LogicMonitor Reviews

We use it for monitoring our customer networks, for monitoring network devices, and we also use it for monitoring our hosted environment.

We're a managed service provider. We have LogicMonitor deployed so that we not only have our devices input into the system, but we also manage a lot of resources for our clients in it. We have it set up so that they can only see their items in there, through a lot of access control. We have a local presence with the collectors, the polling stations, while the data resides in the cloud. Once we pull the data, it then shifts all the data up to the cloud for long-term storage. LogicMonitor is all SaaS-based, other than the local collectors.

Before LogicMonitor, we were using another tool, and deployment of that tool took a lot of time, effort, and energy from our team, and it was very customized. While the end-product could have been great, because everything is so customizable, the problem was that we couldn't get up and running very quickly. With LogicMonitor, we didn't lose any of that customized look and feel, but we were able to get up and running so much faster. We went from onboarding even simple networks over the course of weeks to down to about a week.

We're able to monitor most of the things that our customers worry or care about. That's mostly because of the flexibility of LogicMonitor. The beautiful part about this is that if something is not currently in the system at the moment, the support from LogicMonitor has meant that it gets ramped up pretty quickly.

For customers who have multiple monitoring platforms, it's definitely very easy to simplify and get to a situation where there is one place for monitoring everything. That's definitely been helpful for them.

LogicMonitor's collectors, along with its templated integrations and dashboards, enable us to automate our onboarding process and roll it out to new customers. We've learned how to make it our own, based on what LogicMonitor provides us. We've been able to make ourselves more efficient, absolutely. The faster we can get online and onboard customers, the faster we can get to the point of turning their service on. That means that we can go from a non-paying customer who has agreed to work with us, to a paying customer who's now fully onboarded. We then have them working through the specifics of a managed services solution, outside of the monitoring tool, which is very important for us.

The breadth of things it's able to monitor, the simplicity of the deployment, and how quickly we can get it up and running are the biggest factors when it comes to helping us win new business. Functionally, there are no aspects of LogicMonitor that hinder that ability. It has definitely helped our margins, as an MSP, especially on the monitoring side, because we can get up and running so quickly. It's an absolute must for us to have the tool.

Seeing how easy it is to manage devices, how simple it is to add, remove, or modify a device, and the amount of data that's included out-of-the-box whenever you add a device, makes it far superior to any product. There are no add-ons needed. You license a resource or a device and you don't have to worry about adding a plugin to get all the additional metrics and the full depth of device data. This just happened last week on a customer demonstration call with a customer that has experience with SolarWinds. The customer saw how easy it was to get up and running on LogicMonitor and they were immediately sold and said, "Okay, give me a quote." That's a real scenario in which this product helped us. It's those aspects that not only help us gain new customers, but also to retain customers.

Overall, LogicMonitor saves us time. It's hard to quantify how much now, given that we've been using it for as long as we have.

When I consider LogicMonitor for future-proofing our business, with the ability to monitor customers' future IT environments, I'm pretty comfortable with it. That's because anything that we have come to them to request—whether it be a new feature, or having input into the UX and UI designs—they've been very open and very responsive to. Their support has been very accommodating. When it comes to looking at what could potentially be coming down the road, or to being future-proofed, I feel pretty good, given my experience with the types of special requests I've brought to them.

One of the most valuable features is the flexibility it gives for monitoring a particular device. There are a variety of ways we can get data into LogicMonitor.

In addition, it is an open platform that gives us the ability to add third-party application integrations, such as Slack or ServiceNow or Webex Teams.

There are also integrated features that allow for forecasting growth within the environment, not only for standard metrics like CPU and memory, but also for hard drive space utilization. Those are some pretty interesting and exciting features that are included in the platform.

On top of that, LogicMonitor has the ability to map out an environment at the network level.

It also enables us to drop a collector and automatically pick up everything in the target IT environment and map relationships. Obviously, you have to have the ability to reach the device. If there is anything stopping you via firewalls, then you can't get to it. But from a hypothetical standpoint, once a collector is in, we can capture everything very quickly based on an IP scheme. This has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that we can capture everything very rapidly. However, if there is a misconfiguration on the client's network, then there could be the possibility of grabbing devices that are not needed. So there is some TLC that needs to be done when handling these, but it is a very useful aspect of the tool when it comes to onboarding.

In terms of instant visibility into all of the technology we will monitor for customers, it depends on the customer. But anything the customer wants us to monitor is leveraged. Some customers will say they only want to monitor telephony, while some will only want to monitor their network. We get full visibility into whatever the customer wants us to monitor and we get it pretty rapidly. That is very important. Only having certain metrics that other platforms will give you out-of-the-box means you only get a small picture, a thumbnail picture. Whereas with LogicMonitor, you get the entire "eight by 10 picture", out-of-the-box. Rather than some availability metrics, you get everything. You get metrics on temperature, anything related to hardware failure, or up and down status. It's pretty important for being able to provide a valued service to the customer about the overall health and availability of their environment.

We use LogicMonitor's dashboards quite a bit. In fact, we have our own customized dashboards. We use pieces of the templated dashboards and they definitely help in guiding us to places where we can pull certain indicators of how our customer is doing. Overall, we almost always end up having to adjust the dashboards to fit our customer needs, but the templated dashboards are significantly helpful. They tell us the different methodologies that we can use. We then take them and tailor them for the specifics that we need.

It's super-easy to customize the templated dashboards. For example, we have a school district customer with a campus. The template dashboards give us templates for wireless and templates for general networking and a few other things. We pick and choose the different widgets that we want out of those dashboards and we put them on the single dashboard for that particular school. That provides them visibility into all the things that are critical to them without having to go through multiple dashboards. We get rid of the things that they don't care about, things that our next customer may care about. We try to come up with dashboards that are specific to our customers' wants and needs and to give them, as much as possible, a single place to look for something.

LogicMonitor also hits the vast majority of technologies and complex environments when it comes to coverage, including on-prem, hybrid, cloud, et cetera. It does a really good job at covering the most-used technologies.

The only functional area I can think of that has room for improvement would be the dashboards. They could use a refresh. It would be nice if there were more widgets and more types of widgets.

We've been using LogicMonitor for two and half years.

Up until two weeks ago, I would have said the stability of LogicMonitor is phenomenal. We had never had an issue. But two weeks ago, they had a bumpy week and a half.

Scalability is based on our customers. The process for scaling the product out, for handling the resources from the collector side, is very simple. The one thing we've had issues with is that, when it comes to certain widgets on the dashboards, there are limitations on how many instances can be displayed through a widget. That is something that has caused us to rethink the way that we do our dashboards. Not that that's a bad thing, because it allowed us to actually come up with building dashboards for the client, and that has worked out really nicely. But that is one area where the scalability of the product has been a headache.

Not counting our API accounts, we have around 50 people using LogicMonitor. A lot of them are our frontline staff who are using the system to monitor, alert, notify, and to assist customers with getting their environments back up and running. The other accounts are used by our clients to log in and see their dashboards and devices. There are also folks on the backend, like me, who manage the environment, add the devices, manipulate the devices, delete devices—housekeeping.

We use LogicMonitor quite extensively and we have plans to increase our usage. Any of our clients who were not using us for monitoring before, rather we were being used for other projects by them, are either onboarded now or they're coming on board. The percentage of our clients that we have within monitoring is growing day by day and week by week.

We leverage their tech support quite a bit. They have a chat and a phone feature. For the most part, we leverage their chat and we use them for a very wide variety of things. Overall, I've been very pleased with their level of support. They've done a really good job of turning things around and helping where we've needed the help.

We switched from our previous solution because deployment time was entirely too long and it was too complicated.

Once we were given our initial tutorial of the product, before we onboarded ourselves, it was very easy to do and we have found onboarding and implementation very pleasing. In terms of an MSP onboard, their documentation is some of the best documentation I've seen from a vendor. Based on their documentation, you can very easily onboard yourself. But we also had an executive-level onboarding demonstration.

Our original deployment had professional services involved and it took three or four weeks. But our customer deployments usually take a week. The biggest issue with our customer deployments is having the customer give us the right level of access. Slowdowns don't usually happen from the LogicMonitor side, they're usually from the customer side.

In our own company, we don't have a ton of devices to monitor, so it was really about making sure we got everything incorporated into the monitoring platform, including our cloud services.

In terms of maintenance, the collectors have software that needs to be maintained. The collector software is relatively easy to update. We can do it all from the portal itself. It handles the updates and restarting of the services, and it does so pretty quickly. Generally speaking, there is no downtime for the customer, whenever that happens. Outside of that, there are data sources and other source files that need to be updated on a monthly or  quarterly basis, according to how they're released. At times, those can cause some false positive alerts if they are not handled correctly on the import. In general, I'm the one who handles deployment and maintenance in our company.

We did it ourselves, but we had a few days of LogicMonitor's professional services to get the initial deployment going. Those services were more of a consulting function. Overall, we didn't need nearly as much help as some customers might.

LogicMonitor has given our customers visibility into issues they didn't even know existed. In some cases, when we do assessments, we will actually load a customer's devices into LogicMonitor. In many cases, it gives us visibility into things like misconfigured stack modules or broken stack modules. Stacks or switches won't be stacked correctly. They'll actually be just this side of failing, and nobody has noticed it. Sometimes there are environmental issues that the customer hasn't noticed, where a particular location gets hot every day around the same time. They don't notice it and eventually it's going to result in something failing.

New customer onboarding, for us, usually consists of two things. One is getting access so that we can get it deployed and get visibility into the customer environment. And the second part of it is access for our team. We don't want the LogicMonitor component to take a lot longer. And, in fact, we're able to get LogicMonitor up and running for our customers much quicker than they're able to give us accounts.

It also reduces mean time to repair. When we see an alert, more often than not it's intelligent enough to help us come up with some sort of a solution faster. We can see a service or a server or a switch go into a critical state. A lot of the time, without something like LogicMonitor, which has the full visibility into the device, you would have to log in to the device and do some troubleshooting to figure out what's going on. It could just be that the temperature of the chassis is elevated and it's causing the system to underperform. I can't tell you how much time it saves us on something like that, but scenarios like that are what we experience on a daily basis. It definitely cuts time off of our troubleshooting and response. It's everything from temperature alarms, to disk space, to bad memory modules, and bad hard drives. You name it, we see it. And instead of having to log in and troubleshoot for an hour or two hours, the data is right there in front of us already and we can automatically dispatch somebody to go repair the device.

We're currently paying $525 per month per device for monitoring, and a dollar per device for configuration management.

