VoIP Service Provider and Titanium 3CX Partner, Amplisys, uses Obkio to Monitor End-User Network Performance

As Canada’s first Titanium 3CX partner, Amplisys is an MSP providing robust VoIP and IP telephony services to small and medium-sized businesses. With Amplisys’ expertise in VoIP and network, they knew that VoIP is highly reliant on optimal network performance, and wanted to find a way to better support their customers when network problems arose, which affected their VoIP Quality.

Learn how Obkio works with Amplisys to create a streamlined network monitoring and troubleshooting process to quickly and proactively support every one of Amplisys’ VoIP customers for impeccable customer satisfaction and support.

Founded in 2008, Amplisys is a Managed Service Provider (MSP) specializing in VoIP and IP telephony. Based in Eastern Canada, Amplisys works small and medium-sized businesses, from direct clients to other MSPs (Managed Service Providers).

As Canada’s first 3CX Titanium Partner, Amplisys trusts 3CX’s robust VoIP and Unified Communications platform to deliver their services. They also run their own private cloud and infrastructure.

What differentiates Amplisys from other VoIP service providers is their network expertise. The Amplisys team are network pros that evolved into the world of VoIP, and therefore understand that VoIP Quality is highly reliant on impeccable network performance.

During an interview with Amplisys CEO, Sebastien Thomas, Sebastien tells us, “You need a fantastic network for VoIP, but most people are not network experts and don’t know how to manage their network.”

Although Amplisys’ responsibility is not to manage their clients’ networks, they know that understanding network performance and having network visibility is necessary to providing impeccable VoIP Quality, and customer experience.

Providing great customer service was always part of Amplisys business model, but to provide impeccable customer service, they knew that there was more they could do.

Before Obkio, the Amplisys team would rely on comments from customers to let them know they were experiencing VoIP performance issues.

Customers would speak to their Internet service providers (ISP), who might tell them the issue is elsewhere, and this would cause a long game of ping pong trying to identify if an issue is due to Internet problems, the network, firewalls, or something else.

In most circumstances, Amplisys would send a technician on-site to run extensive network testing and try to manually identify what the problem is and what is causing it. Although customers were understanding of the process, this was a troubleshooting process that could take days or even weeks to complete.

This could take even longer when the problems are intermittent. Intermittent problems are even more difficult to find because they only happen for a few minutes at a time, before seemingly disappearing, but greatly affect the quality of service.

In some circumstances, the team would need to close a support ticket without being able to identify intermittent issues.

But customers wanted more answers, and Amplisys wanted a way to provide their customers with answers and solutions as fast as possible.

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At this point, Amplisys understood a few key things:

Most VoIP problems were due to network performance issues. Additionally, most of those problems are increasingly intermittent and difficult to pinpoint.

Therefore, in order to identify problems affecting their VoIP services, they needed to have visibility over their customers’ network.

More specifically, they needed to be able to monitor performance from their customers’ networks, up to the Amplisys cloud infrastructure.

Most other service providers aren’t necessarily network experts, which makes it more difficult to troubleshoot intermittent problems affecting networks and with network performance management.

Because of Amplisys network expertise, they knew that helping their clients monitor and understand their network would give them an edge over the competition, and help them be proactive when troubleshooting and solving performance issues.

Amplisys knew that there were missing visibility over their clients’ networks to really understand performance issues their clients were experiencing.

They hated telling the customer to just call their ISP without the necessary information to troubleshoot. They wanted to send the client off with the information they needed to help them hold their service provider accountable, or help them solve problems.

Amplisys then went on the hunt for a network monitoring solution that could help them monitor end-user network performance to identify and troubleshoot network issues, especially those affecting VoIP Quality.

They searched for a long time and compared many different monitoring solutions to find the right one and were then impressed by Obkio's Network Performance Monitoring software after trying Obkio’s free 14-day trial!

Because of VoIP dependence on network performance, as well as Obkio’s quick installation process, ease of use, and end-to-end monitoring, it was the perfect solution for Amplisys’ needs!

After trying Obkio to monitor their own network, Amplisys saw the value immediately, and decided to make Obkio a part of their service offering.

They went all-in and installed Obkio Network Monitoring Agents for ALL of their clients, without exception, and continue to do so with new clients.

Amplisys CEO, Sebastien Thomas, shared his enthusiasm with the Obkio and Amplisys partnership saying, “Obkio and Amplisys are really a perfect match! Obkio’s installation is as simple as you guys say it is. No geekiness is required.”

