This is the fourth in a series of articles that explains some of the major sections of the NaviView control panel and helps you understand how much value it adds to your NaviSite service. The Service Request/Ticket tab gives you one-click access to all your current and previous service requests. Upgrades, configuration changes, support tasks and more are presented in a customizable, browser-based interface. Easy-to-use and with built-in sorting and filtering capabilities, the Service Request feature in NaviView is yet another ‘value over time’ benefit that adds efficiency to your organization.

The Service Request window is not just for problem resolution. Additional services can be ordered and provisioned quickly and easily via the interface, giving managers and administrators the ability to do their jobs freely, without outside dependencies. It may seem insignificant, but over the course of a business year can really have an impact.

Here’s a scenario that plays-out in IT organizations regularly. An administrator needs more IP addresses for a customer, and informs the product manager. The product manager calls the sales rep at the hosting provider, and leaves a voice mail as it’s after 6pm. The product manager also follows up with an e-mail as insurance, and then moves on to the next issue, considering the matter resolved. Unfortunately the sales person is out of the office the following day on a client call, and then the weekend, and doesn’t forward on the request to be provisioned until the following Monday. By the time the request is queued and fulfilled its Tuesday afternoon, almost a week since it was initiated. Ironically, in a lot of overworked IT organizations, this would qualify as a good turnaround time.

Now consider the same scenario, except this time cut out the middlemen. The administrator requests IP addresses via the Service Request tab in NaviView, and the request is delivered directly to the network team. Rather than go through a product manager, sales rep, and in most scenarios 2 or 3 other desks at minimum, the process is streamlined and highly-efficient.

That efficiency is also compounded over time. In the first scenario, what happens if the administrator doesn’t get the IP addresses in a timely fashion? He or she has to call the product manager, who calls the sales rep, who calls the provisioning team, and the entire job drags out even longer. With the NaviView Service Request feature, you get up to the minute status on every active item, as well as the ability to review pervious tickets.

In our fast moving 21st century economy, information X speed = money, and in this series of articles about the NaviView control panel, we’ve looked at several ways that this powerful feature saves you time and money, over both the short and long term. If you have any questions or wish to learn more about NaviView, please contact your account manager or our support team at 866.322.1905.

This is the third in a series of articles that explains some of the major sections of the NaviView control panel and helps you understand how much value it adds to your NaviSite service. The Health Check tab in your NaviView control panel gives you a instant, detailed look at the status, performance and available resources of all the servers and devices in your NaviSite deployment. Fully-customizable, the monitors you configure in Health Check display the exact information your stakeholders need, in a single mouse click.

The value of Health Check is not just in the volume of pertinent data, which can be used for planning upgrades, fine tuning performance, juggling resources, and numerous other day to day operational tasks. Highly intuitive and accessible from any web browser, Health Check saves immeasurable time for sysadmins and business managers through its ease of use and data consolidation. Troubleshooting and issue resolution happen faster, decision makers have access to more information quicker, and long term planning is more effective with ample historical data informing new and ongoing business initiatives.

Health Check not only tracks things like network availability, data throughput, and interface uptime, it also incorporates resource monitoring and displays utilization in a clearly understood, real time interface. It allows you to monitor specific processes and applications, and configure specific events and traps to keep close watch on your most business critical services. Health Check allows role based access to data, further increasing organizational efficiencies. All of these notifications and statuses are instantly viewable from a unified source, as compared to traditional, multi-part solutions that require a hodgepodge of tools to provide similar data.

As IT server deployments get more and more complex, it’s important to simplify monitoring and management responsibilities as much as possible. The Health Check feature of the NaviView control panel does exactly that, consolidating a variety of device and process monitoring functions and making a greater amount of information more accessible to the people that need it.

NaviSite Dedicated Hosting and Colocation customers benefit from our multimillion dollar infrastructure, award winning support team, and state-of –the-art technology, but there’s a powerful tool that not all customers are aware of – the NaviView control panel.

NaviView gives you complete visibility into every component and level of your NaviSite IT infrastructure, regardless of location and management responsibility. You can monitor Virtual Dedicated Servers along with physical Dedicated Servers, colocated servers, firewalls (windows, dedicated or shared) and load balancers, and much more. You can also manage such things as service tickets, configurations, along with ongoing performance metrics to give you a total picture of your deployment in an easy-to-use browser-based interface.

