Opportunities for Modern MSPs Offering Digital Workspaces

In a fiercely competitive market, against a background of vendor licensing cost changes that are impacting profit margins, many MSPs offering digital workspaces are modernizing to remain relevant and futureproof.

Many managed service providers have historically focused mostly on uptime/downtime, resource monitoring and so on.

Automation tools are reducing the value of conventional managed services. Native cloud services are increasingly offering organizations improved digital workspaces and self-management tools directly.

The value an MSP (Managed Service Provider) now has to offer is in going beyond the basics, by using their digital workspace expertise and advanced tools to deliver extra value to customers.

This is also not just Software as a Service (SaaS). The modern service provider is now expected to provide processes and people with expertise to deliver value to customers.

How eG Enterprise helps Modern MSPs Deliver Digital Workspaces Profitably

We have already supported many of our MSP partners to leverage the growing opportunities of digital workspaces. Specific key opportunities we see our partners exploiting include offering services to:

  • Measure and report on SLAs
  • Enable 24×7, proactive monitoring
  • Deliver EUC assessments
  • Give insights for compliance, right-sizing, and planning
  • Empower customer helpdesks to be effective

Today I’ll elaborate on these 5 opportunities.

Opportunity 1: Measure & Report on SLAs

Customers usually have no way to measure user experience vs. SLAs (Service Level Agreements). Key questions customers value answered include:

  • Are users able to login?
  • How long does it take?
  • Are users able to click on applications and access them?
  • How well do digital workspaces work in different scenarios e.g. when accessed from one location vs. multiple?

Tools that use Ping and TCP port checks are not sufficient. Moreover, standard web simulation tools are not sufficient for EUC/VDI use cases.

Many of our partners now offer their clients UX monitoring for EUC as a value-added service to clients in a SaaS model.

MSPs offering digital workspaces can add value leveraging simulation tools - image shows screenshots of a simulation of a user using multiple apps within a digital workspace desktop such as Citrix or VMware

Figure 1: Automated workflows can be played back to simulate real user behavior and measure KPIs against SLAs for user experience.

An eG Enterprise dashboard from an MSP offering digital workspaces showing a simulation - highlighted are bottlenecks where the simulation is abnormally slow

Figure 2: Simple dashboards give the administrator continual information on simulation performance and insight into failures or slowdowns.

Opportunity 2 – Enable 24×7 Proactive Monitoring

Ask any EUC admin and they’ll say that they want to be proactive! Synthetic monitoring helps to a limited degree, but they need monitoring of every piece of the service delivery chain. Monitoring must be integrated with the latest architectures (e.g., Adaptive Transport protocol for Citrix, Reverse Connect for AVD) and must track early warning indicators.

Our partners tell us that customer staff spend over 25% of time firefighting, missing alerts due to limited bandwidth / staffing resources and other priorities,

Opportunity 3 – Deliver EUC Assessments

Some of our partners go beyond just offering digital workspaces and desktops to offer consultancy services to organizations looking to optimize or troubleshoot their VDI deployments.

Customer staff often simply don’t have the expertise needed, particularly if deployments need troubleshooting. Digital workspaces are often deployed with the help of external contractors and consultants or long departed in-house staff and current employees may not understand what metrics mean and why they are important.

eG Enterprise covers all tiers: desktop, VDI, cloud, hypervisor, connection broker, profiles, logons, sessions; with automated root-cause diagnostics to pinpoint problematic components. Our partners leverage eG Enterprise to identify bottlenecks and provide recommendations for performance optimizations or even cost savings.

Some of our MSP partners leverage the facility to brand white-labelled eG Enterprise to upsell the monitoring tooling whilst raising the profile of their brand and business visibly.

A topology map of the infrastructure of a VDI deployment as shown on a dashboard within eG Enterprise

Figure 3: Visually rich topology maps allow the dependencies within customer environments to be understood and aid troubleshooting.

Traditional vs Modern MSP

A diagram showing additional services associated with monitoring that MSPs offering digital workspaces can offer if they use eG Enterprise

Figure 4: A wealth of opportunity to offer value-added monitoring exists for modern MSPs offering digital workspaces.

