Vancouver, BC – Produce8, a leader in digital work analytics, today announced the launch of 

, an innovative reporting system designed to empower businesses with real-time data on employee digital workflows while enabling Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to deliver unprecedented value to their clients.


In today’s fast-paced digital workplace, organizations struggle to understand how employees interact with technology, manage their time, and collaborate efficiently. Essential Insights simplifies this challenge by providing real-time, anonymized analytics that drive data-driven decisions, improve productivity, and support overall workforce well-being.


“Essential Insights was designed to seamlessly provide organizations with real-time business data,” said Marco LaVecchia - CRO of Produce8 “With its ability to reveal patterns in productivity, collaboration, and technology usage, businesses can create better workdays for employees, while MSPs can elevate their role as trusted strategic partners in driving digital efficiency.”


Unlocking Workforce Productivity with Essential Insights

Essential Insights delivers four key reporting dimensions that provide organizations with an in-depth understanding of their digital work environments:

 – Tracks digital working hours, focus scores, and employee sentiment, helping businesses balance productivity with well-being.

 – Analyzes time spent in meetings and calls, identifying opportunities to improve communication efficiency.

 – Provides insights into app usage, interaction patterns, and shadow IT risks, ensuring businesses maintain secure and efficient digital environments.

– Enables comparative analysis of departments and teams, identifying trends and disparities to optimize resource allocation and collaboration.


A Game-Changer for Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

Essential Insights is not only a powerful tool for businesses—it also presents a transformative opportunity for MSPs looking to expand their value proposition and service offerings.

 – MSPs can move beyond traditional IT support by delivering actionable insights that make them indispensable business advisors.

 – By offering DWA-powered insights, MSPs can expand into HR and operational analytics, opening new revenue streams.

 – Essential Insights helps MSPs stand out in a crowded market, delivering next-generation analytics that drive business success.


MSPs have traditionally provided IT expertise, evolving from network management to cloud adoption and cybersecurity. The next logical step in their evolution is Digital Work Analytics (DWA)—a fast-growing sector that helps businesses optimize workflows and retain top talent.


“Organizations invest 8-10% of their OPEX budget on IT, but up to 75% on human resources,” Janice Siddons - President of Produce 8 added “Essential Insights enables MSPs to bridge the gap by showing clients exactly how their technology investment impacts their most valuable asset: their people.”

Produce8 has made integrating Essential Insights into MSP service offerings effortless. The tool can be deployed in just three simple steps:

– Demonstrate how DWA analytics uncover productivity patterns and inefficiencies.

Easily Deploy Essential Insights to Client Base

 – No complex integration is required—Essential Insights works seamlessly with existing IT infrastructure.

 – Use insights to fuel quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and strengthen strategic conversations with clients.


To support MSPs, Produce8 offers an MSP Partner Program with dedicated resources and training, helping them scale Essential Insights as a core business offering.

Unlock the Power of Digital Work Analytics


Essential Insights is available now for businesses and MSPs looking to enhance workplace efficiency, illuminate new growth opportunities, and drive data-backed decision-making.


Join the Essential Insights Launch Webinar

Produce8 Essential Insights Launch Webinar

Vancouver, BC – Produce8, a leader in digital work analytics, today announced the launch of Essential Insights, an innovative reporting system designed to empower businesses with real-time data on employee digital workflows while enabling Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to deliver unprecedented value to their clients.


In today’s fast-paced digital workplace, organizations struggle to understand how employees interact with technology, manage their time, and collaborate efficiently. Essential Insights simplifies this challenge by providing real-time, anonymized analytics that drive data-driven decisions, improve productivity, and support overall workforce well-being.


“Essential Insights was designed to seamlessly provide organizations with real-time business data,” said Marco LaVecchia - CRO of Produce8 “With its ability to reveal patterns in productivity, collaboration, and technology usage, businesses can create better workdays for employees, while MSPs can elevate their role as trusted strategic partners in driving digital efficiency.”


