An item has been consistently appearing in most of the follow-up conversations we have with our PowerCloud customers. They are very happy with our service, but they would like to better understand the diverse processes we perform on their infrastructure and applications.
From Cloudways perspective, our focus has always been to strive for customer systems built on performance and availability—and we are exactly doing that. To achieve this, there are many processes we run that our customers are not aware of.
We believed that it was good to hide some of these underlying processes from our customers. However, after listening to many of them, we understand the need for a high level view of all activities (background or otherwise) that surround their application.
This can both provide transparency to customers of the work Cloudways does and help us in aligning customers processes better in order to achieve our final target, i.e. higher performance and availability.
To address this need of our customers, we have come up with The Stream.
What is The Stream?
Basically, it is a timeline of ALL activities that happen around a customer’s account.
Here, you have a list of some of the activities you will be able to find in The Stream:
- Support tickets activity: Tickets opened, closed, etc.
- Patching: When a system has been patched?
- File system level backups: When they happen (and the results)?
- Database backups: Again, when they happen (and the outcome)?
- Offsite backups: Yet again, when they happen (and the results)?
- Internal tickets: Cloudways internal tickets related to the customer (i.e. to upgrade OS, upgrade applications, improve performance, etc.).
- Chats: When and for how long chat activity happened?
- Calls: When and for how long account follow-up calls happened?
- Automated service restarts: When and why our automatic Disaster Recovery processes were triggered?
Our objective is to keep growing this list with additional items that could be of interest to our customers until they can have an extremely comprehensive and real-time view of what is happening at their fingertips.
We will be launching The Stream during the second week of December. Stay tuned!
Pere Hospital
Pere Hospital (CISSP & OSCP) is the CTO and co-founder of Cloudways Ltd. He has over two decades of experience in IT Security, Risk Analysis and Virtualization Technologies. You can follow Pere on Twitter at @phospital and read his blog at www.perehospital.cat