Although PerformanceIT didn't provide a targeted cost for WAN provisioning and audit, indicating that the service was outside its normal scope, it did provide the reports that would let TacDoh audit WAN usage. The rate of $150 per hour and $1,000 per day, on site, is its general quote for special work.
Operationally, full SNMP monitoring, including RMON where available, and performance and fault management were part of the service. The metrics collected include MIB II link utilization and error buckets. TCP and UDP port monitoring, along with syslogs and occasional data capture, were included.
PerformanceIT initially did not support TacDoh's Adtran N-Form management application, and we were impressed that the MSP contacted Adtran to determine the effort required. It found that the Adtran application doesn't support standard SNMP, but said that Adtran plans to add this capability by year's end, at which time PerformanceIT promised to support that application at no additional cost to TacDoh.
PerformanceIT was the only vendor to place appliances at each warehouse location. Each appliance polled the network and mirrored our database, offering redundancy and data aggregation while maintaining the distributed computing model.
When it comes to reporting, PerformanceIT hit all the right notes, offering the right reports and the right publication model. For example, top users, errors and links by store, region and just about any other sort were available. Like the other vendors, PerformanceIT offered Web browser access with the capability to define as many as six roles. This would let us provide store-level access, though we would have liked to delegate authority at least to the regions; delegation would involve creating a regional partition, within which that region's administrator could create store roles, or even further partitions.
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