Acurus

Maintenance Monitoring and Support Agreement

At Acurus we use an effective engagement tool; our Maintenance Monitoring and Support Agreement. This enables organisations to engage with Acurus at all levels of technical expertise at or below market rates depending on each organisations commitment level.

The agreement can be tailored to your specific needs. This starts by having your IT manager set measurable corporate objectives and appropriate performance indicators, this will allow Acurus to develop a clearer structure, become more efficient and be more focused on those objectives.

Once the corporate objectives have been set, both companies will agree on the points of contact in the form of 1 or more of the services detailed below and then a contract can be finalised.

• Maintenance
• 24/7 Monitoring
• Support

Rather than just supporting and performing tasks, our aim is to establish a baseline for the creation of business value within a model of continual improvement.

This agreement is an effective tool which enables customers to engage our engineers at their respective levels, including:

• Desktop Engineers
• Systems Administrators
• Systems Engineers
• Network Engineers
• Infrastructure Engineers
• Project Managers and Administrators
• Solutions Architects

Maintenance

This service is a pro-active approach toward availability management and performance optimisation across all internal systems. This, together with the monitoring service provides excellent visibility into system performance, capacity planning and system reliability.

Acurus has a set of finely tuned procedures and quality assurance checks and ensures that 2 or more engineers are across a single client's maintenance requirements.  All engineers selected to perform such works are fully qualified and have many years of system administration experience. These maintenance tasks are typically performed on a weekly, fortnightly, and monthly schedule depending on the tasks and systems maintained.

The Maintenance component will ensure that IT housekeeping duties on business critical infrastructure are taking place on a regular basis.

Monitoring

Acurus runs a highly customised monitoring system which is useful in establishing baselines of system performance and allows for performance indicators to be to be set and measured. Acurus responds to real alerts from monitoring that affect business critical systems and provides regular monthly reports on uptime, performance, capacity status, risks and KPI's.

Acurus provides your IT staff members with a web based application showing the health of their network in real time. High quality custom dashboards are also provided, showing customised multi layered map view of your network and systems. An iPhone application is also available to provide a view of your monitored services.

A user can click on a major city, to drill down to a map of that city with locations of city branch offices. Multiple layers can be defined, that allow the user to drill down to branch level, which provides an instant view of all service conditions within that branch.  Once the bottom level is reached individual end points like servers, and firewalls can be accessed, providing a history of all services running on that host, and the host's uptime and performance.

These high level management dashboards can be customised in any way required to represent IT resources geographically, or in a logical site view.

The system will show as much or as little detail as is needed to enable engineers to quickly and accurately diagnose issues or potential issues.

Our monitoring service can monitor your whole IT environment including:

• Servers
• Server Services like web servers, mail servers, etc
• Routers
• Firewalls
• UPS's
• VPN's
• Critical DR Services
• WAN links
• Bandwidth of links
• Switches

This monitoring system requires a very small amount of training, allowing for new IT staff to be trained and start using this system within hours.

Support

Although our maintenance and monitoring services keep ad-hoc issues and IT fire fighting aspects to a minimum, your business may access the support component of the contract for the following services:

Reactive response to emergencies such as server or workstation crashes or network connectivity issues

• Telephone or remote support
• Consulting services as requested
• Project engagement

Examples of the use of the support component of the contract are situations like:

• Over flow support work for specific high level problems
• Over flow support for part or whole days (either for desktop support, or server support)
• Fixed cost project engagement

Depending on which services are employed, Acurus will provide monthly SLA reports and an executive IT management report. These SLA reports will show system uptime, system performance, capacity status, current and a summary of events for that month.

Helpdesk Support and Response Times

The Acurus helpdesk ticketing system is used to handle all issues related to IT problems and site change/moves/additions.

The helpdesk ticketing system is not just an enterprise grade application customised for the interaction between Acurus and its customers, but the helpdesk ticketing system also includes the process and procedure that is taking place behind the scenes, including: 

• Relevant engineers alerted to support and system down issues immediately
• All engineers who are members of your support group have full visibility into the state of all cases, even if they're not directly responsible for that case, allowing us to escalate or transfer a case more efficiently
• Provide Acurus internal incentives to perform and respond within agreed response times
• Keep records of all email correspondence linked to a ticket for historical reference
• Performance reports and monitoring statistics for Acurus and for your IT management team
• Meet quality management objectives

Automatic system down alerts will be set to pre-agreed thresholds (data usage volumes, network throughput volumes, ping response times etc.) and will generate support tickets into the ticketing system automatically. Acurus has customisable, and guaranteed response time to issues.