As an owner of a Managed Service Provider practice I found that one of our weaknesses was backup checking and reporting. We consistently had challenges with the monitoring of our client backup systems. Because we lacked an efficient way of checking backups, our NOC Administrator wasted half of the day manually checking backups before he could begin remediation. My IT is responsible for monitoring more than 800 server and workstation backups. Backup checking would take us a minimum of four hours to complete; this prevented us from addressing all of our backup issues in one day. In many cases, we would log into backup consoles for each client to check them manually or sift through emails to record the successes or failures. We tried everything from excel documents for management, utilizing our RMM toolset, and our internal wiki system for storing results. Without proper reporting and dashboards, we had no way of seeing trends or presenting possible infrastructure issues to our clients. As our MSP practice grew, these challenges intensified to the point where we were not confident that all backup issues were being addressed daily. I was certain we would put client data at risk without a better system.

After searching for a system that could accommodate the different products we use in our practice, I was surprised to find that no one really had a great method for checking multiple backup vendors. We pride ourselves on delivering the right backup product for the client based on their infrastructure. When a client requested a report we had to do them manually. This was costing us significant time and money to manually check and report on our client backups.

The solution:

During our operations meetings as a team we came to the conclusion that we needed a centralized backup dashboard, checking and reporting platform. Our in house Developer Nikhil Nagendra took charge and began building a solution for us to use internally. I advised Nikhil that there was nothing like this on the market and that our intent was to use it internally as a testing ground but ultimately I would like to bring Backup Radar to the market. We held weekly NOC and Operations meetings along the way to make sure we were meeting all of our internal needs for backup checking. Now when our NOC Admin comes in for the day the backup checking process is already complete and he can begin to review and remediate the failures from the previous day. We began saving at least four hours a day of time from our NOC admins. With an average fully burdened cost of 40.00 or more an hour for a NOC Admin we are easily saving over 4,000.00 per month in time that would otherwise be wasted. This time is now utilized for projects and other NOC admin tasks that can be billable back to our clients.

Our Savings – 4 hours a day / 30 days a month = 120 hours x 40.00 per hour employee cost = $4800.00. Even on the low end if we can save you 1-2 hours a day per month you will realize a very significant return on investment. This also doesn’t include time to create manual reports which would only add to that savings. In addition you will get time back that can be billable to your clients which could generate more revenue from time that would otherwise be spent checking backups. No administrator enjoys manually checking backups so this will have an impact on employee morale as well.

As I began showing our internal Backup Radar package to peers at industry events we were continually asked how they could get a copy. Because of the interest generated in our internal application we decided to build it from the ground up to be a scalable cloud platform. We brought on a team of world class developers to assist Nikhil in building Backup Radar with the highest performance and quality.

If you manage different backup products or just need a better way to monitor, trend and report on your backup issues in a centralized manner Backup Radar is here to help! Those daily hours saved on backup checking, monitoring and reporting really do add up to valuable time your administrators can spend on more pressing tasks. Sleep better at night knowing you finally have a great view into all of your backup results.

Patrick Leonard
CEO/President
Backup Radar