The Obkio Agents continuously monitor network performance from the client networks up to Amplisys’ cloud infrastructure to identify any problems, monitor VoIP Quality, and ensure that the client’s VoIP Quality is as it should be.

With flexible facturing and MSP Network Monitoring setup, Amplisys can easily and quickly deploy more Agents when they need to monitor more network locations, or ends of the network. Adding more Monitoring Agents allows you to more easily segment the network and pinpoint where exactly a problem is located.

VoIP Quality can be highly sensitive to performance issues, which is why it is always recommended to identify issues before deploying your VoIP service to ensure everything will work smoothly.

And performing a network assessment is the best way to do that.

A Network Assessment is used to qualify your network before the deployment of a new solution to identify issues with your LAN, WAN, firewalls, or Internet access as early as possible.

It is a process that Amplisys uses to optimize network performance for their customers, and ensure a smooth service deployment. It’s also one of Obkio’s major use cases for its Network Monitoring software.

By deploying Monitoring Agents for all their new customers, Amplisys can quickly identify any network problems that may affect VoIP performance, even before the service has been deployed. Obkio then provides Amplisys with the information they need to troubleshoot these problems and ensure optimal VoIP Quality.

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With Obkio Monitoring Agents deployed for every customer, Amplisys always has end-to-end visibility to proactively identify and troubleshoot performance issues for customers, even before customers notify them!

“We always say that Obkio is like our 17th employee, continuously telling us what’s going on and helping us support our customers when problems come up,” says Sebastien.

Amplisys has now been able to streamline their support process, and identify and troubleshoot problems faster than before.

Previously, Amplisys would only know of performance issues if their customers called to inform them of dropped calls. At that point, they would have to hurry to solve the problem.

Now, their team can use Obkio to identify issues even before customers are aware of them.

Sebastien explains, “We used to just wait for the phones to ring, but now we wake up and the first thing we do is look at our Obkio dashboards to understand what’s happening with our customers."

Obkio’s custom dashboards allow you to create dashboards for different locations and customers, with all the performance metrics that matter the most.

Get a complete overview of performance for all your customers and location in one glance.

From the dashboards and Obkio’s automatic alerts for network issues, Amplisys then has a complete overview of which clients are experiencing performance issues, and can deepdive into what they are.

Sebastien explains the benefits of this new process, saying, "If the client hasn’t called, we would call them first to let them know something is wrong, and that we’re already on it. We switched from being reactive to proactive and customers love it!”

Obkio allows Amplisys to automate their VoIP monitoring process, on a continuous basis, to find problems without requiring extra resources on-site.

Once Amplisys has identified customer performance issues, they can collect the data they need to fix the problem, and Obkio is the middle-man to help make that happen.

With features like Traceroutes and Device Monitoring, Amplisys can collect important troubleshooting data about:

• What the problem is
• When the problem occured
• Where the problem occurred
• What caused the problem
• & Who is responsible for fixing it

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One of Amplisys’ customers is a Physiotherapy Clinic with 40 locations across Canada. They were experiencing issues with their VoIP Quality and were then told that their Internet service was the problem.

To help them troubleshoot this problem, Amplisys had deployed Obkio Monitoring Agents in all of their customer’s branches.

They deployed pre-configured Raspberry Pi Monitoring Agents sitting on a POE switch and even shipped Hardware Agents to their clients, who didn’t have monitoring equipment of their own.

Using Obkio, Amplisys was able to identify in a matter of hours that the performance issues were actually due to their firewall configurations.

From there, the right measures could be taken to fix the actual root of the problem.

“Identifying that problem for our client really helped us gain that trust with them,” says Sebastien.

With Obkio now a full-time employee on the Amplisys team the two work together to achieve a variety of things:

Obkio’s Agents provide Amplisys with 360-degree visibility of their client’s networks to quickly identify performance problems affecting their customers’ networks and VoIP performance - even before their customers experience them.

Additionally, Amplisys can start off their day prepared if something needs to be fixed, or if everything is working perfectly.

Sebastien describes, “When I see green everywhere on the Obkio dashboard, I rest easy and I know what to expect.”

Not only can Amplisys be proactive when identifying performance issues for customers, they can also help them troubleshoot significantly faster than before.

Previously, identifying and troubleshooting problems could take multiple days - sometimes without a clear solution at the end of it all.

With Obkio, all the information needed to troubleshoot is readily available on Obkio's Network Response Time Graph, and through Obkio’s Traceroute feature.

