Although the main market for ServerAssist is system administrators who are directly responsible for their own organisation's network, servers and infrastructure, ServerAssist is also suitable for those who provide managed services.
This page will answer some of the questions you may have about ServerAssist, and how you can use it to provide enhanced services to your clients. For more information, please get in touch.
Pricing
The retail pricing is for individual organisations that purchase ServerAssist directly from us for their own internal use. For service providers, this pricing is not applicable, but instead we have a general partner programme and, specifically for managed service providers, a managed service provider programme.
These programmes take a different approach from the standard reseller arrangement. In brief, in return for a usage-based, fixed monthly or fixed annual fee, you can either sell our software to the client or use it yourselves to provide services, and in both cases retain all revenue from the sale or services.
Installation
Depending on the network and the monitoring required, it may not be necessary to install any centralised monitoring at the client site. However, for most scenarios, we would recommend installing the central operations server and management server on a machine located on the client's internal network, and connecting remotely to this machine for day-to-day management and monitoring. This connection can be made securely over a single TCP port, and will allow full remote reporting and configuration facilities from your office.
In most situations, these central services can be installed onto an existing machine, since the load imposed by ServerAssist is very low. In our testing a six-year old four-core server configured with 2GB of RAM was able to fully monitor a 20 server network with an average 14% CPU load, 220MB memory footprint, and 0.7 MB/sec average network traffic.
Configuration
ServerAssist's initial configuration will automatically enable monitoring for CPU load, memory usage, disk space, all services, all event logs, restarts and availability, with no manual intervention, and does not require SNMP to be enabled on Windows servers.
As systems change over time, with ServerAssist’s automatic configuration processing, there's no need to manually reconfigure the monitoring. Any new server software that's installed will automatically be included in the monitoring – its services checked to ensure they are running and all warning, error and security problem event log entries will be alerted. There's no need to manually add the details of the services added or to even know the precise details of the new events that will be generated.
Reporting
A wide range of reports can be generated automatically, and these can be configured to be sent to one or more e-mail addresses (yours, the client's or both), published to a web-based report server (making them available to a wide audience), or stored as files on the file system (allowing integration with other systems if necessary).
Alerting
Alerts can be configured to notify your staff, client staff or any combination of the two, depending on the degree of cover you provide, with alerts for different problems being sent to different people if required.
Branding
The core software supports minimal rebranding, in that it is possible to change the logo displayed in the user interfaces and on HTML-formatted e-mails, and some of the colours used for reports. We also offer a full white-label solution, with all aspects of the software rebranded so that the software appears to be a unique, independent product.