We've had customers who have reduced their costs by not having multiple platforms for monitoring. That said, especially with super-large environments, the cost model for LogicMonitor is the one area where we run into issues. It's the one area where it can hinder our ability to win new customers. But that's only in very specific cases of very large customers. We're usually competing with something like SolarWinds. SolarWinds is on-premises and the cost model is very different. Sometimes we have challenges with large environments competing against that kind of cost model, where we're paying per node. When there are 3,000 or 4,000 nodes, that cost model can get very expensive very quickly.

There are three different licenses that we can get. There is the monitoring license, there is a configuration-monitoring license, and there is a log license. We've generally gotten the configuration-monitoring version. We're trying to get to a scale where we can get those numbers down. What we'd love to see is the scale of cost per device going down. The numbers get skewed, even still. The cost for 2,000 or 3000 devices shouldn't be the same as the cost for 500 devices, and by a large margin.

The AIOps is the log portion of the solution. We would love to use it, but the way that they have it licensed, we haven't been able to. They want to license it for our entire portal and it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to us. For us, it's challenging the way they have it licensed right now. We're working toward it.

It does give us the ability to charge a premium price but it's a little tough to call something a premium product in the monitoring world—even though we may see it as a premium product—because our customers don't look at it that way. For them, it doesn't matter how great the monitoring tool is.

We looked at three or four others, but that was several years ago. We chose LogicMonitor because of the simplicity of deployment and the time to get up and running. It's simple, but it's still as complicated as it needs to be to do all of the things that we need it to do.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using LogicMonitor is that other products are inferior. Also, compared to what we knew with the legacy monitoring tools, LogicMonitor has done a great job. There are definitely better ways of doing things than the traditional monitoring tools did. If a new customer has SolarWinds or OpManager or some other on-premises tool, sometimes they're afraid of the cloud tools. What we'll say is that the amount of things that it can do far outpaces the legacy tools.

Think thoroughly about the structure you want to have in place. Don't just start implementing. Think thoroughly about how you want to be set up, how you want to manage the devices, how you want to manage the people, and how you want to manage the alerting. Plan, scale it out, and implement it properly so you don't have to go back in and do some cleanup work on the backend after the fact.

I would rate LogicMonitor a high nine out of 10.

Sparx Solutions is a managed service provider. We primarily use the LogicMonitor platform for monitoring, maintenance, and management of our managed services and customers' infrastructure. In terms of management, it is more around monitoring and alerting. That is essentially the core component that we use it for. However, there are other features integrated into the platform that we get value out of.

We have baked LogicMonitor into our core services, in terms of MSP and managed service offerings. We use this tool to fundamentally provide network monitoring services to our customers. It is definitely a great tool and something that we use daily.

We have multiple users using these solutions. They are technicians and engineers. Essentially, they use this platform for different purposes. So, a support resource will be able to use it to identify alarms and when there is a new ticket that needs to be created to remediate a problem. Engineers may use this platform to obtain valuable insight into the systems that they are working on, e.g., if they would like to understand whether a device has a really high CPU before they plan a change, etc. There are different use cases for using the platform. One of the main use cases is having users use the platform to provide support services.

We deploy probes, which are hosted by us. These connect back to the LogicMonitor platform in the cloud.

In terms of alerting, there is already a prebuilt alert threshold for a lot of the metrics. It is quite smart out-of-the-box. You may even identify issues which were not visible to you before by just introducing monitoring from the LogicMonitor platform. 

To a certain extent, there are mapping functionalities within the platform. A lot of these sorts of features, which are desired, come straight out-of-the-box. By being able to drop a Collector in the environment, you can quickly identify a lot of key information. Maybe some information, which you didn't previously have visibility to, becomes very visible. That sort of insight is very good information and allows us to be able to provide more value to our customers by having a better understanding out-of-the-box.

There are a multitude of features that we use. Obviously, with the core foundational features, which are monitoring, we use different sorts of data sources to monitor. For example, SNMP would be an example of syslog monitoring. Primarily, that is used for network devices in our use case. When we monitor network devices for our customers, it is all performed with the compute being within the LogicMonitor platform and architecture. The list goes on. 

There are a multitude of different vendors, products, and hardware that it can perform monitoring on. It is not limited to that either. There is actually a vast range of different services that can be monitored, e.g., cloud services and services that use APIs. It is quite customizable and flexible in terms of monitoring capabilities. In addition to what is out-of-the-box, there are also capabilities to configure custom monitoring which can use many different data sources. From that perspective, it is quite broad in its scope of monitoring. 

In terms of the services that we like to use, there is the built-in AIOps, which is quite a good service. It analyzes metrics of data over time and can identify anomalies based on AIs, sort of an intelligence in the back-end. This is a really good service. Some of the services can add on components to the platform, like cloud monitoring, so you can monitor your cloud environments, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

There are quite a vast amount of different features that you can use within the platform. Some of them are additional costs and some of them come out-of-the-box. Another example of something, which has recently been included in the core component, would be a service called LM Config. Essentially, this service allows us to collect network devices, run configuration files, and take backups of our customers' infrastructure centrally from one system. Rather than needing individual systems at every customer site, because this is a cloud delivered sort of architecture, we can take backups of our customers' infrastructure through the platform, which is a really great convenience and sort of efficient way of doing so. This is actually an automated process, so you can schedule it to occur as frequently as you would like.

LogicMonitor enables us to modernize legacy tooling and consolidate monitoring tools in our customers' stacks. It has a nice user interface. It is very straightforward in terms of usability and utility. 

A single pane of glass is always preferred over distributed monitoring or other management platforms. In the past, you would need to have multiple different technologies performing different functions. For example, backups would usually be under another tool. Therefore, LogicMonitor was a great tool for us when we found that it had integrated backups using LM Config. That has reduced the time of being able to provide value to a customer. Being a single pane of glass, a lot of your metrics and alerts can all be grabbed from the tool. For a managed service provider, like us, it creates a lot more efficiencies within our operations. Our users only need to learn one tool, as opposed to learning multiple tools.

We believe that the dashboards are one of the most powerful functionalities within the LogicMonitor platform, as they are quite close to real-time, dynamic, and update quite frequently. Also, they give you a glimpse into the environment without having to run reports, etc. So, the dashboards are definitely a very powerful way of obtaining information and insights from any environment quickly. There are obviously environments where custom dashboards are required. However, a lot of time, the default dashboards provide enough information to get you going and give you that visibility instantly. Monitoring is overtime, but the earlier that you onboard and get the monitoring going, the faster the dashboard starts to populate with data. In that instance, you will be able to see data as it happens through the network or systems that you are monitoring.

Its templated dashboards are quite comprehensive out-of-the-box. For a lot of users out there, the out-of-the-box dashboards and monitoring will suffice. They are definitely comprehensive. Obviously, every environment is different, so you will need to tweak it where suitable. Overall, it's a pretty straightforward onboarding process. Assuming that you have all the right information required, if you want to monitor certain systems, then you may need passwords and configuration setup. Assuming that all these things are complete, then the onboarding process is pretty straightforward and streamlined.

One of LogicMonitor's benefits and strongest elements is that it is very extensible. It allows you to configure a lot of customizations, which are sometimes limited in other platforms. However, we found in our experience with LogicMonitor that it is quite extensible. The functionality is quite comprehensive in terms of customization. You can get very detailed into what you would like to monitor, whether it is using an out-of-the-box data source or a custom data source. You can then create custom dashboard elements so you can exhibit that data in a dashboard.

There have been some new features that have been released recently in the last few months, one of them being LM Logs. This feature uses syslog and SNMP to correlate data. So, if there is an alarm that is identified on a device, the LM Logs component will actually correlate the received log messages from the device and give the resource, or whoever is trying to remediate, insight. Instead of having to log into the device and check the logs manually, the LM Logs feature provides all that within the platform. This definitely decreases the amount of time it takes to resolve, as some of the steps that you would normally do are actually provided within the platform. So, we would definitely like to explore more of the product's feature sets.

We use the solution's AIOps functionality. We have made quite good use of it. It is something that we use daily. In terms of being able to predict anomalies or alert on anomalies within the environment, those prompt us to perform additional investigation. I would assess AIOps as being highly-effective for helping to detect warning signs that precede issues. Some of the monitoring that is provided out-of-the-box provides visibility, even in terms of metrics that you would not normally monitor or may not even know that could be monitored. From that perspective, having a broader scope of monitoring out-of-the-box gives you insight. In terms of AIOps, if we receive alarms where there have been multiple anomalies occurring within a certain time period, then that would prompt us to proactively investigate an issue prior to it actually occurring. From the visibility perspective of having monitoring out-of-the-box, it has been highly-effective and quite insightful.

We would like to see more functionality around mapping of topologies, in terms of networks. An improvement that we would like to see is added functionality to get more detail out of mapping. For example, if the LogicMonitor Collector identifies a connection between two network endpoints, it would be great to actually see which ports are connecting the two endpoints together. That functionality is something we greatly desire. It would actually make our documentation more dynamic in the sense that we wouldn't need to manually document. If this is something that the platform could provide, then this would be a great asset.

We started using LogicMonitor between the end of 2019 to early 2020. It has been almost two years, I would say.

In the time that we have been using it, we have never had a major outage that has affected our ability to alarm or report. From that perspective, it is quite good in terms of stability. There are a lot of new features being released, and we have never had an experience where a major outage was caused by the introduction of a new feature. We are quite happy with its stability.

It is all sort of invisible to us as updates roll in. I think the most recent one coming out is version 155, which is about to be released tonight. At the moment, I would imagine we are using 154.

LogicMonitor is making many updates quite frequently and their monitoring capabilities are growing very rapidly. With every update, I see that gets released, there are new integrations to different systems as well as new monitoring configured. Being a cloud delivered platform, all the updates are performed by LogicMonitor. So, using the system, this is quite invisible to us. 

New updates roll out quite frequently. I believe that it is quite comprehensive in terms of its scope and capability to monitor many platforms, including on-prem platforms/devices, cloud infrastructure, etc. So, I think that it is quite good in its update releases. I'm quite happy with the amount of updates that are occurring. I keep up-to-date with all the different monitoring requirements.

I definitely think that having ongoing maintenance is required. That is not specific to LogicMonitor, but for any IT monitoring platform. I think it is always recommended to have ongoing maintenance performed. In terms of patches, everything is all delivered via SaaS. So, a lot of the patches and new features are actually done by the LogicMonitor team. 

It is scalable out-of-the-box, which is good. The way that it is configured, out-of-the-box, you get a lot of good feature sets. There is minimal configuration required to get up and running. Obviously, the larger the environment, the more effort that is required. In terms of out-of-the-box feature sets, it is pretty comprehensive. You can essentially turn it on, tweak a few metrics, and be on your way. So, there is obviously some work to do. With this particular platform, it has been the most efficient that we have used at this stage. 

