A new year means an opportunity to start fresh. Whether you’re determined to succeed in a new service desk manager job or you’re looking to improve your game in an existing role, it’s always good to get some tips from those who’ve been there and done that. Here are eight tips from experienced service desk managers to help you make the most of your fresh start and flourish at your MSP.

Another year is in the books. In 2018, Auvik published 50 blog posts—each one packed with what we hope is rich content to help you manage networks or build your MSP business efficiently and profitably. Which pieces hit home? These were our top 10 blog posts, as measured by traffic. Thanks for reading!

The sprint to the end of the year can be crazy for MSPs—new maintenance templates have to be made, calendars and expenses need to be updated in the PSA, and everyone has to mentally prepare for the in-laws to visit. Don’t let the Most Hectic Time of the Year affect your bottom line or the health of your team. These nine gadgets will help boost personal productivity, reduce stress, and eliminate distractions so you can help everyone stay focused and productive.

I’ve lived in the virtualization and cloud world for a really long time. During that time, I’ve also seen the impacts on users when you don’t have a good performance monitoring and troubleshooting system in place. That said, what if you have managed services? Do you understand what challenges managed services providers (MSPs) face when working without a monitoring and troubleshooting tool? How are you effectively resolving common VDI performance as well as connectivity issues?

You asked and we delivered; you and other customers requested a solution that would integrate alert management into Datto’s Autotask PSA capabilities. We at OnPage are excited to announce that this MSP solution is now a reality.

OnPage, the industry’s leading incident alert management system today announced a new integration with Datto’s world-class IT business management platform. For the first time, managed service providers (MSPs) can take advantage of a unified view between Autotask ticketing and incident alert activities and workflows. The integration leverages the platform’s advanced ticketing capabilities by converting service tickets into intelligent alerts, all under one user interface.

How well does the team within your managed solution provider business communicate? How much would you say the service desk team in your MSP talks to one another? For most MSPs, communication between members of a service desk team relies on the updates that are typed into a ticket, the casual conversations between taking support calls, and perhaps the occasional tap on the shoulder between engineers for specific issues.

When network hardware vendors issue device recalls, field notices, or security alerts, the implication can be massive for MSPs. Take the 2017 clock signal issue, for example. That huge recall of Intel microchips was a large-scale vulnerability for tons of devices—and meant MSPs had to figure out which devices were affected on which client sites.

In part two of our two-part series on MSP hyperspecialization, we share tips and examples of how MSPs can create their own extremely competitive niche. (Read part one on why hyperspecialization is such a high-margin opportunity.) So you get the business benefits of hyperspecializing your MSP to serve a particular business niche, and you understand the five criteria of niche expertise you need to do so. Awesome! You’re ready to jump aboard a high-margin opportunity. But… now what?

One of the things we at IT Glue wanted to accomplish with the production of our inaugural Global MSP Benchmark Report was to identify what a top-performing MSP looks like. There were certainly some surprises—such as the reality that size doesn’t matter—but a lot of what we found was fairly intuitive. In this rapidly growing industry, there are around 20% of MSPs that are seeing both high growth (10%+ per annum) and high margins (20%+ net margin).