LogicMonitor Reviews

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 However, this needs work to make it easier as the loss of data can occur if you are too out of date.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.

We use LogicMonitor to monitor our customer environments. Some customers opt to look after their own environments, but some customers have us monitor them for them.

We use it to monitor the availability of servers and of network hardware. We have some storage array networks that are being monitored by it as well. We really use it as a guide to help. We monitor all of the key components in the different environments that we have running under LogicMonitor, and we use LogicMonitor as an early-warning system. If a problem develops in a customer environment, and we're monitoring it with LogicMonitor, then we get fairly rapid notification that there's a problem so we can start looking into it and doing something about it.

Also, along with all of that monitoring comes a lot of information logging for things like bandwidth, so we can see how much data is coming and going over different links. If a customer came to us and said, "We're thinking about downgrading the network links that we have," we have evidence to present to them to say, "Yes, it's okay to do that because you're hardly using the network link." Or we can say, "We wouldn't advise you to do that because we've observed that you're using most of that link and, if anything, you need to increase your bandwidth."

The device numbers being monitored is definitely on the order of several hundred among our three or four dozen customers. We're probably monitoring 50 different environments.

The solution's ability to alert you if the cloud loses contact with the on-prem Collectors is the crux of the solution. The customers are relying on us being proactive and highly responsive to any outages in their environments. A lot of the time, when we're phoning the customer up and saying, "We've detected that you've got an outage here," the customer doesn't even know about it. It hasn't even filtered through and their people haven't reported it. LogicMonitor enables us to consistently really wow the customers by sorting that out. They're saying, "I didn't even know that there was a problem in the environment," and we're already getting on and fixing it because LogicMonitor has allowed us to do that. It's really good.

The deployment is all automated, once we've selected where we want the Collectors to go. It saves us time because we're not having to faff around doing it. That might save us an hour per customer. The agentless aspect of it speeds up the deployment. Once we've got a single Collector there, we can leverage the information that that Collector can gather from all of the other devices. That's also really good.

The monitoring is the most valuable feature, the ability to have Collectors monitoring the health of different services. That's the thing that really helps us.

Among the dashboards, it's the availability ones that are my favourites. We have them set up so that they're only going to flag problems. If we look at the dashboard and it's completely empty, then we know that everything's in the green. If we look at the dashboard and there are entries on it, it means that somebody, somewhere, has a problem.

We use LogicMonitor's ability to customize data sources where a customer is providing web services or when looking at the availability of shared storage arrays. That's where we've started to customize it a little bit more to look at specific metrics that the Collectors have.

LogicMonitor provides us with granular alerts tuning for devices and that enhances our monitoring. The granularity that LogicMonitor goes into is really good. At first it can be a bit overwhelming because there's so much to it. But once you've distilled down the bits that you need to be paying attention to, and the bits that you're not particularly interested in, then it makes it quite simple. And when I say "all of the bits that you're not interested in," you're not interested in them right now. But that's not to say that in the future a requirement won't come up where you actually need to look at those bits. The fact that it supports so many different monitoring features is really good.

One of the areas that I sometimes find confusing is the way that the data is presented. For example, a couple of weeks back I was looking at bandwidth utilization. That's quite a difficult thing to present, but they should try to dumb down how the data is presented and simplify what they're presenting. With some data types, it's not really possible to do that. 

But that's one of the good things about LogicMonitor: You've got all of the data there. The sheer wealth of data that it gathers means that you can take that data and manipulate it in other ways, if you want to.

We've been using LogicMonitor for three or four years now. We're partnered with LogicMonitor, so we can resell the solution as well.

I work in a pre-sales role, so when customers need new solutions they will come and ask. If I'm looking to scope replacement hardware, or if I'm looking to review the bandwidth utilization at a customer site, that's when I would go into LogicMonitor. Our service desk, predominantly, does the day-to-day monitoring. Whenever I come to LogicMonitor, it's a case of delving into historical data. At the same time, I've got an appreciation of how the solution works and the cool stuff that it'll do.

I've got no reason to believe that it's unstable, at all. I've not heard of Collectors crashing or the main console being unavailable for any extended period of time. There are periods of maintenance where it would be unavailable, but I'm certainly not aware of anything that was cause for concern with regards to the stability.