Amplisys used to send their team members on-site to manually run tests when clients experienced performance issues because they had no network visibility remotely.

With Obkio, that’s no longer necessary. Obkio is the network admin that provides complete visibility, all through the Obkio App.

The Amplisys team can now assess, monitor, pinpoint and troubleshoot remotely which:

• Reduces the amount of time a customer is experiencing problems
• Erases the need to travel on-site
• Saves money and requires no additional on-site resources
• Increase customer satisfaction

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Customer support was always Amplisys biggest priority. As a Titanium 3CX partner, Amplisys had a robust VoIP & UC platform, but they knew that customer support is what makes the difference between a good service provider and a great service provider.

With Obkio, Amplisys can now:

• Provide quicker, more effective support for customers experiencing performance issues.
• Gain the trust and confidence of customers by providing their network knowledge and expertise
• Identify problems for customers even before the customers find them themselves.

Customer service using Obkio is also a huge difference between Amplisys and their competitors. Many customers coming in from their competitors had little to no support for performance issues besides self-serve documentation.

With self-service, no one is really helping you, and sometimes, you don’t even really know what to look for.

And with many of Amplisys’ customers having little to no network expertise, it was difficult for them to understand what was going on.

With Obkio, Amplisys can take it upon themselves to be the VoIP and network pros all-in-one, with end-to-end support for customers.

When network problems arise, it can be due to a variety of reasons - which Obkio can help you determine. Sometimes the solution is to optimize your network.

With Obkio, Amplisys can help customers determine if they need to optimize their network by upgrading their service.

It can also help build trust between Amplisys and their customers, leading to customers deploying Amplisys’ VoIP services in more locations!

Amplisys received Obkio alerts about performance problems for a client, specifically a large amount of packet loss over the network.

After sending one of their own team members on site to further investigate, they discovered that their customer’s network was configured by a spaghetti of wires, and was being managed by a third-party service provider.

Their ISP suggested they upgrade their fibre, which would’ve locked them into a 36 month contract.

After further troubleshooting using Obkio, in only 20 minutes, Amplisys discovered that the packet loss was being caused by bad network configuration, and had nothing to do with their Internet service.

Because of Amplisys’ ability to help their customer identify and solve their problem, after their ISP failed to, they were able to add value to their customer and build trust.

This led the customer to purchase 40 extra phones from Amplisys, right on the spot!

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In the end, Obkio and Amplisys were a match made in heaven!

After researching and considering other solutions, there’s a few things that stood out about Obkio:

Amplisys previously had a solution to monitor their platform, but they needed a monitoring solution to monitor the end-to-end user experience up to the Amplisys Cloud.

And Obkio does just that.

Obkio’s Monitoring Agents can be deployed in strategic network locations like branch offices, data centers, and remote offices to continuously monitor performance with synthetic traffic, measure key network metrics, and identify issues.

With a focus on performance, and 360-visibility of the network, Obkio also collected the data the Amplisys could correlate with their own data to help them troubleshoot and solve customer problems.

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Obkio doesn’t require any network expertise to install and use using Obkio’s Onboarding Tutorials. It’s designed to be simple network monitoring, even if you aren’t a network professional.

This allows Amplisys to easily and quickly deploy Obkio Monitoring Agents for all of their customers in only a few minutes, while getting permanent 24/7 monitoring solutions.

Obkio is made to be flexible, meaning that it can be used by companies with 1 user, to large Enterprises with thousands of users.

The ability to add Monitoring Agents for their customers when needed allows Amplisys to offer their customers a flexible monitoring solution that can grow with them, while respecting their budget.

Obkio has a focus on the end-user experience all around.

Obkio is built to monitor network performance from the end-user experience using synthetic traffic that monitors the user path without packet capture. The solution sits on the network like a standard end-user which never compromise the end-users privacy.

This allows Amplisys to proactively identify issues as though they were their own customers using their services.

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Like Amplisys, Obkio is designed with customer experience in mind.

Because of the team’s experience in the world of Managed Service Providers, the Obkio team understands the features and tools that Service Providers need most, and are always looking for ways to improve the Obkio app.

Sebastien talks about his experience with the Obkio team, saying, “Obkio really listens to us and other MSPs. We can send in a feature request in the morning and it’ll be in production by that same afternoon!”

The Obkio Team is proud to have Amplisys Team on board, and are looking forward to a long and rewarding relationship!

Try Obkio for yourself with a free 14-day trial and Get Started today!