LogicMonitor pros and cons

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.

We only have one monitoring tool, and that is LogicMonitor. It does pretty much everything we need under one roof. They are very good at rapidly releasing new features. It's not like we have to wait six months or a year between new features and data sources. There is very quick development. If there is something that doesn't do it for us, I know I can just raise it with support or our delivery representative, and there is a good chance that that will be looked at. If it's not too much effort, we will see it released in the next few months. So, the solution is very good from that perspective. We have everything in LogicMonitor.

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.

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.

One thing that's very valuable for us is the technical knowledge of the people who work with LogicMonitor. We looked at several products before we decided to use LogicMonitor, and one of the key decision-making points was the knowledge of the things that they put in the product. It provides real intelligence regarding the numbers that you see on the product, which makes it easy for us technical people to troubleshoot. Other products don't provide you with such information. You see a value going up, but you don't know what it means. LogicMonitor provides such information. For instance, if a value goes up, it says that it is probably because your disk area was too low.

LogicMonitor added AI technology to help understand what's normal and that has helped quite a bit, so that's the feature I found most valuable in the product. The product is also doing quite well with identifying devices and customizing a particular Cisco version or model number. LogicMonitor continues to be active in updating what is available to be monitored, and it's been very good with keeping those things current, so that's another valuable feature of the product.

It is easy to set up and monitor an entire facility. This is crucial because we have around 80 facilities that require monitoring. LifePoint is a hub-and-spoke environment, so it is essential to understand all of the WAN interfaces.

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.

The initial setup is very simple.

The most valuable feature of LogicMonitor is the infrastructure monitoring capability.

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.

Their Logs feature is quite new. It is not as feature-rich as we would like it to be. There have been a couple of conversations internally around other log management tools, like Splunk, which may do more for us than LM Logs. The benefit of LogicMonitor is that our staff know how to use it, so we don't really want to move away from it, if we don't have to. I fully expect there to be more development in this area. It is their newest feature, so it is understandable that it hasn't evolved as some of the other stuff. It would be good to see a bit more development in this area, but I think the monitoring side of things is spot on.

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.

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.

One thing that could be really better is the mapping. Auvik is really good at it. They have a really nice way to give you a visual representation of your network, but in LogicMonitor, this functionality is not as powerful and as good as Auvik.

LogicMonitor should always improve AI because we are always striving for real intelligence. An additional feature we'd like to see in the next release of LogicMonitor is more in the area of identification of when the dominant workload is working. There are certain devices and applications that have cycles of their own. Some are used primarily during prime time, and some are used during the overnight timeframe, and better identification and classification of those workloads would be helpful. For example, we could then do some more planning about, for this particular set of devices, as it has a prime time environment, and we don't want to see a 24-hour average, as we want to see what is the 75th or 90th percentile utilization during the prime time when it is being used, whenever that prime time is.

LogicMonitor can easily easy to pull data from one item at a time. I have yet to find a good way to get LogicMonitor to show me all the WAN devices and how they're doing in terms of capacity.

Role-based permissions could be better and updating modules could be smoother.

I'd like to see more automation in the tool, especially around remediation.

Dashboarding capabilities could be enhanced. It is cumbersome, you must do it all at once, and then you must repeat the process every now and then.