The scalability element of LogicMonitor is sort of built into the platform. From the very beginning, the platform is designed to be scalable, in terms of its automatic identification of different vendors. Once it identifies the vendor or system that it is trying to monitor, it knows which data sources to apply to that device. This is all an automatic process. If you have the right information configured on the device, then it will automatically identify what type of device it is and the metrics are for monitoring. Also, it has its own alerting preconfigured. For some of the metrics that are common across multiple vendors or systems, it actually knows by default what the expected result of the monitoring is. This obviously differs between different devices. However, for common elements that are considered successful or failures in terms of monitoring, these are pre-built into the system. 

Additionally, there are predefined remediation steps in some of the data sources. Not only does it alert you on the failure of some monitoring elements, but in some cases, it also provides you with some recommended remediation steps to follow to resolve the problem. That goes outside of the monitoring. From that perspective, it is quite insightful, especially to a resource who is using the tool. They may be able to obtain some insight from the platform, which may assist in resolving the issue.

Once the solution is structured in a way that your requirements desire it to be, then the onboarding process is quite straightforward. It works on a very scalable inheritance model. So, you can have a top level configuration that pushes down all the way to the bottom, and you can override values at the bottom level. In terms of scalability, and onboarding specifically, if your rules are already configured in such a way that it allows you to just onboard, then no additional work is required, other than creating the customer, branch, or whatever you are monitoring in terms of a container and just adding devices. Once the device is added to the system, the inheritance model will actually push down different metrics and alerts based on automatic identification of vendor, equipment, and systems. So, everything is very automated. That is one of the key strengths of the platform: It is very dynamic and scalable out-of-the-box.

It reduces the time for onboarding customers. We have experienced that firsthand. It actually creates efficiencies when onboarding. The way it does that is by using automation, a sort of inheritance, and a sort of scalable architecture out-of-the-box.

The tech support has been great. For any query that I have, I have been able to talk to a resource quite quickly. In terms of their turnaround time, they are always available during the times that we have needed them. They have shown that they can go above and beyond in terms of their supportability with the platform. I am definitely very happy with the level of support being provided.

There is a lot of information in terms of the learning platforms that LogicMonitor provides. They give you sufficient information to build dashboards and other customizations within the platform. So, the information is readily available, if anyone wishes to pursue that.

We have discussions with the vendor quite frequently every couple of weeks. So, we are always in touch.

In the past, we needed to spend a lot of time and effort tweaking and adjusting metrics per customer, though not with LogicMonitor, which is not efficient. With LogicMonitor, we found that the overall time to onboard a customer into monitoring, providing useful and valuable input to the customer based on their environment, is quite quick. So, the time to onboard and provide insight is quite quick. This is a good example of a way that we found the solution to be quite efficient.

We did previously use another solution. The reason why we switched is LogicMonitor has more advanced extensibility in terms of custom configuration. That was one of the drivers. Another driver why we switched was our user experience with the account teams. We found that with LogicMonitor, from the moment that we sort of met over the phone or virtually, we always had a good experience and felt that we were being looked after. That definitely increased our drive to sort of move away from our previous solution. Additionally, there were integrated functionalities, like LM Config, that take configuration backups from network devices and systems. LM Config was a feature that we wanted to consolidate into one platform.

There was planning that was required before the rollout of this product. That planning is to ensure that the product aligns with our monitoring requirements. In terms of planning, there will always be planning before you introduce any sort of tool like this, i.e., an IT monitoring tool, in terms of how you would like to structure the platform. This foundational planning is ultimately what affects your capability to create efficiencies in alerting and problem identification. 

There is obviously consideration around your alerting. I think alerting is probably one of the key features that any digital IT provider would use, whether it is an MSP or if you are monitoring your own infrastructure. One of the key things that you want out of a platform like this is its ability to promptly alert when there is an issue in your environment, then ultimately triggering a chain of events that would occur after that. So, in terms of planning, you will need to sort of assess your current monitoring and see how you would structure the architecture of the alerting. A lot of it comes down to that. 

It is quite flexible in that sense that no matter what sort of company you are, whether you are an MSP or internal IT looking to deploy a new product in your environment, it comes down to what your requirements are. So, there is not a set timeframe because there are a lot of factors involved, like understanding what your alert rules look like and the classification of the infrastructure. You might have some critical infrastructure, and you will need to consider that and put it in its own group. There are many different methods of doing this, but it all comes down to the requirements.

In terms of configuring and rolling out the platform, once the planning component of it was complete, the actual rollout was quite straightforward as it aligns to the structure that we defined prior.

We deployed LogicMonitor in-house.

There are a lot of different components involved in rolling it out. We would have to configure the platform first with all the planning prerequisites. Once that was all done, then we would have to go and install the Collector applications on our probes and essentially onboard each device individually. 

There is an automatic sort of device for onboarding that you can frequently run to identify any new infrastructure in the environment and flag it. Once this is in, the ability to identify new infrastructure is very straightforward and quick. In terms of how long it takes to actually roll it out to our entire customer base, it takes about a month's time. This includes planning, communications, and multiple other factors as well. 

The quicker that we can onboard, the quicker that we are able to collect metrics to give us insight. Then, we are able to provide value to the customer and insights on their environment more quickly.

The return on investment is having the capability to offer more advanced features as part of our service offering. By having that capability, we have an advantage because we can offer different capabilities and functionalities within a single platform.

It has quite an advanced feature set, especially with its functionality like AIOps. It definitely gives us an edge and advantage to be able to provide these services to our customers and allow our customers to utilize our infrastructure for their own monitoring or reporting purposes. I definitely think that the functionalities are quite good and advanced. It definitely gives us that edge. From the perspective of the services that we can provide, we are able to offer more services to our customers by utilizing the features of the LogicMonitor platform.

From the feedback that we have received from our customers, they are quite happy with the tools that we have been able to offer, things like dashboards and centralized backups. From that perspective, I think that our customers are happy, having provided their feedback on LogicMonitor.

In certain circumstances, the AIOps functionality helps prevent outages. It really comes down to the circumstance. There are multiple factors involved. Being able to promptly receive information that could be anomalous, from the AIOps feature, allows us to proactively investigate alarms prior to any outages occurring, and this is sort of down to circumstance. From this perspective, time is being saved in respect to resolving an issue.

LogicMonitor has given us visibility into issues we didn’t even know existed. It comes down to the consolidation of data and being able to have dynamic dashboards and effective alert rules. It can provide information where something unrelated to the device may cause an alarm to be produced. It might not be directly related to the device that you are concerned with. However, it could prompt an investigation outside the scope of that device which may help us identify an issue downstream or upstream.

An example where LogicMonitor has provided visibility into an issue is it could highlight if there is a configuration issue. We predominantly monitor networks with this platform. Any example of networks using LogicMonitor's mapping feature can give us visibility into what physical links are connected between devices. When there is an alarm in the window where you look at the mappings, it actually identifies the alarm on the device. So, you may be able to identify misconfigurations. 

Another example is using the LM Config feature. If there has been a change to a running configuration file, it actually flags this change. So, if you have a change management policy that needs to be adhered to, and somebody has made a change without authorization, you can actually flag this information. Even though it may not cause an immediate outage or issue to be triggered, being able to have the visibility that somebody has made a change can prompt an investigation that could prevent an issue which may occur later.

LogicMonitor saves time in terms of its ability to proxy a connection through a device. For example, if you are troubleshooting a device, which you may want to connect to, you can proxy this connection through the platform. As a support resource, I don't need to use multiple platforms to connect to a device to further investigate the issue. It is all consolidated. From that perspective, it saves time because a resource now only needs to use one platform.

It saves time because the resource does not need to leave the platform. Depending on how many activities or issues that you are working on, that time could vary. From a consolidation perspective, everything is accessible within the platform. I definitely see the value in a resource not having to actually leave the platform to remediate an issue that is present.

The solution reduces mean time to repair. An example of this is when the resource no longer needs to look at logs manually on a device. It could actually be integrated into the platform. By having those logs right in front of you, it is very quick to make assumptions or conclusions about issues. Whereas, in the past, you might have needed to log into the device independently and do your own review. 

Another example of reducing mean time to repair is the ability to connect to the device directly from the platform. Being a cloud platform, you can perform this connection wherever you are. So, if you are working from home, you don't need to VPN into an office, then connect to some on-premises equipment. Being cloud delivered, you can configure SSO for authentication to authorize against your domain. This makes the authentication and login processes quite easy, especially now during this time of COVID as a lot of people are working from home. It has the flexibility to connect wherever you are as well as the ability to connect to a device within the platform.

LogicMonitor is a premium solution and offers a premium feature set. In terms of what it offers, it is more about value. 

The features were very valuable to us because we could consolidate them into one platform and have a good user experience with the platform, our accounts, and the support team. That was the key driver for us. That was what we were looking for. We looked for a comprehensive solution that could provide advanced features all in one platform, and LogicMonitor was the solution that we chose. It definitely has a premium price. However, you are getting what you pay for in a very effective way. That was important in our decision-making.

There are add-ons. One of the add-ons, LM Config, has now been integrated as part of the standard fee. Also, there are different tiers which offer different feature sets.

I evaluated multiple different solutions. Some of the solutions that we looked at were NinjaRMM, Auvik monitoring, and Kaseya. There were multiple different platforms that I personally trialed. Not that they didn't have good offerings, it is just that the LogicMonitor platform was comprehensive in its feature set. We found, with LogicMonitor, that most of the features we desired were actually consolidated into a single platform. This made it really easy to onboard and offboard as well as apply new features or monitoring to our userbase.

We are very selective about the vendors that we use, in terms of our products that we provide.

So far, the introduction of cloud monitoring with LogicMonitor is testament to their ability to stay up-to-date with different sorts of monitoring and future IT requirements. I have seen progress on this front from LogicMonitor. Ever since we started using the LogicMonitor platform, there have been many updates that have introduced new functionality that seemed to be catered for the future of IT.

There are still some features that we haven't fully integrated that we would like to do. At the moment, we are currently reviewing what the value of these tools will bring to our customers.

We don't use Dynamic Thresholds at this stage. Dynamic Thresholds are something that we would like to review as we proceed with the product. It comes down to use cases. Depending on what you are monitoring, it may make sense. However, in some cases, it doesn't make sense, which is a factor to consider.

In terms of visibility, LogicMonitor provides a wide variety of information. The more devices that you are monitoring, the more information that you can cross correlate. Especially using other features, LM Logs is definitely something I can see value in. From a support perspective, it decreases the amount of time it takes to identify or resolve a problem. So, you receive an alarm, then when the resource looks into the alarm, the LM Logs capability actually allows you to see the log messages at the time of the alarm. Instead of the resource having to manually connect to the device and check the log file, this information is correlated for you within the platform. So, this is not a feature that we use today. I have seen a demo and can definitely say that there is a lot of value from this particular feature. I believe that a lot of providers would see the value in it.

