Hello everyone,

On Tuesday (31st March 2020), we held a webinar on Service Monitoring, The Secrets of Success led by our CEO, Pilgrim Beart and a special guest, Magnus Hultberg, Product Manager at Winnow. The webinar aimed to explore the term Service Monitoring and specifically focus on answering questions like when you need it, why you need it and who owns it.

Read on, or watch the video below to get the key conclusions from our webinar.

These days, IoT devices are increasingly deployed to deliver a service to the customer - some ongoing benefit. The customer isn’t paying for the device, they are paying for the service that it delivers, usually with recurring revenue, which is at risk if you fail to provide a good service. Service Monitoring is the tool - or set of tools - which enables you to deliver that good service.

At a high level, there are really three critical business reasons to use Service Monitoring.

• The first is protecting revenue: that your customers will only go on paying you if you go on delivering a great service.
• The second is that Service Monitoring allows you to dramatically increase your operational efficiency : deliver a better service while actually reducing your costs. Because arming your employees with a powerful tool makes them more productive. Because understanding which of your problems happen 50% of the time, and which happen only 1% of the time, then lets you spend your precious time in areas which will deliver the biggest return. And because buying-in an off-the-shelf solution for Service Monitoring lets you spend all your precious developer time on building your domain-specific application.
• The third is that Service Monitoring helps rescue your team from fire-fighting, so they can start to invest their time into activities for your next phase of growth. So it unlocks growth.
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And here are the key moments from Pilgrim's discussion with Magnus:

• What does “Service Monitoring” mean to you as a Product Manager? What’s the POINT of it?
• 1) One less tool to build / maintain
• 2) Focus on providing data rather than ability to visualise / report / act on it
• 3) Less questions into the team from support / operations - self service
• 4) Strong partner specialised in monitoring assisting when required
• Any unexpected lessons/surprises that you can share with people?
• 1) Analysing time series data can be hard... sometimes it takes a bit of head-scratching to work out how to best leverage your Service Monitoring tool to solve the problem that you have
• 2) That there is a demand for this data (or rather, the clarity and confidence that comes with it), for non techies
• So if Service Monitoring is a tool to turn data into insights, perhaps you could give us an example or two of that e.g. troubleshooting or targeting / prioritising actions?
• 1) Example: We have three ways of connecting to our scales. USB, Bluetooth, Ethernet. There are cases where scales disconnect. We wanted to improve the average connection uptime. With the time series scale connection data in DevicePilot it was easy to prove that Ethernet always never fails, USB occasionally disconnects, while Bluetooth is the worst of the bunch. So we quickly could decide that the use case to focus on to attack the largest contributor to downtime first was the Bluetooth option.
• 2) Example: We have two types of Android tablets we use, and a fragmented world of Android versions running on those tablets. By segmenting issues we see in the field on these parameters, we can easily see if a problem that sometimes occurs only happens for a given type of tablet, or given version of Android. And that helps targeting a resolution and quicker deliver a fix.
• To sum all that up, how would you say that you run your company better thanks to Service Monitoring?
• 1) We react faster to issues
• 2) We can proactively track trends and isolate unexpected behaviour
• 3) We prioritise better thanks to quantifiable triage of issue severity

For more insights in the matter of Service Monitoring and a real use-case example of our customer Winnow, make sure to watch the recording or contact us below.