Unlocking Workforce Productivity with Essential Insights

Essential Insights delivers four key reporting dimensions that provide organizations with an in-depth understanding of their digital work environments:

Quality of Work Life – Tracks digital working hours, focus scores, and employee sentiment, helping businesses balance productivity with well-being.

Collaboration Time – Analyzes time spent in meetings and calls, identifying opportunities to improve communication efficiency.

Application Discovery & Usage – Provides insights into app usage, interaction patterns, and shadow IT risks, ensuring businesses maintain secure and efficient digital environments.

Team Benchmarking – Enables comparative analysis of departments and teams, identifying trends and disparities to optimize resource allocation and collaboration.


A Game-Changer for Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

Essential Insights is not only a powerful tool for businesses—it also presents a transformative opportunity for MSPs looking to expand their value proposition and service offerings.

Deepen Client Relationships – MSPs can move beyond traditional IT support by delivering actionable insights that make them indispensable business advisors.

Drive Growth & Revenue – By offering DWA-powered insights, MSPs can expand into HR and operational analytics, opening new revenue streams.

Differentiate Services – Essential Insights helps MSPs stand out in a crowded market, delivering next-generation analytics that drive business success.


MSPs have traditionally provided IT expertise, evolving from network management to cloud adoption and cybersecurity. The next logical step in their evolution is Digital Work Analytics (DWA)—a fast-growing sector that helps businesses optimize workflows and retain top talent.


“Organizations invest 8-10% of their OPEX budget on IT, but up to 75% on human resources,” Janice Siddons - President of Produce 8 added “Essential Insights enables MSPs to bridge the gap by showing clients exactly how their technology investment impacts their most valuable asset: their people.”

Seamless Integration and Adoption

Produce8 has made integrating Essential Insights into MSP service offerings effortless. The tool can be deployed in just three simple steps:

Show Clients the Report – Demonstrate how DWA analytics uncover productivity patterns and inefficiencies.

Easily Deploy Essential Insights to Client Base – No complex integration is required—Essential Insights works seamlessly with existing IT infrastructure.

Incorporate Reports into QBR Meetings – Use insights to fuel quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and strengthen strategic conversations with clients.


To support MSPs, Produce8 offers an MSP Partner Program with dedicated resources and training, helping them scale Essential Insights as a core business offering.

Unlock the Power of Digital Work Analytics


Essential Insights is available now for businesses and MSPs looking to enhance workplace efficiency, illuminate new growth opportunities, and drive data-backed decision-making.


Join the Essential Insights Launch Webinar


Date: January 30, 2025 | Time: 2 PM ET
Register Here: Produce8 Essential Insights Launch Webinar
For more information, book a live demo or learn about our MSP Partner Program


Produce8 Launches Essential Insights, a Breakthrough Digital Work Analytics Reporting Tool for Businesses and MSPs

At Produce8, we believe transparency is important. So today we're announcing we'll be making all our internal 

Teams that operate in a transparent way and “work out loud” have better communication, higher levels of trust and ultimately are more successful. 

We want to extend that value of transparency to what we’re learning as we build our product. From now on, topics like:

style guides will be hosted on a public Notion page, which we’ll use internally and keep updated as we proceed.

As we’ve developed our system, at times we’ve found the documentation and examples available online to be lacking. We want to do our part to improve the ecosystem for those using the same tools. We’ve learned some things the hard way and hopefully we can save you some time by learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them yourself!

In the docs, you’ll find info on how we improved testability in our lambdas by implementing dependency injection with the Awilix framework, and how we use the Middy framework to build re-usable middleware that keeps our lambdas simple while enforcing complex business logic.

You’ll also find details on how we use CDK to manage a large multi-stack application, how our CICD process operates, as well as how we do contract and UI testing. And we’ve published two npm packages and counting to help with graphql schema management and dynamoDB data migrations, both of which are part of our build process.

For those interested, our stack is composed of the following:

NodeJS as the common language with Typescript

As we proceed, we’ll continue to add more to these pages, so please check back regularly.

 to browse our internal technical docs now.

