I see the biggest features of EM7 is that it is can cover a lot of different products very quickly and without a ton of effort. In my book, the second biggest feature is the company behind the product, they generally respond quickly to issues with some level of urgency and they seem very motivated to innovate the software.
I have thought long and hard about the following statement but if I had to setup another shop all over again EM7 would be the first tool I would fire up #truestory.
We can approach many different solutions without a ton of lift on developers which helps us a great deal. We still need to put time into tuning what is in the defaults, but we can get up and running in short order using EM7.
Reporting is still a gigantic pain point, we invest a lot of cycles in manufacturing reports off-board -#notfun. While EM7 covers a lot of ground quickly and is capable of consuming enormous amounts of event and performance data, EM7 ironically has a hard time reporting on it - basic reporting is there, but if you let's say want to run a report for the last 90 days how many Cisco 2900 routers had a critical power supply incident that for one isn't easy and two needs a developer to write a custom report.
QA of their power-packs has been an uphill battle at times, and I feel like it's in part due to how EM7 is marketed. When a vendor claims they have a management pack for a given manufacturer, that doesn't necessarily mean its going to be dead on accurate for production use. If you need to make dead certain that the release is going to deliver I have come to learn every in step of the way to production needs thorough testing before putting it into a production environment - moral of the story here is make no assumptions and read your release notes. Also your team time for tuning the software release, like I said EM7 consumes alot of data, that always isn't a good thing.
For me the UI lays out very logically, then again I use it every day, but for many of our users navigating the UI gets confusing quickly and before long the user gets lost and frustrated and they give up. The UI for any end user facing systems needs to welcome all walks of life, EM7 at present( I know they are working on the UI currently) is really geared to the end users who are professional engineers not necessarily the weekender admin - which if you are professional engineer you're going to feel right at home.
Deployment went very smooth, their installation engineers still engage with us with is a luxury not every vendor can handle.
It's been a real workhorse for us, but you gotta take care of the horse.
As it relates to scalability : if you follow all the rules, take time to read the manuals, its infinitely scalable in my opinion. That said we haven't had any issues with scalability :)
Customer Service:
Superior to most, they have a good account coverage plan, we get treated pretty well even when there is bad news.
Technical Support:
Probably some of the best in the business at getting to the root of the issue quickly.
We implemented through a vendor team initially, our team seemed to have root level knowledge of the system. I haven't seen many of their engineers spending any time scratching their head on situations.
Kalani – thanks for your review. As you know, we’re constantly enhancing the ScienceLogic platform in response to customer feedback. The reporting enhancements you referenced are an area of emphasis. In upcoming releases, expect to see revamped reporting as well as significant usability improvements for all (including casual users and the weekender admin) as we introduce new navigation and workflows. Feel free to reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more information. We sincerely appreciate your feedback!