter a whole lot to your client. Remember, this is an opportunity to report on your value, so show off Autotask data that you spend a worthwhile amount of time on. Once you’ve got your data ironed out, you can start pulling your Autotask reports together. A little help goes a long way You’re really busy. You don’t have 8-10 hours a week to spend on compiling reports. And no one says you have to. Using a business intelligence tool like BrightGauge can help you get your Autotask reports out with very little work on your end. First of all, BrightGauge takes all your Autotask data (plus data from your RMM, BDR, security, finance tool, etc) and puts it up on one seamless dashboard, so you can keep an eye on the metrics that matter to you in real-time. Then, when it comes to building reports, the whole process is automated and can be set up in just a few clicks. When you connect BrightGauge + Autotask, your account will come pre-loaded with 8 report templates to get you started, including Daily Member Scorecard, Weekly Project Work Summary, Service Calls, Sales Daily Wrap Up, and more. You can open one of these templates, personalize it with a client logo, choose your client recipient(s), and then schedule the report to automatically be sent out at the frequency you choose (like every Monday at 8 a.m.). If you’d rather build a report from scratch, it’s just a matter of dragging and dropping the data you’re already tracking into the report template, and then personalizing it and scheduling it out. It’s honestly that simple. And the reports look clean, professional, and digestible. Once you get your Autotask reports scheduled, you can rest easy knowing they’re automatically being delivered to your client’s inbox every week/month/quarter and that your client’s can rely on you and trust you to receive this information. High-five! By the way, in addition to 8 report templates, you’ll get almost 200 default KPIs and 9 pre-built dashboards to get you started. Some KPIs include: Amount on Invoices 90 Days Past Due Average Time to First Response Average Time to Resolution Breached SLA Summary Per Resource Customer Satisfaction This Month Leaderboard Opened vs Closed Tickets Project Phases - Current Month Tickets Assigned by Tech Tickets Completed This Week Leaderboard Tickets by Issue Type Watch this video to learn more about setting up and sending out reports. If you’d like to add Autotask to your stack of BrightGauge datasources, please contact us today.
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Dashboard of the Month: RMM Overview - Endpoints

Dashboards and reports play a vital role in streamlining data and extracting valuable insights. In the dynamic realm of endpoint management, it is imperative for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to have real-time access to consolidated data from their array of tools, enabling swift action on behalf of their clients. Utilizing metrics not only aids in pinpointing areas for enhancement but also empowers them to enact precise strategies for advancement. In this month's featured Dashboard, we delve into RMM Overview metrics tailored to streamline endpoint monitoring and management. Our inspiration stems from a recent user showcase webinar featuring Nate Ginn, the Centralized Systems Manager at ESI Technology Advisors, who shared insights on leveraging ConnectWise RMM and ConnectWise PSA data for enhanced client management. Tune in to Optimizing Remote Monitoring and Client Management with Data to discover more on how Nate drives performance enhancements through data utilization. Nate and the ESI team rely on the RMM Overview dashboard to gain a snapshot into critical indicators like patch status, warranty updates, and disk space utilization, guaranteeing optimal functionality of their endpoints. This visual aid, shared among their team, helps them stay ahead of RMM tickets for prompt issue resolution as well. RMM Overview - Endpoints - view here. Here are some featured metrics: Ticket & Configuration Information - These segments organize RMM tickets based on their status, time spent, and attached configurations. It also offers a historical perspective on ticket volume, and provides insight into the endpoints and software under your management. Patching & Disk Space Utilization - These metrics provide valuable insights on missing patches, OS patch compliance rates, and disk space utilization percentages. These data points are crucial for addressing performance concerns and identifying potential security vulnerabilities. Thank you, Nate, for collaborating with us and sharing your valuable insights! Recreate in your BrightGauge RMM Overview - Endpoints Dashboard (public view link) RMM Overview - Endpoints Buildout Key Make sure to visit our library of more report and dashboard templates and please feel free to reach out to success@brightgauge.com with any questions!
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Report of the Month: Service Desk 30-Day Summary

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) play a vital role in ensuring the smooth functioning of their clients' IT infrastructure. One effective way for MSPs to showcase their worth and maintain transparency is by crafting monthly client reports. These reports can spotlight important metrics around ticket volume, response and resolution times, and customer satisfaction ratings, illustrating their dedication to meeting service level agreements (SLAs). For June's Report of the Month, we are excited to present a Service Desk Summary Report inspired by a recent User Showcase Webinar on Client Reporting Excellence featuring Scott Kingston, the Service Delivery Manager at Spark in New Zealand. This 30-day summary offers a comprehensive view of the services delivered in the past month. Utilizing dynamic filtering capabilities in BrightGauge, this report can also display data from the previous month, tailored to your reporting preferences. Scott and his dedicated team at Spark NZ diligently distribute their Caretaker Plus Service Desk Report on a monthly basis, providing both interactive drill-down features and a downloadable PDF version for convenience. These reports offer a detailed backdrop for their regular meetings and consistently showcase the tangible advantages and improvements facilitated by Spark's exceptional services. This not only validates their pricing structure but also strengthens their reputation as a reliable and valued partner. Service Desk 30-Day Summary Report - view here. Here are some featured metrics: Ticketing Information - This section offers a concise overview of active tickets, the 30-day history of both open and resolved tickets, and key performance indicators such as resolution rates and customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). Ticket Trends - This section categorizes tickets to easily identify trends. For instance, metrics include tickets by type, subtype, item, source, and ticket opener. Additionally, it provides insights to highlight potential problematic tickets, such as those with extensive time entries and an aging ticket summary. Open Projects & Managed Servers - Concluding the report with a brief summary of ongoing projects and the effectiveness of managed servers opens up avenues for further improvements and additional tasks to be explored. Thank you, Scott, for collaborating with us and sharing your Caretaker Plus Service Report template! Recreate in your BrightGauge Service Desk 30-Day Summary Report (public view link) Service Desk 30-Day Summary Report Buildout Key Make sure to visit our library of more report and dashboard templates and please feel free to reach out to success@brightgauge.com with any questions!

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