At this stage, we are quite happy with the level of functionality that we have with this tool.

I would definitely recommend trying LogicMonitor for yourself. I believe you will quickly see the value in the different feature sets that are provided and its simplicity, in terms of the user interface. If you have used another platform for IT monitoring before, this is very good in terms of the user interface. It definitely has a great user experience when you are using the platform. It is very customizable in terms of the color schemes that you can use. Definitely give it a go and you will see the value, just as I have.

If you feel like you can't find the tool that meets your requirements, it is definitely out there. Personally, we were looking for a new tool for quite a significant amount of time. We looked at many tools. Coincidentally, towards the end of that sort of campaign of trying to find a new solution, I actually received a call from a LogicMonitor resource. It was quite coincidental. It's actually funny how it happened. So, one of the lessons I learned is there are many platforms out there and you just have to keep looking. Eventually, you will come across something like we did, like LogicMonitor, that will meet your requirements. 

We have had a fantastic experience so far. It is a fantastic product. It is definitely worth looking at. It has definitely delivered on our requirements. I will rate it as a solid nine out of 10.

If I summarize LogicMonitor, it is a single windowpane. You don't have to run four hardware stats and software stats on multiple screens during the monitoring of services. It gives you flexibility. It has the capability to pull up your data sources as well. So, it is like a single window, where you can see all your resources recorded, e.g., what value are you deriving out of your software?

We have our own product that we are specialized in. We needed something to help us with the setting up of the monitoring part.

Our customers are very happy. They are running Dell EMC hardware, so they don't need a Dell EMC monitoring window and our software windows. With LogicMonitor, they can see what is happening inside Dell EMC in a single, unified view that completely monitors their alerts.

We have some customers who are running a mix of Dell EMC, HPE, and Cisco hardware. We have our own software, as a service organization. We don't sell hardware. Whenever we reach out to our customers, we give LogicMonitor as a dashboard to them so they don't need to monitor the hardware side separately. For example, if my service is running on their hardware X, that means they don't need to monitor hardware X and our services too. LogicMonitor has the capability of monitoring their hardware as well as our services. This is how LogicMonitor helps us.

LogicMonitor has the ability to alert us if the cloud loses contact with on-prem collectors. We have more than 50 on-prem collectors, and there is the flexibility of putting an escalation chain to every collector. So, if a collector goes down, then whatever escalation mechanism is bound to that particular collector can fire. For example:

• If an email has been attached to that collector, that email will come. 
• If a call is attached, that call comes via mobile. 
• If an SMS is there, then that SMS comes via mobile. 
• Third-party external integrations over PagerDuty or any HTTP delivery also happen because they have the ability to send alerts through Slack as well.

We use the LogicMonitor dashboards with a couple of widgets. We have some custom dashboards as well. The CPU and memory usage dashboards are very cool to run, because if the hardware is intact, then your hardware services are working fine. 

We have around six to seven customers working with customer data sources. It helps us give more reports to our customers. For example, the CPU and memory usage are standard dashboards which count how much memory and CPUs are working. However, there are certain things that our customers want from the application side, like how many signups you're doing. We created those data sources on LogicMonitor and helped our customers see the same dashboard on the same screen. This has helped us a lot.

The solution provides us with granular alert-tuning for devices. They have three thresholds out there: warning at 70, error at 80, and critical at 90. You can segregate whether you want to call it a warning, error, or critical. There is flexibility, and we are happy with that.

Go-to-market is very easy with LogicMonitor. Today, if my customer needs five dashboards of software and 10 dashboards of hardware, then I am capable of delivering that with LogicMonitor.

I would give reporting an eight out of 10. LogicMonitor takes the data from us and does an average on the graphs. So, it doesn't show the absolute case. This is one thing that is a pain and flaw with LogicMonitor. For whatever data that gets collected from the hardware, it shows the average of one minute. This is basically a pain because we don't know what is happening in those couple of seconds, because what you see is the last minute's average. For example, if there is a surge of over 100, we will not be able to see the 100. It will turn down to the average of 50 or 80. Then, it becomes a tug of war with customers, where we will say that it was because of a surge it closed at 120. They reply, "No, in the graph, it is showing 50. How can you say 120?" Then, we tell them, "No, LogicMonitor pushes the average out every minute." We keep some of our services at a threshold of about 100. Whenever the threshold crosses 100, then the service will fail. However, the graph never shows 100. The graph will show 50 or 80, because it is an average per minute.

We are working with LogicMonitor to get flexibility to see the absolute running numbers, rather than doing an average. They can keep the average for customers who want it, but there should be a way to at least show the real numbers, which are coming every second on the screen. This is not something new that we are asking for. There are a couple of freeware available in the market, Munin or WhatsUp Gold, which have these capabilities to show real, absolute numbers as well as the average, min, and max. What we get from LogicMonitor is only the average, min, and max. The absolute is not there.

We are not asking anything new or out-of-the-box from LogicMonitor. Our customers realize that these things are available in freeware versions in the market. Also, whatever is added as free should be a part of their paid subscription.

Everybody is moving onto their mobiles. In the last five years, the development of their mobile application has been very slow or non-existent. Whatever the improvements have been made, they were made on the desktop view. However, on the mobile side of it, it only has the monitoring. As an administrator, if I need to create a user, then I need to open a laptop or go to a desktop to create a user. I can't create a user from the mobile application.

I just started using LogicMonitor.

The stability is fine.

I don't see any challenges with scalability. Whatever my product is capable of delivering, LogicMonitor is delivering that too.

The users of this solution include my team members. They use the LogicMonitor Portal for customer account creation and credentials, such as changing a password or creating dashboards. Also, all our customers have read-only access for their dashboards.

We monitor close to 100 devices. We have plans to increase that usage in the future.

The support is very good. We are happy with the kind of attention that we get from our customer service manager (CSM). 

In 2016, we started off our organization. The same thing happened with LogicMonitor. The timing was that we were both startups at the same point in time, so we grew at the same pace. We never checked another competitor of LogicMonitor, and LogicMonitor was our first buy of its kind. We have been with LogicMonitor since day one.

The initial setup was very easy because they have product manuals and provide guidance. What they have maintained on their website is very concise and their team is very eager to help as well.

If I go through their manuals and website, they cover a lot of devices out-of-the-box, including Cisco and even customized development.

LogicMonitor has a long list of OEMs that they can monitor and service, like Barracuda, Fortinet, FortiGate, and Cisco.

There is no ROI. We are mitigating outages for our customers, but not really saving time.

LogicMonitor is competitively priced at the same level as other vendors, like Datadog.

We have not tried another operator, like Datadog, or other solutions out there. We were early adopters with LogicMonitor, and we have stuck with it until this day.

It takes a lot of time to develop a data source to put on the LogicMonitor platform. It's not easy for us to plug out of LogicMonitor and plug into Datadog. Plugging out and plugging in will work only in cases where we are monitoring basic things like CPU memory, which comes with the default package. When it comes to custom data sources, LogicMonitor has given us the option to write a script that they can make visible in their dashboards. 

When I talk to competitors, like Datadog, they have their own ways of handling data. To consider switching, we would need to invest our time in understanding which formats work with their product and how that will impact our customers and their timelines.

LogicMonitor has evolved drastically in the last couple of years. They have made a lot of changes and are moving very fast. They are getting accustomed to machine learning, AI, DevOps, etc.

Don't reinvent the wheel. Just concentrate on your business and put your monitoring on LogicMonitor.

The solution has helped consolidate the monitoring tools that we need to an extent. For example, if our customer is running an HPE machine and doesn't have a license for HPE monitoring, they can at least see the basic hygiene level of hardware through LogicMonitor.

In the last month, we deployed the agentless collectors. We are still in the phase of commissioning those devices, so I don't personally have any experience on this.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10). 

We primarily use the solution for managed services, Azure/AWS, Kubernetes, and website monitoring.

We look after all sorts of devices and being able to have monitoring coverage of 90% of things we need is great and saves us time. If we need to make some specific change we can and it's relatively easy to do.

Having a suite of modules that do all the work for you rather than having to set up loads of things yourself and it be there straight away ready to go is mind-blowing.

Being able to use this tool with relative ease makes it a worthy monitoring solution.

LogicMonitor allows streamlined use and offers ease of use with an all-in-one monitoring solution that is SaaS-based. Having this solution SaaS-based means we don't have to handle the platform updates.

Having a full team at LogicMonitor for support is super helpful as they are available all the time to answer any questions you may have.

Having a super easy tool to work with allowed our support staff to get up to speed quickly and has made dealing with alerts and incidents a breeze.

LogicModules are great. Creating these is super easy and fun. Allowing users to make their own modules allows monitoring to be covered from all angles. We can make a script, for example, and go get metrics that may not be there out of the box.

The dashboard is helpful for showing off all that data you collect and impressing customers. Dashboards are a real good selling point as showcasing the data you collect all in one place makes troubleshooting and keeping an eye on things way easier that a giant alert list. Having them on a slideshow is super neat too.

Role-based permissions could be better and updating modules could be smoother. They are my biggest complaints as they are lacking in comparison to other tools I have experienced. That said, all the feedback we can give to help improve the product as it matures will help the LogicMonitor team build an amazing solution in years to come.

Roles just miss some extra permissions such as allowing people to see certain instances yet not the full device. We'd like to allow for dynamic groups to be made without the need for root permissions. 

Module updates are important and you have got to stay on top of them. However, this needs work to make it easier as the loss of data can occur if you are too out of date.

We've used the solution for over five years now.

I have never had an issue where the stability of the portal was affected.

The solution offers very good performance and can scale easily and flexibly. 

I'd advise new users to set it up the way they want and make sure they update/import everything they can.

We are a managed service provider and deploy LogicMonitor to support our customer base and monitor assets in the network.

We use it for monitoring our customers and alerting them when something happens. We also use it for dashboard reporting, both performance reporting and end-of-month reporting. We are now moving to use the platform with API connectivity to our new billing solution, to enable both-way billing updates. What that means for us is the ability to create an order, have the monitored endpoint in LogicMonitor created, and also feed back into the billing system so that we can invoice our customers correctly.

LogicMonitor is a cloud-based application and there is a small appliance installed on-premises to act as a collector. It's the device that talks to the cloud and is the intermediary talking to all the devices inside the network.

The benefit for us of LogicMonitor is the scalability of the solution to support many customers with a large number of devices. As our business scales, we are not having to go back and strap on more infrastructure or re-patch this or do that. It's a cloud-based platform that gives us all the benefits that come with consuming SaaS-based offerings.

