10 essentials of MSP log management

Computerworld - The most critical components of any managed service provider's (MSP) service-level agreement are to ensure that the customers' log data is available when needed and to provide analysis of the log data on a real-time and scheduled basis.
Many times, customers are required to analyze and retain data due to regulatory compliance rules such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. In addition, log analysis allows customers to identify security and network anomalies that may not be detected with other tools.
MSPs include businesses such as network service providers as well as other managed IT services. Previously, I wrote about managed security service providers, a subset of MSPs (see "The pros and cons of MSSPs"). The following are the top log management requirements that an MSP should provide. I drew these conclusions after working for five years at one of the largest MSPs in the world.
1. Customer view segregation
As an MSP, one of the biggest concerns we had was segregating the views customers had into the data. We didn't want any customers to see data that didn't belong to them. Given that MSP administrators manage many customers and devices, the administrators must be able to associate the devices with customers and ensure that customers can see only their associated devices.
This requirement drove many of the design decisions we made during the building of the support infrastructure. We made conscious decisions to create granular permissions as well as many-to-many relationships between customers and devices.
2. Raw log retention
We also needed to provide our customers with their raw, unaltered logs for regulatory compliance and so they could do their own analysis. We can do all the necessary analysis on our side, but sometimes a client may want other information from the logs that our analysis doesn't provide. Also, customers sometimes have other proprietary information they want to correlate.

Remember that MSPs build everything based on economies of scale, and sometimes it's difficult to customize a solution for an individual client. Obviously if a customer was willing to pay for additional services, we could do them, but not every customer wants to or has the budget for customized service.
No. 3: Reporting is No. 1
Customers at this MSP wanted reports on their security infrastructure. They wanted to see how much traffic (bytes, connections and so on) the firewalls were letting pass through so they could properly plan for the future. They wanted to see how often users were using virtual private networks so