Opportunity 4 – Insights for Compliance, Right-Sizing, Planning

Often, organizations must deliver reports for compliance. eG Enterprise provides a wealth of reports out-of-the-box that allow our partners to automatically generate the reports demanded of them. MSPs offering digital workspaces who simplify their clients’ compliance processes have a significant edge in a crowded market.

Cost control, ROI (Return on Investment), the pressures to do more with fewer staff and at lower-cost, and so on, are important in day 2 MSP operations, whether on-prem or in cloud. eG Enterprise can deliver recommendations to right-size, optimize the deployment to get more from existing resources and licenses. It becomes simple to identify:

  • Outliers
  • Oversized VMs
  • Undersized VMs
  • Wasted resources
  • VM sprawl
  • Security misconfigurations

A right-sizing report for VMs shown in the eG Enterprise console

Figure 5: Out-of-the-box reports identify over or under-provisioned resources. A report for VM right-sizing is shown. Note: specific recommendations for changes such as recommended numbers of vCPUs are made.

Opportunity 5 – Empower Customer Helpdesks to be Effective

Customers really care about resolving user issues rapidly. Support cases are costly and can divert IT staff from core tasks, frustrated end users and employees unable to work cost businesses money and hamper organizations being able to function.

MSPs offering digital workspaces can add value to clients by providing tools to help their helpdesk resolve user experience issues and other problems faster. Cost savings can result if customer helpdesk staff are empowered to triage effectively.

Some of our partners also provide training and work with helpdesk teams to direct problems to the right SMEs. Many have implemented automation where practical to further enhance IT efficiency and resolve issues before support cases are raised.

The ITSM integrations and auditing capabilities within eG Enterprise ensure that our partners can identify and document ROI from software and services to demonstrate service viability and successful delivery.

Partners also value the ability to demonstrate that services are running well due to the MSP’s competence and proactive actions. It is important to remind customers that these things do not just happen by magic and that swapping MSP may be risky.

An alert window in the eG Enterprise console

Figure 6: A shift-left strategy from MSPs can offer tangible benefits to customers.

Read more about our mission to make helpdesk operations easier: Empowering IT Help Desks with IT Service Monitoring (eginnovations.com).

Why MSPs Offering Digital Workspaces choose eG Enterprise above Native Tools

Native tools often may not even suffice for a single vendor’s offering, often they only cover the vendor stack and not the supporting tiers. For example, in digital workspace deployments: Citrix Director doesn’t monitor VMware vSphere/ESXi, you need Citrix uberAgent for in-VM insights/physical desktops, Azure Monitor does not monitor Citrix, AWS CloudWatch is not even sufficient for Amazon’s DaaS products.

Traditional MSPs and organizations relying on native tools often find themselves with observability gaps and undesirable scenarios, such as:

  • Many tools for one vendor stack, fragmented, and do not provide a single pane of glass.
  • Tools that don’t support multi-tenant deployments, so are not ideal for MSPs.
  • No synthetic monitoring capabilities.
  • Different monitoring tool stacks for different clouds and on-prem in multi-cloud or hybrid cloud setups.

Futureproof in the Face of Uncertainty

It’s been an uncertain time for our MSP partners, licensing changes associated with VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom and at Citrix for CSPs, have led to many needing to evaluate their business models and technology stacks. Many have turned to us to help them continue to add value, cost-effectively by:

  • Ensuring they optimize their use of VDI technologies such as Citrix or VMware and their licenses to maximize revenues without compromising customer experience.
  • Allowing them to explore and benchmark alternative technologies when hypervisor or similar price changes force change.
  • Empower them to run and monitor alternative digital workspace technologies such as Amazon WorkSpaces or Microsoft AVD alongside other technologies with minimum startup.

Our licensing is fully transferable between technologies, with a bespoke MSP pricing and licensing program, learn more: eG Enterprise IT Monitoring Licensing – Cost-Effective & Flexible (eginnovations.com). As our MSPs change we plan to be with them for the long-haul!

eG Enterprise is an Observability solution for Modern IT. Monitor digital workspaces,
web applications, SaaS services, cloud and containers from a single pane of glass.

Free Trial  See the platform

Learn more about eG Enterprise for MSPs:

About the Author

Raja Kannan is Head of Technology Services at eG Innovations. Raja’s experience is in End-User Computing, Infrastructure Monitoring, and Application Performance Monitoring (APM). Raja has been part of several patents associated with eG Innovations’ advanced monitoring technologies.