ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, today announced the integration of its agent-based network monitoring software, MSP Center Plus, with Zoho Reports, the cloud-based reporting and business intelligence service from Zoho.

The move enables managed service providers (MSPs) to easily organize data and create insightful reports and dashboards, all of which are vital to demonstrating their efforts to safeguard and enhance the performance of their customers’ distributed networks.

The biggest reporting challenges for MSPs concern custom reporting and big data sets generated by monitoring solutions. MSPs need custom reports to meet each customer’s unique demands, but most monitoring software cannot create such reports. Most third-party reporting tools offer custom reporting but do not integrate with MSPs’ monitoring software, leaving MSPs to manually consolidate reports created by multiple tools. Meanwhile, the big data sets generated by increasing mobile and other network device traffic only compound the reporting challenge.

"Service providers spend a lot of their valuable time creating reports manually," said Dev Anand, MSP Center Plus Product Manager for ManageEngine. "The integration of MSP Center Plus and Zoho Reports simplifies and automates reporting on different sets of monitoring data for different customers, giving MSPs more time to work, rather than report, for their customers."

With today's announcement, the entire feature set of Zoho Reports is now available to MSP Center Plus users, giving MSPs the flexibility to easily generate customer-specific reports.

The advanced reporting capabilities most significant to MSP Center Plus users include an easy to use, spreadsheet-like interface that supports drag-and-drop report and dashboard building. Users also have immediate access to 60 pre-configured performance reports and 6 pre-configured dashboard views.

Additionally, the entire database of MSP Center Plus is uploaded to Zoho Reports, so users can create powerful, custom reports with SQL queries written in any database dialect or syntax. Users can also take advantage of standard relational modeling features like defining relationships between tables (using lookup columns), enforcing data integrity, auto-joining data across multiple tables, and auto-numbering.

Other highlights of the Zoho Reports integration with MSP Center Plus include:

* Variety of reporting components. Users have access to a wide range of reporting components, including pie charts, bar graphs, pivot tables and tabular view components that ensure the most insightful report building and analysis possible.

* Collaborative analysis. Users can develop reports together, enabling informed, collaborative business decisions. Fine-grained access control gives the report owner control over data and reports being shared.

* Reports anywhere. Users can embed reports in websites, intranets, blogs, applications and Microsoft SharePoint Server. Reports can also be exported to PDF, XLS and CVS formats and emailed to MSP customers.

Anand said, "Traditional reporting tools such as Crystal Reports offer excellent flexibility but lack online collaboration features. By integrating Zoho Reports, MSP Center Plus users can now generate a report once and share it with colleagues, partners and customers across the world instantly. And the auto-publish options ensure shared reports get automatically updated with changes made in the original document."