If you have any questions or have any suggestions on how to make it better, we’ll be thrilled to hear from you! 

At Produce8, we believe transparency is important. So today we're announcing we'll be making all our internal technical docs public.

Teams that operate in a transparent way and “work out loud” have better communication, higher levels of trust and ultimately are more successful. 

We want to extend that value of transparency to what we’re learning as we build our product. From now on, topics like:

our coding standards;

best practices;

lessons learned; and

style guides will be hosted on a public Notion page, which we’ll use internally and keep updated as we proceed.

As we’ve developed our system, at times we’ve found the documentation and examples available online to be lacking. We want to do our part to improve the ecosystem for those using the same tools. We’ve learned some things the hard way and hopefully we can save you some time by learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them yourself!

In the docs, you’ll find info on how we improved testability in our lambdas by implementing dependency injection with the Awilix framework, and how we use the Middy framework to build re-usable middleware that keeps our lambdas simple while enforcing complex business logic.

You’ll also find details on how we use CDK to manage a large multi-stack application, how our CICD process operates, as well as how we do contract and UI testing. And we’ve published two npm packages and counting to help with graphql schema management and dynamoDB data migrations, both of which are part of our build process.

For those interested, our stack is composed of the following:

NodeJS as the common language with Typescript

AWS lambdas

CDK for infrastructure as code

DynamoDB

Appsync for Graphql

API Gateway for REST

As we proceed, we’ll continue to add more to these pages, so please check back regularly.

Click here to browse our internal technical docs now.

If you have any questions or have any suggestions on how to make it better, we’ll be thrilled to hear from you! 

Connect with us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Check us out on NPM.

Review our public-facing Github repos here.

Happy Trails :)

-Geoff

Why We’re Making Our Dev Docs Public

AWS Serverless architectures are amazingly powerful. Using an infrastructure as code tool like Terraform or Cloudformation, you can easily spin up highly scalable resources with little effort.

Obtaining good observability can be a challenge, though. 

While there are paid tools out there that can be configured to ingest your metrics and manage observability for you, CloudWatch is a very powerful tool in its own right. However, configuring custom metric filters and alarms can be a chore as the size of your stack and number of environments grows.

My teammates and I at Produce8 are big fans of the AWS Serverless tools available. As our system grows, we need a scalable and developer friendly solution to provide real-time observability and alerting without adding another third-party app to our stack.

This sample shows you how to create a scalable solution to use both standard and custom CloudWatch metrics with alarms on all the lambdas in your stack to provide real-time observability on log events and lambda errors with a few lines of code.

 CDK, CloudWatch Log Groups, CloudWatch Alarms, Lambda

First, let's create our stack. For illustrative purposes, I'm just going to create two lambdas.

Now, I could define a custom alarm for each lambda as I build, but this approach will add a lot of bloat to the code, and it's easy to forget to add them as the codebase grows.

 Lambda in the stack (including lambdas defined in the future) will have the same set of default alarms, I'm going to use a 

 to traverse the stack, get all the lambdas and add two alarms to each.

Aspects use the visitor pattern to call an instance of the default alarm for each node in the stack. This will continue to add alarms to any new lambdas that are added in the future.

Now for the magic. Let's create some alarms.

I want to explain what's happening here. The function:

will be called once with each construct in the stack, so we need to ensure we're dealing with a lambda, not an S3 bucket or IAM Policy etc.

Once we know we have a NodeJS lambda, we can proceed to create our alarms. The first function:

will add a custom log filter on the log group and look for a pattern of our choosing. Since we log in JSON format at Produce8, I can use this pattern to look for any errors logged.

Next, I create a custom alarm and publish any instances of errors in the logs to an SNS topic I've set up.

This is helpful to catch runtime errors in my lambda code. But what if the lambda fails for some other reason, like a timeout? 

In that case, my custom logging will never get called, so I need to ensure I get notifications on other kinds of lambda errors as well. Here, AWS helps us with their standard metrics. Looking at the lambda function, you can see all the metrics available.

