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Managed Services — Essential

Your live platform is monitored around the clock, with BigStep engineers responding to outages 24×7 and to other issues in business hours, under written response times, plus a monthly report on uptime, incidents, cloud spend and changes.

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Sound familiar?

Our platform is live and brings in business, but we don’t have anyone on call. If it goes down at night, we find out in the morning from a customer. The team that built it has moved on, and there is nobody left who knows the system well enough to fix it fast.

What you leave with

  • Uptime checks and dashboards

    Format: Your cloud monitoring (GCP Cloud Monitoring / CloudWatch / Azure Monitor)

    How we know it’s acceptableEvery covered service has a check, you can view the dashboard

  • Alert rules and on-call routing

    Format: Terraform in your repo

    How we know it’s acceptableA test alert reaches the on-call engineer within the P1 response time

  • Runbook

    Format: Markdown in your repo

    How we know it’s acceptableAn engineer new to the system can restart or roll back using only the runbook

  • Escalation matrix

    Format: Document

    How we know it’s acceptableNames, 24×7 contacts and response times confirmed by you

  • Monthly health report

    Format: PDF, 1–2 pages

    How we know it’s acceptableDelivered by the agreed date each month; covers uptime, incidents, response times, spend and changes

Also included

  • Month 1 onboarding: access, service map, monitoring set-up, runbook, baseline.
  • Written response times: P1 (service down or major feature broken): response within 1 hour, 24×7. P2 (degraded, partial failure): within 4 business hours. P3 (minor issue, question): next business day.
  • Fixes needed to restore service after an incident, plus a short root-cause note for every P1.
  • Monthly checks with early warnings: SSL certificate expiry, WAF status, cloud budget alerts, failed backups.

How it runs

Monthly

Onboarding

  1. Week 1

    Access and discovery

    Get access, map services and integrations, review Terraform and CI/CD.

    Out

    Service map and a list of gaps.

  2. Weeks 2–3

    Set-up

    Uptime checks, alert routing, P1/P2/P3 definitions, runbook, baseline uptime and spend, escalation matrix.

    Out

    Monitoring live, runbook, response times switched on.

Then, on a repeating cadence

  1. Every month

    Run

    Monitor, respond, restore, run the monthly checks.

    Out

    Monthly health report.

  2. Every quarter

    Review incident patterns.

    Out

    A short note recommending staying on Essential or moving to Growth.

Is this right for you?

This is for you if

  • Buyerthe person accountable for the platform after launch, usually a CTO, Head of Engineering, Head of Digital or technical founder at a company without its own on-call team.
  • Also has to say yesyour IT/security owner (approves cloud access) and Finance, because this is a recurring monthly cost.

When this isn't the right fit

  • Your system is not live yet. Monitoring a prototype has no value. Start with a build sprint, such as the AI Feature Sprint or the Agent Prototype Sprint.
  • You expect regular feature work or bug fixing every month. That is a development engagement or an AI Engineering Pod, not Essential.
  • You want your cloud bill reduced, pages made faster, or the AI agent improved. That is Managed Services - Growth or the Inference Cost Teardown.
  • You need a guaranteed uptime percentage with financial penalties, or 24×7 response to every issue, not just outages. That is a custom contract, priced well above Essential.
  • You will not give us cloud access, logs and the right to restart and roll back. We cannot respond to what we cannot see or touch.
  • Your infrastructure is undocumented and not in code. A paid onboarding step is needed before we take on the service.

What’s included, and what isn’t

In scope

  • 24×7 monitoring and alerting
  • P1 response 24×7
  • P2/P3 response in business hours
  • Fixes needed to restore service
  • Root-cause notes for P1
  • Monthly checks of SSL, WAF status, budget alerts and backups
  • Monitoring config in Terraform
  • monthly health report
  • Runbook upkeep
  • One production environment (plus staging at the top of the range).

Out of scope

  • New features and UI changes
  • Bug fixes not tied to an incident
  • Cost optimisation, performance tuning and load testing (Growth)
  • AI agent evaluation or model upgrades (Growth)
  • Analytics, lead or SEO reporting
  • Content and data updates
  • Security changes beyond restoring service (for example, new WAF rules)
  • Re-architecture
  • Cloud bills and third-party licences (paid by you)
  • Uptime guarantees or service credits.

Before we start

Before day one

  • Cloud console access with agreed IAM roles, including permission to restart services and roll back deployments.
  • Access to the code repository, CI/CD pipeline and Terraform state.
  • Access to integrations the platform depends on, or a named vendor contact.
  • Your named contact for P1 escalation, reachable 24×7.
  • Signed-off list of covered services.
  • Response times start only after onboarding is complete.

What we’ll need from your team

  • Month 1: a technical contact for about 4 hours a week (access, walkthroughs, approvals).
  • After that: about 1 hour a month to review the report.
  • A decision-maker reachable 24×7 during a P1, for example to approve switching off a failing integration to bring the site back.

Pricing

What we need to give you a quote

  • Cloud provider and account structure
  • List of production services and integrations.
  • Current monitoring tools.
  • Whether infrastructure is in Terraform/IaC.
  • CI/CD setup.
  • Incident history for the last three months.
  • Current monthly cloud spend.
  • Any compliance or data-residency requirements.

After we hand over

Who owns it after we leave

While the contract runs, BigStep operates it and your named owner receives the report and approves changes. If the contract ends, monitoring, alert config and runbooks are already in your own accounts and repo, and we run one handover session with whoever takes over.

How success is measured

  • Uptime % per service (measured, not guaranteed)
  • P1/P2 incidents per month
  • Actual response times against the committed times
  • Time to restore service
  • Monthly cloud spend

Baselines are captured in month 1.

What comes next

  • Monthly · $10K–$22K a monthGrowthwhen the client wants cost reduction, faster pages or AI improvements.
  • Also Inference Cost Teardown if AI or cloud spend is high.

Questions buyers ask us

  • Monitoring tells you something broke; at 2 a.m. someone still has to fix it. That’s what you pay for.

  • We guarantee how fast we respond, which is what we control. We measure and report uptime every month, so you can see the result.

  • Yes. Outages get a 1-hour response day or night; smaller issues get business-hours response. Full 24×7 on everything is available as a custom plan.

  • Fair point. That’s why month 1 is onboarding and the response times start only once onboarding is done.

Start with a free session.

We’ll tell you if this is the right programme.

Book a Free Session