November 21, 2024

How Evidi built the perfect MSP single pane of glass

We were on the hunt for a centralized dashboarding solution and we needed it to be scalable. We also needed to be able to easily share these dashboards with customers. SquaredUp checked every box.

Andre Ghanima

.NET + DevOps Developer, Evidi

Evidi – an IT consultancy and managed service provider based in Norway – are on a mission to help businesses harness the power of the Microsoft stack and realise their ambitions.

With a large portfolio of services and a growing network of customers to manage, Evidi faced a challenge relatable to any MSP: They needed better visibility, and the solution had to be cost-effective and scalable.

Evidi’s key requirements as an MSP:

Single pane of glass: A big-picture dashboard to see at a glance the health of all customers and services.
Customer dashboards: Bespoke customer dashboards so there is only one place to go for a customer’s information.
Secure sharing: A cost-effective and secure way to share dashboards with customers.
Scalable & flexible: A future-proof solution with automation functionality and unlimited data sources – capable of evolving with their growing customer base and expanding service offerings.

Evidi's consideration process

As the head of Evidi’s Managed Cloud Cost Monitoring & Optimization service, Andre’s key mission was to get the visibility required to slash cloud expenses and maximize efficiency for all customers. He was also a member of “Team Operate and Evolve”, a squad tasked with refining Evidi’s processes.

He shortlisted six tools, including Azure Monitor, Grafana, Dynatrace and SquaredUp.

Azure Monitor dashboards fell short of delivering the unified single pane of glass Andre had envisioned. Grafana and Dynatrace were strong contenders, but SquaredUp was judged to be a better fit for the team’s needs around scalability and ease of use.

This was the perfect single pane of glass for our needs. Our support team doesn’t have to use eight different sites to get the whole picture of a customer’s stack or health. They can just go into SquaredUp and get the complete picture.

Andre Ghanima

.NET + DevOps Developer, Evidi

The perfect single pane of glass for MSPs

The single pane of glass solution Andre envisioned for Evidi has two core components.

1. Customer health at a glance

*Due to information security this is a mock up of Evidi's customer overview for illustrative purposes*

Using SquaredUp’s health roll-up feature, Andre created an overview dashboard showing the health state of all of their customers. Perfect for speedy troubleshooting.

“We put all our customers on one huge dashboard displaying rolled up health states (red/ green etc). It's great, if anything’s wrong we can then drill down into an individual customer to see their dashboards.”

2. Customer 360 view

Andre also created one workspace per customer, each equipped with four core dashboards, which we will look at below.

“That's the single pane of glass we’re going for – you can immediately get the complete picture of a customer from that workspace.”

Rather than requiring Evidi’s support team or the customer to navigate the Azure console themselves, Andre has extracted just the info they need and surfaced that into dashboards. The team has all the info they need at their fingertips.

“Our support team doesn’t have to use eight different sites to get the whole picture of a customer’s stack or heath. They can just go into SquaredUp and get the complete picture.”

These interactive customer dashboards are shared to clients via a secure, read-only link. Let’s take a look at the four core dashboards Evidi creates per customer.

Managed Cloud Business Monitoring by Evidi
Managed Cloud Governance by Evidi
Managed Cost Advisory by Evidi
Managed Carbon Footprint by Evidi

4 core customer dashboards

1. Managed Cloud Business Monitoring by Evidi

This dashboard provides a comprehensive view of application health and performance.It covers some vital indicators for ensuring optimal cloud service performance and availability – including active alerts, Cosmos DB usage, app exceptions, and service bus topic activity.

“This is the main dashboard we use. Our Support team checks it at the start of every day. Monitors and alerts are set up so the team gets notified immediately if anything goes off. Our clients have full visibility of this dashboard too. Tracking client secret expiry dates is a nice feature – we get alerted two weeks prior rather than finding out when they expire.”

2. Managed Cloud Governance by Evidi

This dashboard is focused on governance and compliance, with the goal of enhancing cloud security and operational hygiene.

It identifies orphaned resources, highlights Defender for Cloud recommendations, and categorizes high-priority issues.

“As the guy in charge of cloud costs, it’s great to have an alert on orphaned resources. Often resources are simply forgotten about, and they continue to pull cost from the cloud. Having these dashboards prevents this. It could save thousands. Orphaned resources also pose a security risk as they are unmanaged.”

3. Managed Cost Advisory by Evidi

This cost optimization dashboard offers savings recommendations, reserved instance advisories, and a detailed cost comparison by resource group.

“The point of this dashboard is entirely for cutting costs. It’s helpful to go into someone’s tenant and get this picture immediately. It shows you where to start, and what’s downscalable. It makes it easier to start a conversation with customers about right-sizingand helps them make more informed budget decisions.”

Andre’s team have also used KQL to manipulate and display custom data, like the cost percentage increase or decrease for a subscription or a resource group.

“The ability to show cost reductions has been helpful as well as it demonstrates the benefits of us de-provisioning something or re-sizing an application.”

4. Managed Carbon Footprint by Evidi

This dashboard tracks carbon emissions by service type, helping organizations visualize and manage their environmental impact. It shows monthly trends and key metrics such as total emissions, changes from the previous month, and specific service contributions.

“Customers love this. Everyone is increasingly becoming more aware of their carbon footprint, so to be able to be see if it’s going up or down, and split it out by service is helpful. It’s also fun to see how much that output is in number of smartphone charges!”

Favorite features

We asked Andre which features he had gotten the most value out of when using SquaredUp.

1. The organizational structure: Workspaces, roll-up, drill-down

“I like how everything is structured. It’s really smart that SquaredUp offers a top-level, single pane of glass view of the entire organization, then the workspaces and dashboards that you can drill into.”

Learn more about our health roll-up feature

2. Notification API

“This feature takes things one step further than alerting. You can take a screenshot and get that sent directly to the channel your team uses – for us that’s Teams. Getting a complete picture of something sent to a channel at exactly 8am is good part of the routine. A really nice feature.”

Learn more about our Notification API feature

3. Terraform

“Part of what made us choose SquaredUp was its Terraform module. To be able to onboard a customer and automatically deploy relevant dashboards with their data is key to our scalability criteria.”

Learn more about our Terraform provider

I really like the simplicity of SquaredUp. It was easy to set up and get going with out of the box. Support was fantastic too – we used it a lot. It's exactly what we needed.

Andre Ghanima

.NET + DevOps Developer, Evidi

Watch the interview

Andre came onto our podcast SQUPCAST earlier in the year to share with the community how he uses SquaredUp dashboards as an MSP. Watch the video to see Andre give us a tour of Evidi's dashboards.

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