Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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?

Just like the goblins, ghouls, and ghosts that’ll be walking down your street tomorrow night, network management can be scary. If you’re not a network expert (and don’t have one on your payroll), it can be intimidating to make changes to clients’ infrastructure for fear of taking the network down. Small actions can have a big impact.

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).