Managed services: what our monthly report contains

Why a monthly report

The real-time dashboard answers the question “is everything working right now?”. The monthly report answers another one: “is our information system in good hands, and where is it heading?”. It serves management, IT and, where relevant, auditors.

The content below shows the standard structure. It is tailored to your contract, your scope and your service commitments.

1. The one-page summary

• an overall status per area (availability, security, backups, capacity), in green, amber or red;
• the month’s key events;
• the decisions needed from you (budget, trade-offs, approval of a change).

2. Availability and performance

• availability of each service, compared with the contractual commitment;
• application response times and their trend;
• every outage: date, duration, cause, impact and corrective action.

3. Incidents and requests

• number of tickets opened and resolved, by priority;
• response and resolution times, compared with commitments;
• recurring causes, and what is being done to remove them.

4. Backups

• backup success rate over the month;
• the restore test performed: what was restored, how long it took, and the result;
• compliance with the agreed maximum data loss (RPO) and recovery time (RTO) objectives.

A backup that has never been restored is only an assumption. The monthly test is what turns it into a guarantee.

5. Security

• security alerts analysed, and the follow-up to each;
• updates and patches applied, and pending ones with their justification;
• open vulnerabilities, ranked by severity;
• review of privileged accounts and remote access;
• upcoming deadlines: certificates, licences, end of support.

6. Capacity and costs

• CPU, memory and storage usage trends;
• projection: when will a resource reach saturation?
• for the cloud: the month’s costs, variance against budget and optimisation leads.

7. Changes made

The list of the month’s interventions: deployments, configuration changes, migrations. For each, the date, the reason and the outcome. Nothing changes on your systems without leaving a trace.

8. Recommendations and next month’s plan

• recommendations ranked by priority, with estimated effort;
• interventions planned for next month;
• follow-up of previous months’ recommendations.

How you receive it

The report is sent at the start of each month and presented in a short review meeting. Between two reports, the dashboard remains available at all times, and an expert answers your questions within 24 business hours. Request a sample report.