Our customers are not necessarily aware that we use LogicMonitor in the background. They're buying a managed service from us and we choose to use LogicMonitor to deliver our services. But what they like about it is the ability to see information in real-time. Information that is presented in a way that they can gain value from it.

The solution enables us to pretty much drop a collector and automatically pick up everything in the target IT environment and map relationships. There is still tweaking that needs to happen after that. There can be devices that aren't configured correctly, and therefore you've got to go and do them, but it will at least tell you that some attention is needed. In some instances, there will be devices that it won't find because they're not running any of the necessary protocols to be found. But in our case, we're a little bit different because we know specifically the devices that we want to monitor. Generally we limit what to look for because we know exactly what we're expecting to find. But from a deployment point of view, the ability to drop a collector certainly saves a lot of time and effort, and the tools that are available make it quite easy to deploy and set up a customer quickly.

The collectors, along with templated integrations and dashboards, enable us to automate our onboarding process and rollout for new customers. When we onboard a new customer, we obviously want to be able to do it as quickly as possible. Building up everything based on templates allows us to save on effort and cost. We have invested a fair bit of effort into developing our own templates based on those included in the system. They allow us to deploy our look and feel in the solution we provide to our customers. That's a particularly important part of it because we really could not afford to be doing a custom deployment for every single customer type.

And when it comes to future-proofing our business to support our customers, we're quite comfortable with what the product offers today, and what Logic Monitor has been rolling into it for the last eight to 12 months. It is in line with what we would be expecting to offer our customer base. We want to see continued investment by LogicMonitor in AIOps, application performance management, logging, and enhanced dashboards. Their continuous product development is vital because we can't offer what we provide today in two years. We must evolve what we offer our customers, and that means we need our vendors to do the same thing: better capabilities, more capabilities, things that we couldn't offer before.

In terms of the functionality and capabilities of LogicMonitor, while it is only a small part of what we do through our managed service offering, it's a strong enabling tool to make that part happen. We'd like to think that it gives us "customer stickiness". In the end, it's part of an overall offering, albeit a very integral part of it. Could we do it without LogicMonitor? Maybe, but it would be a lot harder, and we would need another tool that does it as comprehensively as LogicMonitor does today.

In addition, LogicMonitor gives us visibility into issues that we didn't even know existed. That is the key aspect of the solution. It uncovers underlying issues before they require a full, reactive response. That's the value of this style of solution: understanding predictive behavior that might be symptomatic of something more serious occurring or failing.

I can imagine that if we didn't have the tools from LogicMonitor, it would take a much longer time to sort out some of the issues we see. The tools simply throw up an alert and we can go straight in and start resolving.

One of the features I consider most valuable is the flexibility it gives us to configure the solution to do what we need to do and what our customers are asking us for.

We use the solution’s templated integrations to get instant visibility into all the technology we monitor. That's an integral part of the solution, in that we don't want to be writing code and having to develop new connectors to talk to new appliances. There's a strong community, along with information provided by LogicMonitor, to keep the tools up to date for talking to all those different network devices. There's a massive library of all the potential devices that we might find in a network, information that is sitting there and ready for us to use should we come across a customer that has something that we've never seen before. The likelihood is that there is already a template built for it that we can leverage.

We started out using the solution's templated dashboards, but we have built a number of customized dashboards as well. The templated dashboards are a good starting point. In terms of customizing dashboards, there is a steep learning curve, but once over that hurdle and you understand the way the dashboards work, how to extract the information and display it, and what's possible, it becomes very easy. The concept of developing a dashboard template for ourselves, then cloning it for every single customer, and only having to change one piece of information, is a godsend. That's one of the strengths. We can develop a template that fits every customer and just change the information that is presented. The templated dashboards save us time getting up and running with visibility into our customers' environments and help our customers because we present some of those dashboards to them.

There are some very specific things that need improvement in LogicMonitor. One is the lack of formatting for customized alerts, particularly the delivery of them to our email channel. We'd also like to see further customization of dashboards. Finally, something that is specific to us as an MSP that uses LogicMonitor, is white-labeling or skinning of the product, so we can make it look more customer-focused for our customers.

I've been using LogicMonitor for nearly 18 months.

We have not had an issue since we installed the solution, at all. It has been rock-solid.

We're still a small business, but we've had no issues with scalability. We have added many new customers without any impact on performance. One of our key reasons for choosing this solution is the scalability when consuming a cloud-based product. We don't have to worry about our scalability. If we double, triple, or quadruple in size, we simply consume licenses as required. We're not worried about platform hardware and all the security challenges that go with that. 

Apart from the scalability, the security of the platform, and the functionality that's rolled into it, comes with scale. That includes connecting more customers, more devices, more collectors, and through more API calls. It gives us the ability to do that without even thinking about the impact of adding another block of 500 devices to it. It is fantastic. We just look after our customers and don't have to worry about the platform in the backend.

We've had excellent support, both tech support and account support.

From the outset, as a brand new user when we first started, there was a fairly steep learning curve to LogicMonitor. However, now that we understand how to get good value out of it, we find it quite easy. We are at the point where we're starting to automate the configuration so we don't have to spend anywhere near as much time as we did when setting up our first couple of customers.

For organizations picking up LogicMonitor for the first time, I would suggest they take advantage of the onboarding teams from LogicMonitor, their success manager and their account manager, to get from start to operate as quickly as possible.

The solution gives us the ability to charge a competitive price for a premium product. The cost of LogicMonitor is built into our service offering. From our point of view, it's a cost component for delivering our service.

For us, LogicMonitor is now value for money, but we are still on a plan from a few years ago. The challenge for us in Australia is the billing from LogicMonitor is done in U.S. dollars. The exchange rate between the Aussie dollar and the U.S. dollar has not gone in our favor over the last 12 months. A number of the other big players in this space will bill in your local currency, and that is of value to us. We've raised the issue with LogicMonitor.

That said, they're generally quite open and flexible to a discussion around licensing. We're on the the full Enterprise offering. We've pretty much got everything turned on. From our point of view, they've always come back to the table when we've had to grow and move to the next level, and they've given us advice on the best way to do that.

We evaluated six solutions at the time. We then narrowed it down to a short-list of three, and we ended up buying two systems. We still operate two systems today because there are a couple of things that LogicMonitor doesn't do that the other systems do extraordinarily well. That's the way we've chosen to run our business. The specific lack in LogicMonitor is the real-time, live network map. It has basic functionality, but it's nothing like the competitive offers from SolarWinds or Auvik.

Like any good project, spend plenty of time upfront working out precisely what you want out of LogicMonitor, before you race off and start deploying it. Otherwise, you'll end up doing a lot of reworking. Take advantage of the onboarding resources, and even pay a little bit of money, if needed, to give you that leg up and the headstart in understanding how the platform works. If you know what your customers want to get out of it, and what you want to get out of it as a business, the platform will most likely be able to give you what you want. From there, you'll end up in a comfortable operational place where you can look at taking the next step into process automation with all the API functionality to improve business efficiency.

The strength of LogicMonitor is in the dashboards and the information that's available. Every customer likes a dashboard, so if we can give them dashboards that provide meaningful, real-time information about what's happening in their network and across their business, they see significant value in that. Most solutions don't have that today.

We are using the solution for on-prem, all our applications, and network monitoring. It fits everything. We use it for monitoring and reporting on our ESX, Pure Storage, Cisco, F5, Palo Alto environments. We also use it for alerting, graphing, and capacity planning. We use it for everything.

We are using the latest version. We have LogicMonitor Collectors onsite in our data center, but the dashboard and everything else is all the cloud model. We use both AWS and Azure as our cloud providers.

It has improved our organization with its capacity planning. We have a performance environment that we use to benchmark our applications. We use it to say, "Okay, at a certain level of concurrency, we know where our application will fall over." Therefore, we are using LogicMonitor dashboards to tell us that we're good. Our platform can handle X number of clients concurrently hitting us at a time. That's how we use it to size our business, e.g., size our ESX environment and Internet pipes. 

Our capacity planning team consumes the data on the dashboards. The bread and butter of using the data in the dashboards is to inform, "Hey, what upgrades do we need to make in six months?" So, that data gets consumed regularly by other teams.

In the three and a half years that I've been using it, we haven't had false positives. I'm the primary network engineer, so I can say with confidence, "We have the environment tuned to the point where we don't get false positives."

Its historical reporting: I can go into my production F5s and look at the CPU, memory transactions, application transactions, and bandwidth utilization. Then, I can use all of the graphing metrics. I can have a dashboard for my production environment and all of my critical elements where I can graph utilization over time and use it for capacity planning. It's a single pane of glass for everything about your environment health.

We build our own dashboards, creating dashboards for our various environments. It is all written in HTML5, so it's super easy to drag and drop, move things around, expand, and change dates. It's awesome. We can get as detailed as we want or roll up to a manager/director level. I like its ease of use.

I don't do much with reporting because the dashboards are good enough that they tell the story. I haven't actually clicked on the reports tab in quite a while, so we're probably under utilizing that. If you just go into a dashboard, and say, "Show me my F5 health for the last six months," the dashboard is good enough for that.

I have custom data sources for various things. With data sources, you can go down the rabbit hole real quick because they're very powerful. You can go to the LM Exchange, grab data sources, pull them down and put them into your installation, and then you can tweak them. The idea of a data source is that it matches. For example, if I have a collection of Cisco devices along with a collection of F5 and Palo Alto. There's a generic match criteria which says, "Is a Cisco. Is an F5. Is a Palo Alto." However, it also has all these other match conditions. Therefore, you can build Redex filters or match on 10 Gigabit Ethernet, but not 1 Gigabit Ethernet. You can get super deep in the weeds, and it can get complicated pretty quick, but their support is fantastic. 

The solution provide us with granular alert-tuning for devices. E.g., I can use it for application website checks, where I can set up an automated check from a bunch of different test facilities. So if I want check my application, I can ping it from five locations. I can tune the data source so that if the millisecond response time is ever greater than 500 milliseconds, it lets me know. I also can tune it so it won't alert me on one fail, but alert me on three fails. For any data source that you're collecting for, you can set thresholds for notice, warning, critical, and what to do if it fails one, two, or three times. You can just go crazy tuning it.

We found the solution monitors most devices out-of-the-box, such as, F5, Cisco, Palo Alto, ESX, Pure Storage, Windows database connectors, ActiveBatch. and Rubrik.

The ease of use with data source tuning could be improved. That can get hairy quickly. When I reach out for help, it's usually around a data source or event source configuration. That can get challenging.

I joined NWEA about three years ago and was new to LogicMonitor at that time. Three and a half years is how long I've been using it.

The stability is perfect. It is 100 percent.

Right now, we're collectively administrating it across the organization at five or six people. It doesn't take day-to-day massaging.

