MSP Admin: A best practices guide

This guide provides a general overview of key features and best practices for Site24x7's MSP Admin role.

My Account

Secure your account: Utilize Zoho Accounts to manage personal settings, including to change your password, enable two-factor authentication (2FA), and restrict IP addresses from accessing your account.
Customize your settings: Update your organization's information, including the company name, logo, and custom domain, for branding purposes in customer reports. Be aware that these changes will override existing settings for all customer accounts.
Contact Site24x7's support team for critical changes: To update or delete organizational details, view all users, or enable organization-wide IP restrictions and 2FA, you must contact the Site24x7 support team.

Security and access controls

Define roles based on the principle of least privilege: Assign roles such as the MSP Admin (full control) and MSP Operator (read-only access) to control access levels based on a user's responsibilities. Avoid assigning higher roles than necessary to minimize the risk of unauthorized changes.
Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA): Enhance security by requiring a second form of authentication for user logins. You can enable MFA for your own account and for individual customer accounts.
Leverage Zoho for single sign-on (SSO): Site24x7 uses Zoho Accounts for SSO. To add a user, you must have both MSP Admin and Zoho Organization Admin privileges. This ensures a secure, centralized user management system.
Configure alerts carefully: Set up alerts and associate users with specific Customer Groups. This ensures that the right people are notified of issues related to their assigned customers, preventing alert fatigue and improving response times.

Management actions

Centralize and automate actions: Use centralized management actions to streamline operations and ensure consistency across all customer accounts.
- Configuration Profiles and Rules: Centrally manage and apply Configuration Profiles (e.g., thresholds and notification settings) and use Configuration Rules to automate monitor settings across different customer accounts.
- Bulk Action: Use this powerful feature to apply changes to Configuration Profiles for multiple customer accounts at once. This is a permanent action, so exercise caution when using it.
- Third-Party Integrations: Integrate Site24x7 alerts with external services (e.g., ticketing systems and messaging platforms) and apply these settings across all customer accounts to streamline your workflow.
Track activity and optimize monitoring: Use Audit Logs to track and review all account activities, including configuration changes and user actions. Use the Advisor feature to receive personalized best practice recommendations for optimizing your monitoring setup.

Customer management

Add and manage customers individually: Use the customer management dashboard to add a new customer account. Provide the required details, like the company name and contact information, and customize the customer's login portal for a branded experience.
Control customer access: As an MSP Admin, you get full Super Admin rights over a new customer account. You can then assign specific roles and privileges to your customer users to control their access to their data, enforcing data segmentation and security.
Manage account statuses: You can upgrade, downgrade, or terminate a customer account as needed. You can also view details like the customer's name, email, and account status (TERMINATE, FREE, or ACTIVE).
Set up security measures: Establish security features such as SSO with SAML and MFA for your customer accounts to meet their security requirements.
Simplify management with groups: Create Customer Groups to organize and manage customer accounts efficiently, especially when dealing with multiple clients.

Customer Groups

Organize your accounts: Use Customer Groups to organize your customers logically. Note that a customer account can only be linked to a single group.
Set a default group: You can set one Customer Group as the default. Its data will then automatically appear on the Home and Alarms tabs, simplifying navigation for users.
Associate users with groups: An MSP user can be associated with up to 10 Customer Groups to control their access to specific customers' data, ensuring they only see what is relevant to their job functions.
Delete with caution: A Customer Group can only be deleted if it is not associated with any customers.
Enable the network operations center (NOC) view for continuous status updates: For constant, real-time status monitoring of a large number of monitors (up to 10,000) across all customers, utilize the NOC view. This dedicated, no-click dashboard is ideal for displaying in an operations center.

Alarm management

Acknowledge alarms and assign them to technicians: Immediately assign an alarm to a technician or click Pick this Alarm. This suppresses persistent alerts, allowing the technician to resolve the issue without notification noise.
Filter and prioritize alarms: Filter the Alarms view by the severity (e.g., Down or Critical) and by open alarms (unassigned) to ensure you focus first on the most critical unaddressed issues.
Utilize alarm details for RCA: Navigate directly to the Alarm Details page to access the Outage History, Log Report, and Alert Logs for quick RCA.
Schedule expected downtime: For planned or recurring downtime, use the Schedule Maintenance feature. This clears the alarm from the active list, keeping the view clean for genuine, unexpected issues.
Use Mute Alerts selectively: Reserve the Mute Alerts option for temporarily disabling all notifications during planned events, but be aware that it will suppress all alerts (email, SMS, etc.) during that window.

Reporting

Filter for tailored reviews: Always filter reports by the Customer Name. This ensures that all the data is relevant for specific client service reviews and accurate SLA discussions.
Use the Outages report for RCA: Leverage the Outages report to learn the detailed downtime reasons and duration, making it the primary tool for RCA and internal process improvement.
Monitor licensing: Regularly check the License Usage Summary Report to track usage, monitor allocations, and ensure effective capacity planning and cost management.

Subscriptions

Understand your plan: The MSP Plan includes various monitors (basic monitors, host monitors, advanced monitors, and network components), RUM page views, and AppLogs. Purchase add-ons to top up your plan as needed.
Manage customer usage: Define an upper usage limit for different monitor types for your customers to prevent unforeseen costs. You can also distribute RUM page views and AppLogs licenses to individual customers.
Manage payments: Note the payment options (credit card, PayPal, and purchase order payments). Be aware that credit card and PayPal payments are set for auto-renewal. The hourly billing option enables you to add specific monitors after the license pack is exhausted, with charges based on usage.

By following these best practices, MSP Admins can ensure the efficient management of customer accounts, maintain high-security standards, and deliver consistent monitoring services.

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