Industry Leading Support for State-of-the-Art Technology
Welcome to the ControlCircle’s Support Centre. This section of the website covers all areas of support from SLAs to types of accreditations our engineers hold. There is a wealth of technical & support information for clients & partners to use to assist them in understanding our Support team structure & to what process we follow to manage incoming tickets & support calls, but also the Support Centre can be used to help put together RFIs or RFQs by our partners.
Why Outsource?
Companies wishing to have maximum uptime with solid performance need to look further than just an IT Manager & IT administrator to maintain their systems. Whether you’re a Enterprise, a Large corporate or a SME you need to start looking at other potential options in order to keep day-to-day business, running as productively as possible. Companies are constantly searching for ways in achieving this, its normally a combination of software which is costly needs to hardware to run it and the operating costs are high and then a support team to monitor the alerts, companies struggle here to recruit and retain support staff due to today’s competitive market place. The crux of the situation is that running a 24/7 support team is time consuming to get going, difficult to manage, costly to set up and expensive to run. So what do you do?
ControlCircle’s flexible end-to-end support services allow companies to integrate various elements to form a bespoke and complete solution, whilst leaving your in-house resources free to concentrate on core business projects. ControlCircle will allow you to ‘pick and mix’ levels of support for each piece of equipment, tying in with what is critical to business uptime and what is not. This approach enables your company to keep within the IT budget and to increase the levels of support or service on specific areas of your IT infrastructure.
ControlCircle’s proactive 24/7 Support Team complete with vendor certification and accreditations, work closely with our customers to ensure constant protection & monitoring of their network. Along with the 24/7 support team each customer is assigned a dedicated ‘Direct Touch Engineer’ who acts as a technical Account Manager he develops deep knowledge of their specific implementation & network to ensure accurate, effective and consistent service.
Key Areas of Our Support Services:
Monitoring & Reporting
Professional Services
Service Level Agreements
FATS (Fast Action Tokens)
Direct Touch Support Engineer
Monitoring & Reporting
ControlCircle’s Advanced Monitoring Platform (www.networkoverview.com) provides a holistic view of the network, essential in allowing us to deliver enterprise-class service level agreements. ControlCircle deploys a probe into a client’s network, the probe is a 1U Linux box that is locked down and communicates via SSL back to our central system. Once in, the probe actions an auto discovery task which picks up all assets reachable on the network. The probe then gathers & caches SNMP traps/alerts from all devices on the network be it a switch, server, application. Each deployment includes extensive device & network alerting and reporting, status from TCP/IP connections, individual packet level analysis and device utilization, patch levels, audit & configuration status all this enables ControlCircle’s technical support teams to pro-actively monitor and manage the network, troubleshoot issues swiftly with full knowledge of the issue and all elements associated and to respond before a fault becomes critical.
ControlCircle’s confidence in their ability to monitor & manage systems extends to providing our clients with the same monitoring view and reporting information as that used by our 24/7/365 Technical Support teams.
NetworkOverview utilizes monitoring, reporting and management systems from leading technologies like N-Able, Tripwire, PatchLink, Heat, Vital Suite, Cisco Works, EIQ to name a few.
To learn more about NetworkOverview go to the dedicated section on this website.
Professional Services
ControlCircle’s Professional Services Team are utilised throughout the design, implementation and support of all network architectures ensuring a single point of contact for pre and post implementation. Technical design consultants ensure a tailored solution to suit individual customer requirements and work closely with a dedicated project manager ensuring implementation and acceptance of the network.
The Professional Services Team are also available for consultancy to review systems, troubleshoot on site or design upgrade solutions. Call our sales team for more information.
Service Level Agreements
From day one ControlCircle have been involved in supporting mission critical systems 24/7, responding anything but immediately has not be an option. Our Service Level Agreements reflect this methodology.
ControlCircle offer an industry leading ‘Service Level Agreement’ (SLA), with the Premium service providing a 5-minute response on all alerts.
Your standard SLA will provide:
- 24/7 technical support with a dedicated ‘One Technical Point of Contact’ policy for all clients.
- Parallel, proactive network operation centres (NOCs) - engineers located in Ireland and Docklands to provide resilient, responsive monitoring
- Bespoke customer portal for customer access of real-time status & availability, graphical monitoring trends, logs and configuration information. All this sensitive information is protected by Crypto Card two-factor authentication & Juniper SSL hardware devices.
- Problem notification to the client within 15 minutes via defined communication channels with appropriate escalation processes.
- For high-availability networks there are two levels of emergency hardware replacement:
A: Hot Swap - every device in your network can have an identically configured device waiting on stand by at your hosting facility. In the event of failure our engineers can swap devices in 90 minutes. With highly redundant N+1 fail-over architectures this gives the highest level of protection against unscheduled downtime.
B: Cold Swap - ControlCircle will hold an equivalent device on your behalf and at a point of failure will configure it identically to your failed device and then facilitate swap-out.
- Direct Touch Engineer assigned to all clients.
- Online Support Portal where tickets can be raised and live updates and status can be viewed.
- All configuration changes within 4 hours, but in practice you are typically looking at 30 minutes.
*See the SLA section for more information.
FATS (Fast Action Tokens)
We have recently introduced Fast Action TokenS (FATS) to our support services. These provide for a premium response from the support team as follows.
Under the terms of our support contracts, we commit to a response time of 15 minutes to respond to and begin actioning tickets raised by clients. Non-critical issues, e.g. configuration changes we commit to do within a 4 hour period, critical issues (eg system down / seriously slow) we react to immediately.
The idea of a FATS token is that clients buy them to secure an immediate action to the ticket they have raised. So if, for example they wish for an immediate rule change they notify the support team of the FATs request and this is then prioritised for immediate action by a 3rd line engineer rather than going into the Ticketing system as normal and actioned by a 1st line engineer when he becomes available. FATS can be used for any reason and by any company they don’t have to be a client, (they would have to prepay and be set up on the system).
Direct Touch Engineer
ControlCircle’s dedicated ‘Direct Touch Engineers’ work closely with our customers to collaborate on resolving problems and ensures that the performance and availability of the server and network infrastructure is maintained to the highest standard with maximum levels of productivity and efficiency.
Our Direct Touch Engineers are responsible for designing and delivering technical solutions in mission critical environments and providing technical assistance or resource during implementation and operational lifecycles.
ControlCircle will match clients with appropriate DTEs, making sure skill sets are relevant to a client’s infrastructure.
A Direct Touch engineer would see a client on a weekly or fortnightly basis to review technical issues, outstanding tickets, future projects and new technology releases.
The Direct Touch Team also work closely with ControlCircle’s Service Delivery Managers, who’s main focus is the quality of the service and any issues clients may have.