We have close to 50 users utilizing the solution. It's mostly a production/operations audience. My Ops team has a couple hundred people, but I doubt that many of them would be consuming the dashboards on a regular basis.

The product is extensively being used. It's completely a part of our production environment. We couldn't maintain our environment without it. It's production-impacting.

I've never been presented with a scenario where it didn't scale.

Their support is fantastic. The support is always super friendly and helpful.

From the dashboard, you click support. You chat with an engineer, saying, "I'm trying to clone this data source that already exists and I want to tweak it so it only applies to interfaces with this tag." You can clone a data source, tweak it to match what you want, negate the things you don't want, and then you have a new data source. You can take all of their stuff out-of-the-box, and it generally works, then you tweak it as needed. So, data sources are pretty easy to use.

I think my team was using Nagios before. That's just a burning trash heap of an old application.

In my organization, as a whole, we have many chefs in the kitchen. We, the infrastructure team, picked LogicMonitor, then we moved all our stuff to it. However, the database team still relies on Nagios because they're like dinosaurs. DevOps uses Sensu Prometheus, collectd, SIEM, and a laundry list of others. The only reason why LogicMonitor hasn't consolidated is because our teams have the freedom to choose their own tools, and we do. Unfortunately, we tend to overspend on duplicate functionality. I don't think it's because LogicMonitor can't do it, but because the infrastructure team picked it, the Dev Ops team was like, "Well, that's your guys' tool. You guys use it. We're going to go pick our own thing." We were like, "Okay, go ahead.

I know that we have added extra Collectors, and it's super simple. We get to a point where we have too many instances on a Collector and it starts working too hard because it's just a VM. So, we spin up another Linux VM, download their Collector code, install it, and then you have another Collector running in 30 minutes. It's pretty straightforward. We add collectors fairly regularly, and it's pretty easy.

I know getting it installed is not that big of a deal, but getting things migrated off of old stuff can be time consuming. However, I wasn't around for it.

If we were implementing LogicMonitor now, we would need to identify when to pull the plug on Nagios, then identify what we wanted to monitor so we were not running duplicates.

One person is needed for a new LogicMonitor deployment.

We use LogicMonitor for our alerting and integrate it with PagerDuty for on-call paging. That is key to operational uptime. We live and die by the number of SEV-1, SEV-2, SEV-3, outages, and uptime. It is absolutely critical that LogicMonitor alerts PagerDuty, which alerts the on-call. We are reducing the impact of incidents using the tool by alerting for incidents that we can respond to.

I don't know what we spend on LogicMonitor, but I know that Cisco Prime is a multiple six-figure solution. Therefore, I know we are saving at least several hundred thousand dollars in that we're not buying Cisco Prime.

We pay for the enterprise tech support.

The organization I came from had a huge SolarWinds deployment. We also used Nagios, Cacti, and OpenNMS, which is an open source NMS platform. Unfortunately, I've had to do some work with Cisco Prime as well, which used to be called Cisco Works. I installed Cisco Prime for a handful of clients in a past life.

• Pros of LogicMonitor: Ease of installation and use. 
• Cons. Tuning data sources can be a bit labor intensive. However, once you get it set up, it's pretty straightforward. 

Having worked with OpenNMS, Cisco Prime, and SolarWinds, just the cost and complexity of those solutions is ridiculous. I would never advocate going back to that black hole.

We're fairly self-sufficient. We already use Puppet for automation, and we're starting to move some workloads to Ansible. However, we wouldn't ask LogicMonitor to help us with automation.

Biggest lesson learnt: Know what you want to monitor and what threshold you want to alert from. E.g., if you don't do anything and just start monitoring out-of-the-box, it works. However, if you don't set thresholds, it's not telling you when to take action. So, if you just add things to LM and start monitoring them, you're not done. Until you've set a threshold for where something is actionable, you haven't really finished the job. That's my experience with NWEA. You can click on anything that we've been monitoring, and if you don't have any thresholds set, then you're just making pretty graphs.

I would rate the solution as a 10 (out of 10). I am a fan of the product. It's great.

We use it to make sure that proper tuning is done for the existing monitoring.

In addition, our university has a number of schools and each is a customer of the main IT organization that manages and provides support for all the colleges, like the law school, the business school, the medical school, the arts school, etc. The goal, and one of the main use cases that we were planning and thinking about, was to be able to onboard all the devices, all the applications, all the databases, as required by individual schools.

We also wanted them to be able to create their own dashboard, tweak it, manage it, delete from it, and add to it. 

It's deployed as a SaaS model. LogicMonitor is out in the cloud.

When we were using Nagios and we had alerts but there was only red, yellow, green. Here, the good thing is that you have escalation: level-one, two, three, which are clearly defined, and what action needs to be taken for each level. The clear escalation chain and tuning helps, because we don't want to wake up the director for 80 percent of the cases. That would be ridiculous. But when necessary, the right people should be alerted, especially for the production environment. If something has been "red" or there has been no interaction for half an hour, it's important to know that and to take the necessary actions.

That's a key thing, being a production-operations team member, because I don't want my team to be flooded with all the noise of alerts for something which can be tackled by a specific team. Having escalation chains, so that the alert goes to the right team to look into that and take action, means the prod-ops team doesn't need to even look into it. We don't even need to ticket it. We only keep aware of it through the daily alert dashboards. That has made a big difference in our overall resource planning, because previously we had 400 to 450 daily alerts. By using this feature we cut that down to 150 to 200 which are "candidate alerts" that production-operations needs to take action on. They may require creating a ticket, or calling the right people, or doing some activity that needs intervention or escalation to the next level. We have been able to cut down on our resources. We don't need to have four members actively looking into the dashboard. We can validate things with one or two employees.

LogicMonitor has also helped to consolidate the number of monitoring tools we need. We had some third-party monitoring, four or five things, and they're all consolidated with LogicMonitor. The only exception is IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler. But what we did was we integrated that via Slack. I'm not really sure why we weren't able to consolidate TWS. The plan is to get rid of TWS, but we could not do so immediately, until there is an alternate route. But apart from that, everything has been consolidated using LogicMonitor.

We were especially able to consolidate third-party cloud monitoring for AWS. There were discussions about how we could also integrate or combine Azure monitoring resources through LogicMonitor. The team has mentioned that it has plug-ins that it can use to combine that. We also had separate backup scheduling software, a tool that had separate monitoring, and that has also been combined with LogicMonitor.

And LogicMonitor has absolutely reduced the number of false positives compared to how many we were getting with other monitoring platforms. At a minimum they have been reduced by 50 percent. The scope of more tuning and going through the learning curve helped to bring it down. Within the first two or three months, we were able to bring the false positives down by 50 percent. That's a big achievement. That is the main reason we initiated this project of getting into LogicMonitor. There have been further talks internally about how we can eliminate them further, and bring it down by 70 percent compared to the false positives we were getting. That's our goal. So far, it has reduced the time we used to spend on them by 50 percent, both offshore and onsite, as we have an offshore team in India that works 24/7. We used to have multiple people in each shift and we have reduced that down to a single person in each shift. That's a big step in the right direction.

Tuning is one of the main components. We like to make sure that only the right alerts are escalated, and that alerts are being sent to the right members, as opposed to every alert being broadcast to everybody. The main thing is the escalation chains. We feel that is a very good thing, rather than sending all the information to everybody at each level. Having the ability to make those sorts of changes doesn't require you to do too much, out-of-the-box. You just need to create the basic entities, like who are the different people, who are the contacts, or email groups, and cover the data source and events which should be alerted.

Another feature from the technical aspect, the back-end, is the ability to allow individual users or customers to have their own APIs. They're able to make changes using the plugins covered by LogicMonitor. That is a very powerful feature that is more attractive to our techno-savvy customers.

In terms of basic functionality, from a normal user's perspective, the escalation chains and the tuning part that are embedded in LogicMonitor are the two most important things.

Among my favorite dashboards are the alert dashboards. Being a prod-ops team, we took the out-of-the-box alerts dashboard given by LogicMonitor and we have kept on tweaking it by adding more columns and more data points. The alert dashboard is something which is very key for us as a team. In general, it gives us more in-depth information about uptime, the SLAs, etc. LogicMonitor has done a good job of providing very user-friendly dashboards, out-of-the-box. There are so many things that we are still learning about it, how we can use it better, but the alerts dashboard is my favorite.

The reporting is something which I have explored, to send me an email every day with how many alerts, in particular how many critical alerts, there were. It's a good starting point. The reporting can be sent in both HTML and Excel and is accessible on the dashboard after you log in. These two things are very good. This is the first feature I looked at once we went live, because I want to know things on a day-to-day basis and a weekly basis. I activated the email feature because I want it to send daily, weekly, and monthly reports of my alert dashboard data.

We use LogicMonitor's ability to customize data sources and it's a must, because ours is a very heterogeneous, complex environment. Changing data sources is important for at least some of the deployments. For other organizations, it may not really be required to change the default data sources provided by LogicMonitor. But here, it was important to change them. That's where the capabilities of the embedded APIs really helped us. I'm not part of the team that makes those changes, but I worked actively with the teams that did, and I always got very positive feedback from them on how they would get the right answers from LogicMonitor. They had to make a lot of changes to the data sources, for each customer, and it worked out well.

There are a few things that could have been done better with the reporting. It could have a more graphical interface.

The dashboards can be improved. They are good, but there is a pain point. To show things to management, to explain pain points to other customers, to show them exactly where we can do better, the dashboarding could be better. Dashboards need to show the key things. Nobody is going to go into the ample details of Excel sheets or HTML.

Automation can also be improved. 

Finally, while this is a very good tool for monitoring and responding, if there was a way they could do something like PagerDuty or another third-party solution for alerting, integrate both monitoring and alerting, that would be an ideal scenario.

I have been using LogicMonitor for close to a year. If I remember correctly, LogicMonitor was implemented in my organization as a replacement for Nagios. I was actively involved in that project right from the beginning of verification through going live. In the initial stages we may not have been actively using it, but we started learning about the tool and how to implement it about a year ago.

Overall, the stability has been good. We didn't have any issues during the phase after we set up and went live. 

The performance was also pretty good. We didn't have to wait for a response for any of the attributes on the dashboard or reporting.

LogicMonitor has the ability to alert you if the cloud loses contact with the on-prem collectors. We had a challenge within one or two months of deployment. The problem was the way we were using the collectors. We were actually using our Nagios server as one of the collectors. We were trying to eliminate that server altogether, because it was giving duplicate alerts.

Initially we had a challenge of not getting any alerts when the connection to the collector was lost. Later on we found that there was a routing table or there were some firewall changes that were needed. I would attribute that more the learning curve and what the best practices are.

Since correcting that problem, we haven't had an issue of any collector being down. There's no question about any of the alerting.