I'm going to use the "Errors" metric for this example, but you can use any you want.

In this case, we already have a metric, so we just need to create a new alarm to use it and publish to the same SNS topic.

I've added a custom lambda to forward messages from the SNS topic to a Slack channel so the whole team can get near-real-time (~1min) notifications on lambda errors.

While you do pay a small monthly fee for CloudWatch alarms if you go beyond the free tier, it's a drop in the bucket compared with the bigger monitoring solutions. See pricing 

And to see this code sample and others, head over 

 to Produce8’s public CDK samples repo.

In the spirit of openness and transparency, and in line with our values as a company, our team at Produce8 is dedicated to publishing and sharing articles like this on our internal 

AWS Serverless architectures are amazingly powerful. Using an infrastructure as code tool like Terraform or Cloudformation, you can easily spin up highly scalable resources with little effort.

Obtaining good observability can be a challenge, though. 

While there are paid tools out there that can be configured to ingest your metrics and manage observability for you, CloudWatch is a very powerful tool in its own right. However, configuring custom metric filters and alarms can be a chore as the size of your stack and number of environments grows.

My teammates and I at Produce8 are big fans of the AWS Serverless tools available. As our system grows, we need a scalable and developer friendly solution to provide real-time observability and alerting without adding another third-party app to our stack.

This sample shows you how to create a scalable solution to use both standard and custom CloudWatch metrics with alarms on all the lambdas in your stack to provide real-time observability on log events and lambda errors with a few lines of code.

Tech Stack: Typescript, CDK CLI, AWS

Tools Used: CDK, CloudWatch Log Groups, CloudWatch Alarms, Lambda

Setup

First, let's create our stack. For illustrative purposes, I'm just going to create two lambdas.

Now, I could define a custom alarm for each lambda as I build, but this approach will add a lot of bloat to the code, and it's easy to forget to add them as the codebase grows.

So, to ensure every Lambda in the stack (including lambdas defined in the future) will have the same set of default alarms, I'm going to use a CDK aspect to traverse the stack, get all the lambdas and add two alarms to each.

Aspects use the visitor pattern to call an instance of the default alarm for each node in the stack. This will continue to add alarms to any new lambdas that are added in the future.

Adding alarms

Now for the magic. Let's create some alarms.

I want to explain what's happening here. The function:

will be called once with each construct in the stack, so we need to ensure we're dealing with a lambda, not an S3 bucket or IAM Policy etc.

Once we know we have a NodeJS lambda, we can proceed to create our alarms. The first function:

will add a custom log filter on the log group and look for a pattern of our choosing. Since we log in JSON format at Produce8, I can use this pattern to look for any errors logged.

Next, I create a custom alarm and publish any instances of errors in the logs to an SNS topic I've set up.

This is helpful to catch runtime errors in my lambda code. But what if the lambda fails for some other reason, like a timeout? 

In that case, my custom logging will never get called, so I need to ensure I get notifications on other kinds of lambda errors as well. Here, AWS helps us with their standard metrics. Looking at the lambda function, you can see all the metrics available.

I'm going to use the "Errors" metric for this example, but you can use any you want.

In this case, we already have a metric, so we just need to create a new alarm to use it and publish to the same SNS topic.

I've added a custom lambda to forward messages from the SNS topic to a Slack channel so the whole team can get near-real-time (~1min) notifications on lambda errors.

While you do pay a small monthly fee for CloudWatch alarms if you go beyond the free tier, it's a drop in the bucket compared with the bigger monitoring solutions. See pricing here.

And to see this code sample and others, head over here to Produce8’s public CDK samples repo.

In the spirit of openness and transparency, and in line with our values as a company, our team at Produce8 is dedicated to publishing and sharing articles like this on our internal development practices. 

Lambda Alarms in a Serverless Architecture

Never miss an update from us. Join our community of business leaders and professionals navigating work and life in the digital-first era.

