How MSPs Use Real-time Integrations As a Part of Their Service Offering (Webinar Overview)

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If you’re a Managed Service Provider (MSP) or work with one, you know that supporting clients is more than just answering tickets. It’s about maintaining strong, real-time communication between multiple teams and systems. 

We recently co-hosted a webinar with SPK and Associates that talked about a challenge many MSPs deal with every day:

“How do you keep MSP workflows running smoothly across multiple client tools without drowning in portals, emails, or silos?”

In this session, Carlos Almeida [VP Engineering, SPK] joined me to dig into the real-world complexities of managing ITSM across multiple client environments and how SPK handled them using Exalate.

Here’s a recap of the highlights (and if you missed it, it’s worth catching the full recording).

SPK and Associates are not your everyday MSP.  They are an MSP built for engineering teams, especially in regulated industries like medical devices, aerospace, and automotive.

They’re focused on helping product and DevOps teams move faster and smarter.

And that means they live inside ITSM tools, their own and their customers'. And for that, communication is everything. But here’s the catch: when those tools don’t talk to each other, things get messy.

The Reality of MSP Workflows

For MSPs, support requests come from everywhere: emails, Jira Service Management, Zendesk. Underneath all of this lies a ticketing system that drives everything: bug reports, escalations, status updates, audits, and SLAs.

But what happens when these ITSM tools are disconnected?

• You end up copying data across portals, so efficiency decreases
• Your reporting becomes a nightmare since the data’s all over the place, some in the MSP space, some in email inboxes
• Your SLAs suffer
• You lose the big picture, getting a fragmented view. 
• And during incidents? When your systems don’t talk, clean escalation paths across your customer portfolios take a hit.  

“We’re dealing with critical systems, and when tools don’t talk to each other, it’s not just inefficient, it’s risky.” – Carlos

For SPK, it was not very different. 

Clients raise issues, tickets, and bugs. SPK triages, assigns, and tracks them. Monitoring is set up, and escalation paths are defined.
Then you’ve got project-level work: migrating to the cloud, deploying new tools, setting up compliance frameworks for data communication.

What SPK wanted was to let clients stay in their tool, and they stay in theirs. Use Exalate to sync it all, live and bidirectionally.

“You don’t want your clients logging into your ServiceNow just to check if something’s moving.” – Majid

Use Case 1: MSSP Monitoring & Alerting

MSSPs monitor client infrastructure for vulnerabilities.  They usually have these monitoring tools feeding alerts into a central hub, which can be an ITSM tool like ServiceNow. 

These alerts need to be communicated to the clients’ own ITSM tools. Why?

Because clients need to know what’s happening:

• What’s the vulnerability?
• What’s being done about it?
• Is the system isolated? Disconnected? Contained?

Once these alerts come into the MSSP, Exalate lets these alerts fan out to different client systems. Further communication happens in real-time. 

Clients get the data, time stamps, mitigation actions, and states. At the end, both sides can generate clean reports and post-mortems.

Use case 2: MSP Project Management

Clients raise work orders with high-level requirements for MSPs (usually as Epics). These are action items for MSPs. 

The MSP divides the work into stories, tasks, subtasks, etc., and they are then communicated back to the clients for real-time monitoring. 

Think of visibility. The customers will always have a clear view of the tasks to be worked on. Work order is established, and they get real-time status updates.

Clients now have full visibility:

• What's moving
• What’s blocked
• What’s dependent

Use case 3: MSP internal workflow

Everything starts in a central Jira instance at SPK.

Tickets come in from multiple client tools (Jira, Azure DevOps, ServiceNow). The MSP uses the central Jira mainly for triage, priority, and routing.

The twist?
SPK engineers might be working in Zendesk or other platforms. When they update the ticket, the update syncs back to the client’s actual ITSM tool of choice.
So, you get a three-way integration going on here. 

The Results for SPK

In terms of ROI, SPK’s results were: 

• 25–40% reduction in time to resolution across multiple clients after integrating Exalate into their systems
• 70–90% Manual handoff reduction. Fewer email pings or back-and-forth communication
• 20–30% improvement in SLA compliance due to real-time visibility across system escalation triggers. 
• 20–50% faster onboarding for clients after applying Exalate configuration to integration templates

The Demo: Central MSP Flow

In the webinar, we demoed this setup:

• Central MSP system: ServiceNow
• Rocket company working in Jira
• Software company working in Azure DevOps

The end client in Jira creates a work item. Exalate integration picks it up and sends it to ServiceNow. The ServiceNow incident number, link (or URL), and the current priority are populated back in Jira. 

The MSP updates the ServiceNow ticket (status: In Progress, urgency, assignee). All of it flows back to Jira.

Status, priority, comments, all synced bidirectionally.

The MSP then creates subtasks under the incident in ServiceNow. These sync back as subtasks under the original Epic in Jira.

The same flow works for the Azure DevOps client. When the client closes a task in Azure DevOps, the MSP’s ServiceNow shows it as Resolved.

The customers will have the required visibility of how the MSP pipeline looks, when the task was closed, etc.

How We Roll Out Integrations (and What We’ve Learned)

First, map out your customer ecosystem. Understand what tools they use, where communication breaks, and what your actual goals are: SLA compliance? Visibility? Reporting?

Then:

1. Start small: choose one use case and pilot it. Then scale gradually. 
2. Map your systems, workflows, and field-level mappings
3. Set up basic sync: tickets, comments, statuses
4. Measure the impact
5. Tie every integration to a business goal
6. Train your team. Educate your clients. Make integration your differentiator
7. Set up the right access, permissions, and tokens. 
8. Always check for compliance. 
9. Document and test everything, a lot. 

And always think about edge cases. That’s where things tend to break.

If You’re an MSP Looking to Integrate

As an MSP, you know the struggle of disjointed ITSM tools. SPK’s approach shows what’s possible when you put real-time data sync at the center of your service delivery.

Got questions? Want to learn more about how SPK’s setup works in detail? Drop them below. 

[Syed Majid Hassan -Exalate-]

Watch the full webinar here https://bit.ly/45lXXii