The impression we got when we provided information about the number of servers, the number of end-users, and the number of networks that were part of Nagios back then, was that LogicMonitor said they could expand and double that, if things were to grow. There is scalability in that environment to support a big data buffer. So there should not be any problem with scalability.

In terms of DR, discussions are still going on as to what would happen if there were a disaster. 

As a whole, the organization has to use a monitoring tool. It could be Nagios, it could be LogicMonitor. There was a phase in which most of the schools were using both in parallel. But one after another, they are all happy to be using LogicMonitor. Usage-wise now, it's only LogicMonitor. Nagios has been cut down, so nobody is looking for any monitoring system apart from LogicMonitor.

There are some schools that still need to tweak it and tune it, because they have not given it much attention or have not really been required to actively monitor their solutions. We know where the priorities are, which school is the top priority and which schools were using Nagios more actively. But all the major customers that were using Nagios, once we unplugged it, have been happy with the LogicMonitor implementation. There are a few schools which are not actively using any monitoring system. They may get to the stage of actively using it, but, university-wide, everybody is using LogicMonitor. There is no other monitoring tool out there.

We have evolved and have kept on making changes, as per the requirement of the customers and one good thing about LogicMonitor is that it has a very good support system. We have had chat sessions with them to ask questions which help each school, and the IT organization as a whole, to evolve a better monitoring and alerting tool.

The way LogicMonitor support responded during our initial setup was amazing. That's something I really enjoyed a lot. They never said something like, "This question should not be asked," or "This question is not a candidate for the chat session." For every question we would get a reasonably quick answer which we would be able to implement right away. They would also log in remotely and help if something was something beyond an individual's capability. That helped to migrate and complete this process in a quicker manner. LogicMonitor has a very highly talented support team that can answer the questions and help the customer right away. It's been wonderful.

I don't see that happening with all vendors. With other organizations, when you submit questions in the chat session, they'll take the request and they'll say, "Okay, we'll get back to you." LogicMonitor — and it's a differentiating factor — is there to provide solutions right away, rather than putting it into their ticketing system and escalating to level-2 and to level-3.

I really don't know if that level of service is only for specific customers, based on the contractual terms and conditions, or if it is the way they do it for everybody. If this is the way they do it for every customer, they should definitely be very proud of the way they are doing it. Their team is there to help support the customer instantly, versus taking their own sweet time.

I would encourage LogicMonitor to continue that same level of expertise, of people being there 24/7 to support customers. That would be a big differentiating factor compared to competitors.

The main reason for migrating to LogicMonitor from Nagios was to eliminate the noise of alerts. It may have been because alerts were not properly tuned, but the visibility with Nagios was not complete. It became a bottleneck. 

Only one or two people had active access to tune things. If anything had to be done, there was just one guy who had to do it. We wanted to move towards a self-managed model. LogicMonitor is a solution which can be in that category, once it's deployed and there is a transfer of knowledge to each school.

We want each department to self-manage: manage their own dashboards and create their own reports based on their requirements. If they have a new device coming up, they can spin up a new AWS instance and onboard that, etc. It's the initial phase which is going to be challenging. But once we have the handover call with the individual customer, it's going to be easy, and that was not possible in Nagios.

We also wanted to have a proper escalation chain, which was not present in Nagios. That's something we have made use of in LogicMonitor.

Finally, we switched to use fewer resources and to speed up turnaround.

The initial setup is complex. It's too picky. I'm a hands-on technical guy, although I don't call myself an SME, but I know everything right from networking, servers, databases, firewalls, to clustering, support, and operations. The initial phase is definitely a little bumpy for somebody who's not completely technically savvy. I understand that it's because there are so many features involved, and there are so many ways for onboarding and using the custom APIs, etc. To me, LogicMonitor, looks like too much of a technical-savvy company. There's good and bad in that. It depends on how you look at it.

The automated and agentless discovery, deployment, and configuration are good. We used that a lot initially. They did a good job with that. One thing that could be done is to make the naming conventions — adding different names like the IPs, the DNS lookup — a little better. They could eliminate some of the duplicate entries when you're onboarding it. I saw a lot of duplicate entries, which goes into the licensing. Apart from that, the way they provide a template or a flat file to the system for onboarding is good.

As for monitoring things out-of-the-box, it seemed that our database team spent more time in configuring stuff, whether MySQL or Oracle, etc. Now, LogicMonitor has come up with a very easy way for configuring and monitoring database components out-of-the-box. But that's something which I felt was a little bit of a pain point. I don't know whether it was that our team made it more complicated or LogicMonitor didn't handle it out-of-the-box.

Apart from that, LogicMonitor has done a good job of out-of-the-box monitoring of the basic resources within the servers — memory, CPU, disk configuration, etc. — as well as for HTTP, the web components.

While I wasn't actively involved in the planning for the implementation, I picked up things from the team which was actively involved in planning and implementation. The process was primarily to engage with LogicMonitor. Our team — the product owner and team members — worked together and was in touch with LogicMonitor to gather all the existing features that were available and how we would make use of all that. That was the initial phase during which we got to know the product completely.

We mapped all of the devices which were in Nagios to make sure we onboarded everything that was in Nagios to LogicMonitor.

We had several internal discussions where we told the schools how we were actively engaging with LogicMonitor to make sure that we would go in phases. The initial phase was knowledge-transfer, the second one was to onboard a school, or at least one application, to make sure that it was tested completely and then remove that from Nagios. We took time to make sure that they were getting proper monitoring and proper alerts, out-of-the-box.

While doing that, we found that there were a few things which were not properly configured in LogicMonitor, compared to Nagios. The goal was to improve on Nagios, minimize the false alerts, and have better features for reporting, dashboarding, escalation chains etc.

We had six to seven people actively involved in the process. Two to three were purely technical, and made use of LogicMonitor support very extensively, especially for some of the customized activities like using custom APIs. From the LogicMonitor side, there were two to three members from the front-office who were actively involved, and on the technical side they designated a couple of people whom we could directly contact on a day-to-day basis. We had a daily, separate session with each of our teams, like networking, business, operations, and DevOps, so that each team could ask questions about its pain points and get better information so that we could do things ourselves and, for things that were beyond us, to learn how they could help. We had a month of one-on-one sessions with them, every day, for two or three hours.

When we initially started the engagement with the LogicMonitor team, they came onsite to run a one-week session with all the key stakeholders: the customers, the technical team, and back-end operations team. That was a very useful session that helped kickstart things. At that point, not everybody knew completely how LogicMonitor works and how we could plan to migrate from Nagios to LogicMonitor. What were the things that we could retain? What were the things that we could just ignore? Overall, the exposure to LogicMonitor during that one-week phase, in terms of customer-engagement, was really a great experience for me. We also had the ability to quickly use the chat session online and ask questions.

The implementation team's role and its way of engaging with the customer was amazing. That's something which I really appreciated. That helped me. Once the engagement was over and the contract started, the online support was available. If we had a problem, we could type in our question or our problem right away. The support team would respond and fulfill our requirements. They would fix the problem.

Our deployment took two to three months. That includes the visits by the LogicMonitor to do some knowledge transfer and give hands-on experience to some of the key stakeholders. But during that time, not all places within the university were onboarded. Some schools were not really interested. I don't think they were properly updated. That was something that was more of an internal issue, because we were doing our own "selling" to tell them what the differences are between LogicMonitor and other things. We had to tell them that Nagios was going to be pulled and that they would be completely in the dark if they were not moving to LogicMonitor. So during those three months, there were still quite a few schools which were not migrated to LogicMonitor or didn't onboard all of their resources. But the majority of them were done in three months.

In terms of maintenance, we have three to four people involved. One guy was actively involved in the Nagios implementation and its maintenance. He was part of decommissioning that and completely taking ownership of LogicMonitor's technical aspects. One person is the product owner who interacts with all the stakeholders, the different schools, to make sure that they have their requirements met using LogicMonitor. One is a manager. And there is a person from the business point of view, who provides his pain points, and what they're seeing on a day-to-day basis. So those four people are actively dedicated — I would not call it to maintenance — but to the day-to-day LogicMonitor stuff.

There are the users as well. Each school has its own applications and services that they offer internally. I don't have exact numbers but there are about 20 of them.

It allows us to accomplish more with less by minimizing the false alerts.

And by giving the "keys" to the individual owners, it makes things faster.

Also, as I mentioned, we don't need to have as many people in each monitoring shift, in the 24/7 environment. Previously, we had alerts that went to everybody and everybody was up and looking into why we had a given problem. Now that we are splitting the problems into different buckets, we are not tapping into all our resources' time. That's an area where we're saving. As a rough ballpark, we are saving about 50 percent of the resources from an operations perspective.

We have a separate team involved in licensing. I wasn't involved in that.

I believe they evaluated two or three other tools, but I was not part of that process.

For the initial phase, rather than having only one or two functional guys participating, it's always good to have one or two technical folks in the discussions. That helps a lot. You don't want surprises if an organization decides to go live with this tool, and then realizes that technical things are not on board with the ideas of the functional team. That's something I can say based on my journey and experience.

Another thing that is important is to keep on having internal conversations; that you value and give importance to everybody. It's good to educate them. Use the help of the LogicMonitor support team for internal question/answer sessions and do anything that will help them feel more comfortable. It's not about two or three members being really happy with this. LogicMonitor is something which can only be successful in automation if all the key teams and team players are on the same page.

The biggest lesson has been how we could make everybody be part of the mission. Previously, monitoring used to be in the hands of one or two, and each of them had a lot of overhead to deal with. But by doing this, we have reduced the complaints from individuals and each stakeholder. They know how they're configured. They know what the escalation chain is, so they're confident. If there is something not working, it's because of the way they have it configured.

By doing this we have minimized the internal noise. We have given everyone the opportunity to know the pain involved in monitoring and what it takes to have a better monitoring system in place, and how each person can contribute and think outside the box. They know how to put into place the right parameters and the right numbers. Previously, 70 or 80 percent of things were escalated internally. There was no involvement of the particular customer. If there was a problem for a team, it was somebody's problem, not their problem. Now, it has all become their problem. This is a very high-level benefit of using tools like LogicMonitor, which involves everybody more.

I would give LogicMonitor an eight out of 10. There are a few things that LogicMonitor is also learning from their experience with the customer. Most of the customers are giving feedback to LogicMonitor for improvements and to make changes. I'm sure that very soon it will be a 10, but at this point in time, from my experience and journey, it's an eight.

We use it for alarming on Cisco Voice systems, the Unified Communication stuff. We monitor all the gateways, trunks, SIP trunks, servers, and make sure all of the application is functioning, calls are being completed, and that there are no performance issues on the network or the voice system.