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Register for the our next webinar 'From Guesswork to Clarity: Delivering vCIO Reports Powered by Real Data'

Time blocking is a time management method that involves dividing your day into blocks of time, with each block dedicated to accomplishing a specific task or group of tasks. This technique helps in organizing your day more efficiently, ensuring that you allocate time to important activities without the day slipping away into less productive tasks.

Effective time blocking will manifest as a well-structured timeline, fewer distractions from low-priority apps, and a higher focus score, demonstrating better productivity and focused work. These KPIs are crucial for assessing the effectiveness of your time management approach.

Time Blocking Challenge Outcome 

Want to have better workdays? We can help!

Time Blocking Challenge

Want to have better workdays? We can help! 

Great Workdays Kickoff for Organizations

Monotasking, also known as single-tasking, is the practice of focusing all your attention and effort on one task at a time, rather than trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously. This approach stands in contrast to multitasking, where individuals attempt to manage several tasks at once, often leading to decreased productivity and increased chances of errors. Monotasking is about deepening focus, enhancing the quality of work, and improving mental engagement with the task at hand.

You should observe longer durations in productive apps, fewer interruptions from non-essential apps in your timeline, and an enhanced focus score, reflecting improved monotasking efficiency.

Monotasking Challenge Outcome

Monotasking Challenge

The "Eat the Frog" technique is a time management strategy that encourages tackling the most challenging or crucial task of your day first thing in the morning. The concept is derived from a quote often attributed to Mark Twain, suggesting that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that's probably the worst thing that's going to happen to you all day.

Successfully adopting the Eat the Frog habit will be evident through early and focused engagement in productive apps, reflected in your heatmap, timeline, and top apps report within Produce8.

Eat the Frog Challenge Outcome 

Eat the Frog Challenge

Monk Mode is a productivity approach where you deeply focus on your work by minimizing distractions, akin to the focused and minimalistic lifestyle of a monk. This mode involves dedicating extended periods to work intensely on a single task or project, often in isolation, to maximize productivity and quality of output.

With successful Monk Mode application, anticipate extended periods of focused app usage, minimal distractions from irrelevant apps, and better digital intensity and focus scores, all signaling increased productivity.


Monk Mode Challenge Outcome

Monk Mode Challenge

MSPs give your clients more.  Want to instantly show your clients how many unused software licenses they can recoup?  Join the webinar.

MSPs - Show Your Clients How Many Unused Software Licenses They Can Recoup

MSPs - Your Clients Have a Meeting Problem - Now You Have the Fix.

Episode 4: Is a 4-Day Work Week for MSPs a Fever Dream?  The Future of MSP Work is a monthly thought-leadership series discussing strategies for growth and what's coming next in the Managed Services industry. This month we are talking with Joe O'Connor, CEO and Co-founder of Work Time Reduction, a consulting and research organization that specializes in reduced-hour, outcomes-focused work models. We will be discussing the possible fever-dream of a 4-day work-week for MSPs and touching on:  How would a 4-day-work-week even work for MSPs?  Are your clients adopting it?  What would need to happen to enable it?

The Future of MSP Work: Is a 4-Day Work Week for MSPs a Fever Dream?

Introducing Essential Insights: Unlocking the Power of Digital Work Analytics (for MSPs & their Clients)

Why Produce8 for MSPs?

Find out more about Essential Insights reporting

Produce8 Launches Essential Insights: Revolutionizing Digital Work Analytics for Businesses and MSPs

Engage Your Entire Business in Productivity Initiatives 

Types of Meetings Affecting Focus Time

Are you ready to supercharge your productivity and unlock your full potential?

It doesn’t have to be all synchronous or all asynchronous. Find the balance for your team. Measure what is or isn’t working.

It’s also worth repeating that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can blend asynchronous work with synchronous work.

Engineering & Dev

Produce8 Launches Essential Insights, a Breakthrough Digital Work Analytics Reporting Tool for Businesses and MSPs

Why We’re Making Our Dev Docs Public

Lambda Alarms in a Serverless Architecture

Never miss an update from us. Join our community of business leaders and professionals navigating work and life in the digital-first era.

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