This is the second in a series of articles that will explain some of the major sections of the NaviView control panel and help you understand how much value it adds to your NaviSite dedicated hosting and colocation service. The Configuration Summary tab in the NaviView gives you highly detailed real time status and configuration settings information on all the systems and equipment in your NaviSite deployment. You have instant, hands-on access to granular data, everything from network addresses to processor types. The benefits to this level and quality of information are both immediate and tangential, adding efficiency to countless daily tasks and longer term projects.

Audits and inventories that would have previously taken hours can be accomplished in minutes. Identifying and validating system requirements for new applications is a quick and easy process. IP, port, and host addresses are updated in real time, speeding troubleshooting and security efforts.

As experienced network engineers and systems administrators know, IT infrastructure inventories can be hit or miss. They are time consuming and labor intensive to maintain, and in a busy operation are an early casualty to higher priority tasks. Invariably you won’t have the updated inventory when it’s most needed, in an ironic and expensive corollary to Murphy’s Law.

The Configuration Summary in the NaviView control panel dodges those issues completely. It’s a single source for complete, real time details on all your NaviSite IT systems, regardless of location or function. The savings over time is compounded, with more efficient daily operations and the occasional ‘save the day’ moment that comes from having the information you need exactly when you need it.

As discussed in the previous article, in the 21st century business environment, information X speed = money. When your business’s decision makers have more information faster than your competition, you’re in a better position to succeed. The Configuration Summary in your NaviView control panel is a deceptively valuable tool, and you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

This is the first in a series of articles that will explain some of the major sections of the NaviView control panel and help you understand how much value it adds to your NaviSite service. We refer to NaviView as a singular entity, but in reality it’s comprised of a number of applications and devices. Those components feed management tools and real time stats into an intuitive Dashboard, which is where we’ll begin.

For customers, the Dashboard effectively is NaviView. The Dashboard unifies management and monitoring functions in a single, configurable, widget driven interface, giving you the ability to display up front the tools and data you access frequently. Key alerts and notifications are at your fingertips so you know what’s happening, the moment it’s happening. That means more information faster, aiding short term decision making and long term planning.

Here’s how that can work. In our scenario, an online retailer is in the midst of a successful promotion, but they’ve run into a snag. Their customers have started complaining about slow site performance, and they can see that the numbers are hitting a plateau in the late afternoons, capping sales as a result.

After reviewing standard performance data, the retailer decides they need to add servers to their site infrastructure to support the increased demand. This solves the immediate problem, but at a premium cost. Margins are reduced as a result of the cost of additional server capacity, and by addressing the symptom and not the heart of the issue, they’ve only punted the problem down the road, bleeding away additional profits.

Now consider the same scenario, only this time our retailer is armed with information gleaned from their NaviView Dashboard. They are able to drill down and discover a bug in the shopping cart software that prevented cart processes from being terminated correctly with a small subset of products. These processes appeared to be legitimate transactions, and without the deeper look provided by NaviView might have gone unnoticed, just a slow and steady erosion of sales. Adding salt to the wound is the loss of repeat business from customers who had a poor experience, and the increased acquisition cost which badly skews marketing ROI.

In our modern economy, information X speed = money, and having more data faster is one of the biggest advantages you can give your business. In this example, the tools and data insight provided by NaviView helped our retailer find the best, most cost effective solution, solving the immediate problem and avoiding secondary sales revenue losses and diminishing marketing returns. Scenarios such as this play out daily, and success or failure can hinge on the timeliness and quality of information available to your decision makers. The NaviView Dashboard gives you a highly customizable one stop interface to deliver that info to the people who need it.

The tangible, obvious numbers are easy. Take the average daily sales total, multiply it by the percentage increase for seasonal holiday sales, multiply that number by hours or days of downtime, and you have a nice, easily understood price tag. It’s not the most accurate price tag however, and therein lays the danger. Intangible costs can ripple and escalate in unexpected and very expensive ways.

Let’s consider an imaginary SMB that sells a popular gadget. They have a shopping cart section of the website that moves 1,000 gadgets a day at a price of $10.00 per gadget.