We used a different monitoring tool to do the Cisco Voice monitoring and our customers were very unhappy with us. It was missing stuff when monitoring, meaning it wasn't fully knowledgeable about checking all the OIDs and other things. It wasn't robust enough to allow us to customize it and build it out. Customers were getting very unhappy with that and they didn't like the dashboards, the graphs, and the reporting that came out of the other tool. When we moved over to LogicMonitor and we were able to show everything that we could actually deliver, a lot of our customers that were leaving came back to us or have provided us more services. We now have a proper tool that can deliver the services that we actually need, and that we've actually quoted and have contracts for.

The solution's ability to alert us if the cloud loses contact with on-prem collectors means we get alarms when a customer's collector isn't calling home anymore. That allows our engineers to know that there's some sort of serious outage. Either there's a power outage, the server crashed, or the internet's down. That's something that triggers our engineers to look at the customer and figure out why the monitoring solution is down. Is it the monitoring solution itself, is it the customer, or is it an act of God?

In addition, we had a lot of false positives before because we used a lot of VPN tunnels with other solutions. Moving to a SaaS solution and using LogicMonitor and the cloud has helped us a ton because it's improved reliability, SLAs, and uptimes. We've seen a 70 to 80 percent decrease in false-positive alarms.

Another benefit is that we went from three monitoring systems down to one. The first solution was Prognosis, which was developed by Integrated Research. The other tool was N-central, which is now provided by SolarWinds. We consolidated those two tools down into just LogicMonitor.

We've also been able to automate things such as cleaning up disk space or restarting a service. If the monitoring system catches a service not running, instead of initially sending off an alarm and creating a ticket, it's going to do some self-healing, to try to restart that service or run a script that cleans up some disk space. If that still doesn't fix the issue, it then passes the alarm on to create a ticket for a human to look at. 

That saves us time because, obviously, it doesn't disrupt an engineer and force him to try to log in to that customer and try to start the service or look at logs. It just says, "Hey, we restarted it. Everything's up and running," and there is no real impact to the company or business. It didn't take time for an engineer to look at it, respond to a ticket, and close the ticket. If a single service isn't running, that's about 15 minutes, at least, of an engineer's time. If an engineer doesn't have to do that three times a day, he's saving about an hour.

The dashboards are the big seller for us. When our customers can see those graphs and are able to interact with the data, that is valuable. They can easily adjust time ranges and the graphs display the data fast. We've used other tools in the past, where you'd say, "Hey, I want the last three months of data on a graph," and it would just sit there and crunch for five minutes before you'd actually see the data. With LogicMonitor, the fast reliability of those dashboards is huge. Allowing our customers and nontechnical people to see what is happening in their environments in an easy, friendly way is huge for us. That's the big feature we use and push on our customers. 

I have two favorites when it comes to dashboards. I put together a few dashboards for the voice systems that allow the customer to to see how the performance is going: green light/red light. They see green and everything looks good. Being able to click into that and interact with the dashboards to then drill down and get more info is awesome. The other thing that I really like is their Google Maps widget that goes inside of a dashboard. That is great for customers that have multiple locations across the country. They can see, "Oh, hey, I've got a regional outage in St. Louis, or the West Coast has a power outage, or everything is green. I see all my sites in my countries are green. Everything is good in my environment." 

Another valuable feature would be their logic modules. They are little scriptlets or settings so you can say, "Hey, I want to monitor this OID or these services," etc. That's huge in terms of customizability and having the system be robust. Out-of-the-box, monitoring solutions don't always have everything you need. You might say, "Hey, I know that there's this new OID for this new firmware," and you need to be able to write something to call that and pull it into the monitoring system. The logic modules within LogicMonitor, being so robust, is awesome because I can easily go into the tool, add something and push it out to all my customers and, boom, I'm off running with all this monitoring. And it took me five minutes to put it together.

In terms of the solution's reporting capabilities, I look at it in two ways. One of the ways is the dashboards. Being able to take all those dashboards and say, "Hey, I want a recurring report every quarter for QBRs," is awesome. On the technical side, for all the back-end stuff, being able to use reports to export information so that I can use it to inventory or check properties of stuff in the environment — do assessments — I really like those as well.

In addition, the solution's ability to customize data sources was big and something I did a lot of to build out the Cisco Voice monitoring, so that we could deliver what we've been contracted to do.

Another big thing we use a lot is LogicMonitor's granular alert tuning for devices. A customer might say, "Hey, we know this SIP trunk is going to have this utilization, so tweak the threshold for that one interface or that one SIP trunk at this level, but leave everyone else at the default." Or, "Hey, we're going to be doing maintenance on a power supply, so we'll need to set downtime or suppress alarming for that power supply, but let everything else that we're monitoring for that system go through." Using that granular ability is great for that. It's also great for adjusting alarming. They'll say, "Hey, we want this specific interface to be a priority-one alarm," but it's default is priority-two. Being able to tune that within the alert rules and get that granular and say, "This specific interface is going to be different, it's going to go somewhere else," or "it's got a different priority," is important.

One thing I would like to see is parent/child relationships and the ability to build a "suppression parent/child." For example, If I know that a top gateway is offline and I can't talk to it anymore, and anything that's connected below it or to it is also going to be offline, there is no need to alarm on those. In that situation it should create one ticket or one alarm for the parent. I know they're working towards that with their mapping technology, but it's not quite to that level where you can build out alarm logic or a correlation logic like that.

I would also like them to expand more on their resources view, which is their tree structure of all the devices and what's being monitored. I'd like to see some logical type of grouping of services. If I know I've got this web application which is using this SQL database and this service from this web server, it would be helpful if I could create a special view for those kinds of services and instances.

I used LogicMonitor about six years ago at a different company. It was brought in there and I used it for a few years. Then I transferred to a different employer at which time I brought LogicMonitor in. It was in about 2014 when I first got exposed to it. With this new company, we've been using it for about four or five years now.

I am happy with the solution's stability. I haven't had any issues with reliability, with the service going offline or not being available.

LogicMonitor will be able to scale to many more devices, if we need it to.

We're monitoring about 1,200 devices currently. That's a bit of a misleading number because there's so much more stuff we monitor, like virtual machines that don't really count as licenses, or even phones. We're also monitoring Meraki devices and cloud stuff. We're monitoring almost 30,000 phones with the tool, but they're not really devices in terms of licenses.

Their support is fantastic. They're always there to answer your questions and they're very knowledgeable.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Installing the collector at a customer site is super-easy. You do a basic default install, "next, next, next, finish," and it's calling home. 

Adding devices and getting customers set up, whether they've got one device or 1,000 devices, is easy. I can import a CSV and it starts going out, scanning, setting up everything, and auto-discovering all the different services. There is a lot of automation that makes it easy for us. Before, with other systems, if I knew there was a Windows server and it had SQL, I would have to add these special SQL packages and then add this other package. And then I might forget: "Oh, hey, there's a special service I was supposed to monitor." Having all those data sources and automation within LogicMonitor makes it easier for us to set up and deploy.

The solution's automated and agentless discovery, deployment, and configuration is that ease of use. No matter how many devices there are, being able to easily import and add them in is great. Having it automatically know it's scanning SNMP, for example, when it finds this name in this one OID it knows it's a Dell Storage unit and that it needs to automatically apply all of these special Dell Storage unit monitoring services. It will scan how many hard drives there are. If it finds there are 12 hard drives instead of 24, then it only monitors 12. Or instead of having two power supplies in this unit, if I'm only seeing one power supply, I should only monitor the one. That automation is awesome.

LogicMonitor also monitors most devices out-of-the-box. For us, it's a lot of the Nexus switches and VSS, which are the Cisco Virtual Switching System. There was so much stuff and we didn't know what we could monitor with our other solution. We saw only the basic stuff. When we installed LogicMonitor for this one customer, and added the Nexus switch, all of a sudden we saw module stuff, a lot more interfaces, and different hardware things. All of that was out-of-the-box and we were blown away by that. We didn't realize we were missing 70  percent of what we could monitor on this one device until we switched to LogicMonitor. 

That was actually the big savior for us for this very large, high-profile customer. We were using N-central for them and it required 15 collectors to monitor these 4,000 devices. We were able to use LogicMonitor and get that down to two collectors to monitor all that. The customer had been calling us out on it saying, "Hey, how come you don't see this? How come you don't see that?" We had to throw our hands up in the air. Once we introduced LogicMonitor and showed them what we did within five minutes, and all of the stuff we could see, they said, "Perfect. We'll stick with you guys. You seem to have the right solution."

We have definitely seen return on our investment with LogicMonitor, especially once we showed how we could replace that Prognosis tool with it. The cost savings were through the roof. As an example, for one customer of ours, for one year with the Prognosis license, it would have cost $180,000. With LogicMonitor, it only costs us about $8,000 to $9,000. That's a huge savings, and it's great for the customer because it means we can lower our cost and they think we're losing money, but we're still getting so much. That was a huge benefit.

It's affordable. The price we get per license is a lot cheaper than what we were getting with some of the other tools. There are other monitoring tools out there that are cheaper, but what you get with LogicMonitor, out-of-the-box, makes it worth the cost. It works well.

There were a few other tools we looked at. Their pricing, how complex their setup was, and even their dashboards and reports were all considered. LogicMonitor seemed to fit all those categories for us and give us huge improvements. It was a no-brainer.

We looked at WhatsUp Gold. We looked at the main SolarWinds package and there was a tool called ScienceLogic that we looked at. And there was also Nimsoft.

Do it. Your customers are going to like it, once you show them the dashboards, the pretty colors, and the ability to easily interact with it. That's going to win over your customers. I guarantee it. I've seen it happen. You can say, "I've got this tool that does everything," but if the customer can't tangibly see what the tool is doing, they'll say, "Well, what am I paying you for?" And they don't want to see generic spreadsheets. They want something that's easy to use and interact with.

I like how they've been improving on it over the years. It seems like they're going in the right direction. LogicMonitor fits what our company needs, and we plan to keep on using it for at least five more years, until something else gets better or they're out of business.

We don't use its AIOps capabilities for things like anomaly detection or root cause analysis yet, but that is something we are looking into. I know they're releasing those features in phases. They've got the first phase of AIOps and then they're pushing the next one with the dynamic thresholds, and that is definitely something we're going to be using, especially when you're looking at Cisco Voice systems and how they perform throughout the day. Dynamic thresholds are going to be huge for us, so that's going to be exciting.

We have about 100 people who work directly with LogicMonitor in our company. They're all the way from managers down to the low-level NOC people who are answering the telephone, to the Tier-3 engineers, and even the sales and marketing people. Everyone interacts with LogicMonitor in some way, either supporting a customer, running reports, or looking at the capabilities and what we are monitoring.

Overall, I've been very happy with the solution so far.