It scales well; no concerns whatsoever.

I've never actually used their technical support, but I know that our guys have, and they've always been able to fix problems fairly quickly. The technical support, as far as I'm aware, is really good.

I believe LogicMonitor monitors most devices out-of-the-box, but that was done with the setup which I wasn't involved in. We've got a lot of different customers. They've all got different types of network hardware. They've all got different storage arrays. Some of them have different types of hosts from different manufacturers. But we're able to monitor all of them with LogicMonitor because the information that LogicMonitor is pulling from them is common across them. The devices include Dell and HPE hardware, such as storage arrays, including Nimble, as well as a lot of Cisco networking gear. It will even monitor stuff that isn't enterprise-grade, but provided that something is enterprise-grade, it typically conforms to all of the WMI monitoring capabilities that LogicMonitor plugs into.

We have about half-a-dozen people who use LogicMonitor, and they're mostly third-line support engineers, so they're quite senior engineers. We have first- and second-line support and they just do the monitoring, but a lot of the really serious investigation, if there are any issues, go over to senior roles.

It gives us the ability to talk about our monitoring solution and service with a very high degree of confidence in ourselves. And we can set very high SLAs because we know that LogicMonitor is reliably going to tell us if there's a problem anywhere. That will enable us to start working on it very quickly, which in turn will help us to deliver very high SLAs  and very rapid response times to our customers. Obviously, customers are going to be happy about that because they want things fixed quickly. That is the best benefit that I see from it.

It's an enterprise-grade solution and competitively priced compared to the other solutions that are out there. If it were extortionately expensive, we wouldn't be using it. If it weren't doing what we needed it to do, we wouldn't be using it. Our organization is not huge, but LogicMonitor is worth every penny that we pay for it. I've never heard anyone say, "I'm not sure that we're getting good value for money from this product." It's integral to our business.

When you compare it to competitors, maybe some of the competitors' products are going to be a bit cheaper, but it comes down to the functionality that you're getting. You're paying for what you're getting, so I would say it's good value for money.

The solution's overall reporting capabilities are pretty good. We've assessed a lot of different solutions, because if we're offering a monitoring service to customers, it needs to be really good. We looked at SolarWinds and other ones, but LogicMonitor was the one that consistently came out on top across the monitoring requirements. LogicMonitor was hands-down the best.

LogicMonitor consolidates the monitoring tools that we need in one solution. We didn't have any tools in place originally, but all of the different types of things that we want to monitor comprised one of the reasons that LogicMonitor came out on top. It was the sheer breadth of functions that it has. A lot of the monitoring solutions that we were looking at would only do maybe 75 percent of it. They would monitor the uptime of servers and they would monitor the availability of network links, but they wouldn't give us any information around the bandwidth utilization of those network links. Other solutions would give us the bandwidth utilization, but then they wouldn't be able to monitor the servers. LogicMonitor gave us everything in one package.

It's the depth of data that it gathers that I find really useful because there's nothing worse, when you're trying to find information about something or dig deeper into something, than hitting the bottom of the information really quickly and not having enough information to work with. With LogicMonitor, there is a load of information to dig through. It's a really good solution for that.

I'm not aware of any false positives that we get through LogicMonitor. That could be because we've tuned it over time so that we've tuned out any of those false positives. But generally speaking, if LogicMonitor flags something, there is a problem. Sometimes those problems are transient and something is just flagged because there was a blip in the system for whatever reason. But then it resolves itself without any intervention. LogicMonitor still allows us to see all of that stuff.

There are always lessons learned when you're running anything like this at scale. You set things up the way you think they should be set up initially, and then, with 20/20 hindsight you invariably decide, "Well, we didn't need to do that. We should have done this." But the solution allows you to do that. You don't end up fenced into a corner where you configured something the wrong way initially and you can't undo it. If you do see ways of doing things better, you can change them as you go.