1,000 gadgets X $10.00 = $10,000 per day in gross online revenue

Our imaginary company also has a call center, with 10 employees that each sell 100 gadgets a day, at the same price.

100 gadgets x 10 employees x $10.00 = $10,000 per day in gross call center revenue.

It’s not enough to look at this and say that 1 day of downtime = $10,000 in lost sales. That’s not how things work in practice. Using big numbers just for the purposes of this example, let’s say that the website fields 10,000 new customer inquiries a day to generate the sales of 1,000 units. It also fields 2,000 support questions a day for existing customers. If just 10% of those queries convert to phone calls, one of two things will happen- the cost of servicing each call will go up in personnel and overtime wages, or the quality of service for each call will go down due to longer hold times and dropped calls. Either of these events will negatively impact revenues and profit, not just through the immediate lost sales, but also lost repeat business from customers unsatisfied with their support experience.

This also has an impact on the overall cost per sale by unit. If the IT infrastructure for our online sales costs $3,000 a month or roughly $100 per day, then our sales cost per item is roughly $0.10. In this example our call center sales cost per-unit are considerably higher. If each salesperson were paid $3,000 per month for a total $30k in monthly payroll, the per-unit cost skyrockets to $1.00, or 10% of revenues. That means it costs roughly 9% more for each call center sale over the online equivalent. That number goes even higher if an overburdened call center takes incrementally longer to process each call.

From one perspective, it isn’t difficult to come up with some large and scary dollar signs to justify the cost of uptime solutions. The problem is that when you don’t have an accurate CoD on which to base decisions, you run the risk of paying for more than you need. So what level of availability do you need?

The difference between 99% annual uptime and 99.999% annual uptime is a whopping 80+ hours. The cost of that downtime varies by industry, but according to a study by the Fiber Channel Industry Association they range from $14,500 to over $6m per hour for some financial industries segments. These numbers take into account losses in productivity as well as through direct and indirect sales, and although this article is focused on the impact of downtime on holiday sales revenues, it would be a mistake to ignore the bigger picture.

The lesson in all of this is that by completely identifying total downtime costs for your business, you are in a much better position to make informed decisions about the level of availability you need, balanced against the level of availability you can afford. Armed with this information and working with a top notch managed hosting provider, you can develop a flexible uptime solution that is not only affordable, but that allows you to scale during important seasonal business cycles. Get a handle on downtime costs, and you won’t find yourself paying for solutions that cost more than the problem.

Hardware costs should be straightforward to identify, although deciding whether to purchase or lease is much less cut and dry. Purchasing hardware outright may cost less over time, but it also depreciates quickly and businesses can find themselves still paying off equipment that is losing performance ground to newer deployments. Leasing can offer more flexible options, but that typically comes at a premium price.

Software licenses can also be costly, and come with the added overhead of license management. Licensing can be an aggravating cost because unlike hardware purchases, you must renew software licenses, effectively paying multiple times for the same purchase. Likewise, responsible businesses must absorb the annual expenses of warranties and service contracts for upgrades and support.

The best hardware and software in the world is only as effective as the environment that supports it, and few businesses have the infrastructure it takes to provide full redundancy and bulletproof uptime. The cost of redundant power and network connectivity and 24-7 staffing are beyond the means of startups and SMBs navigating a tough economy, which means more cut corners and less reliability. Now the costs of deploying and operating an in-house web or application server are compounded by the lost revenues and productivity that come from increased downtime.

The intangible and unforeseen costs continue to add up, as in the case of higher insurance premiums to cover that capital infrastructure. Supporting systems like data backup and archival, security and virus protection, and hardware upgrade and replacement processes must also be included. Every one of these items not only increases the overall cost of delivery, but they also represent areas of compromise and budgetary limitations.

Here’s the unfortunate reality- most businesses that run their web and application servers in-house pay more and get less.

That’s why outsourcing to a managed hosting provider makes sense. SMBs get a much greater level of service at a fraction of the cost, and benefit from enterprise class systems and infrastructure that would be impossible to replicate in-house. Around the clock support, rapid deployments and upgrades, and a wide variety of complimentary services like load balancing, content delivery optimization, and flexible data storage and backup options make managed hosting even more compelling. Managed hosting turns the cost/benefit equation of in-house servers upside down, giving SMBs and startups much greater return on their investment.