Understandably so! There is a relationship that I find difficult to explain here. For a managed service provider, we were there mainly for the operating system

Understandably so! There is a relationship that I find difficult to explain here. For a managed service provider, we were there mainly for the operating system. If told about particular services, those too. To tend to that, we had to maintain more access than what common convention today tells us should be comfortable. It's really sold as "an extension (or replacement) for your IT department" We would do everything we could to avoid going even remotely near the data, but it does depend on a bit of 'trust us' There were varying degrees to it, too. Some customers would get notified if we even pulled their IP addresses, others only if we logged in, some if we escalated privileges at all. Like the peer comment from TheHappyOddish mentions, sending a wall message to folks logged in was a sort of common courtesy; chances are we're both in here for the same reason.