Customer story
TrustWiseIT is a managed IT provider serving businesses across Metro Vancouver - endpoints, servers, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, firewalls and networking. Which makes their own availability an awkward question to be asked, and a worse one to answer badly.
An IT provider sells the promise that somebody competent is watching. That promise gets tested most sharply on the provider's own systems: a managed IT company whose website is down, or whose certificate has quietly expired, has a credibility problem before it has a technical one. Prospective clients notice, and the ones who notice are exactly the ones who were evaluating whether the promise was real.
The failure mode here is not exotic. It is a certificate nobody renewed, or a host that stopped responding on a Saturday and was found on Monday. Both are entirely preventable, both are embarrassing in proportion to what the company sells, and both are invisible without a check running from somewhere other than the machine in question.
TrustWiseIT's public web presence sits under continuous external checks in AlertKick - the full path a real visitor takes, from DNS through the TCP connection and TLS handshake to the actual HTTP response, run from outside their own network. TLS certificate expiry is tracked on the same schedule, which turns the classic silent-deadline failure into a dated, scheduled piece of work.
Alerts route to a named person with a timeout rather than into a shared mailbox. That distinction is the entire point: an alert nobody has to acknowledge is indistinguishable from no alert, and a provider whose own alerting is a mailbox nobody owns is not in a strong position to sell escalation policies to anybody else.
For a managed services provider, this is not really an infrastructure decision. It is a sales one. Being able to answer "what happens if your own systems go down?" with a specific mechanism rather than a reassuring noise is worth more in a prospect meeting than any amount of copy about proactive monitoring - and it is the same standard TrustWiseIT applies to the businesses it looks after.
"We sell the idea that someone is watching. It would be a poor look not to apply that to ourselves - and being able to describe exactly how our own systems are monitored has turned out to be a better answer in a sales meeting than anything we could write on the website."
TrustWiseIT have set out their monitoring standard in full - the four layers they watch for the businesses they manage, what reaches a human, and the limits they are upfront about: how we monitor the systems we manage.
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