INAP Bare Metal Customers Can Add Intelligent Monitoring Services

INAP has bolstered its Bare Metal high performance, single-tenant hosting services to offer new intelligent monitoring services that allow channel partners and their customers to view in real-time how INAP is managing IT operations for its customers around the clock.

The new service aims to provide more accountability and transparency so customers can actually see and confirm how their IT systems are being operated for increased confidence and oversight, Jennifer Curry, senior vice president of global cloud services for INAP, told Channel Futures. Also being unveiled is an accompanying INblue cloud management and support platform, which delivers the intelligent monitoring services for Windows and Linux INAP Bare Metal customers.

Included are comprehensive intelligent monitoring for servers, resources, applications, operating systems and a wide range of other infrastructure, plus the ability to add automated patch management using an integrated single-agent system, said Curry. Corrections are made by INAP support technicians using a proprietary, software-defined smart workflow system.

INAP’s Jennifer Curry

“We have had components doing this in various ways in the past, but this is our comprehensive monitoring being done in one system,” she said. “It includes a transparency and proactive [approach] that didn’t necessarily exist in previous platforms from INAP.”

The intelligent monitoring service is powered by a lightweight agent that is secure and tracks every element of a company’s infrastructure in a portal, while generating system performance, security and operational alerts based on certain thresholds. Action items that need to be fixed are generated by the monitoring and then smart workflows are created for INAP support staffers to make corrections to the systems using IT monitoring tools and cloud management tools.

The new system is different from other products available to customers because instead of requiring them to fix the alerts that arise, INAP staffers make the corrections through the portal, said Curry. Those corrections are then visible to customers on a single screen.

By allowing customers and partners to see what fixes are being made on behalf of customers, those customers gain more transparency as they hand over more system-management tasks to vendors, she said.

The accompanying INblue platform and interface lets customers add firewall configurations, dashboards for monitoring data backups — and the intelligent monitoring capabilities.

For channel partners who will sell and support the new services, they’ll be able to provide real results and evidence that can be shown to customers to illustrate the real-world services they’re receiving, said Curry.

“They can show it to clients and see it themselves,” she said. “It’s something that channel partners can rely on.”

INAP will use feedback from partners to continue to refine and improve the services.

Gabriel Consulting’s Dan Olds

INAP bare metal services provide hosted infrastructure for customers from 53 INAP data centers around the world. The high performance data center company also specializes in colocation, connectivity and cloud services.

Dan Olds, principal analyst with Gabriel Consulting Group, said the new INAP monitoring services address longtime complaints from IT administrators — that they spend too much time on routine tasks that could and should be automated, and that their systems should be designed to give them alerts on potential issues before they become real problems.

“The INAP monitoring tools will give admins a much better view into what’s happening with their infrastructure and also give them notice when things are starting to go sideways,” said Olds. “This early notice will help them solve problems before they become a fire that they have to put out.”

For INAP Bare Metal customers, the new services are designed to help handle problems while keeping IT admins fully in the loop so they know what’s going on, said Olds.