I would rate LogicMonitor a 10 out 10. I've used other monitoring solutions over the years, and LogicMonitor does things really well. The console may not be quite as flashy as others that I've seen, but it's perfectly functional. Having a flashy console is not necessarily the be all and end all because, often, if the console is flashy, and it distracts you from what you're looking at. Every time I've ever used LogicMonitor, it's given me everything I needed out of it. I've got no complaints about it whatsoever.

We are a managed service provider, so we have a wide range of deployments. LogicMonitor, as a whole and software as a service solution, is deployed with collectors on-premise, which also ties directly into cloud providers.

We primarily monitor Citrix environments for customers. That varies from the delivery side, so network Citrix ADCs as well as virtual desktops and the supporting infrastructure around that. That's probably our primary use case.

While we do some NetFlow capture for other managed service clients, the primary use case would be Citrix monitoring.

LogicMonitor really improved our workflow as a company. Previously, we had been using a combination of about four or five tools. We were able to consolidate those all into LogicMonitor, which significantly improved our response time to new customers and onboarding time for new employees.

We can create granular alerting for devices. Then, since we are a managed service provider, we can have very granular alerting, not only for our own purposes, but where customers would like to be alerted directly on specific issues. It is very easy to build escalation chains that include the customer as well as our own team.

LogicMonitor's AIOps give us a great view of performance over time and potential changes in performance.

We have been able to tune LogicMonitor very granularly and eliminated most of our false positives. Any monitoring platform is going to give you false positives to some degree, but we have definitely reduced our false positives with LogicMonitor by at least a half.

The dashboarding is very useful. Being able to create custom data sources is one of its biggest features which allows quick time to market with new features. If one of our vendors changes their data format or metrics that we should be monitoring, then we can quickly adjust to any changes in the environment in order to get a great user experience for our customers.

We have created custom dashboards for our customers to give them a single pane of glass view as far as what their environment looks like in relation to their Citrix environment or VMware Hypervisor environment. LogicMonitor is a combination of things that they have pre-built. Especially along the VMware infrastructure, they have some great dashboards canned and ready to go. On the Citrix side, we have developed a lot of our own dashboards for customer use. We have gotten great feedback from those, as they're very easy to throw together and provide a lot of value to our customers.

We use custom data sources extensively. It's one of the greatest features of LogicMonitor, as a product. We can have very granular control over our data sources. Customizable data sources are one of the primary draws to LogicMonitor, and we do use them extensively. Developing new LogicModules is very simple. We primarily use PowerShell, but there are also a myriad of other options depending on what your target operating system is.

LogicMonitor alerts us very quickly if one of their collectors loses connectivity with the cloud. Occasionally, we will get alerts for customers where we don't have extensive monitoring in place, and they may not be aware that their site is down or that there are other issues with their environments. We have had occasions where the alerts that we get from LogicMonitor that the collectors are down might be our first indication where a customer is having an issue.

At this time, we are using AIOps for dynamic thresholds and anomaly detection. For anomaly detection, we found it quite helpful because it will give us an idea of when there is an anomaly in the environment. For example, if you have a backup job that normally would run, but it isn't running or if there is a bulk data transfer that wouldn't normally occur at a particular time, we can have it alert one way or another. That is a great feature, as far as LogicMonitor's AIOps toolkit.

We have found LogicMonitor's reporting capabilities to be somewhat lacking. That is one of the only areas that we really thought was not as strong as it could be. One of the great things is the dashboard functionality, which we were able use to work around the reporting functionality. Instead of having a canned report that gets emailed to our customers, they have a live dashboard that they can log into and view the things we would normally include in a report. They can have a live look, where they can really drill into the data and see what is there.

LogicMonitor's reporting capabilities definitely could use an improvement. We have made do with the dashboarding and done what we can to make that work for our customers. However, there are definitely customers who would like a PDF or some kind of report along those lines, where we have been utilizing other tools to provide them. The out-of-the-box LogicMonitor reporting is the only thing that we have been less than impressed with.

We have been using LogicMonitor for about four years.

LogicMonitor's stability has been very good for us. We have not experienced any major outages or issues with LogicMonitor as a product in the several years that we've been using it.

We have a team of a couple of people who handle the implementation and deployment of LogicMonitor. We have a larger team who handles the day-to-day support. One of the great features of a LogicMonitor being a software as a service product is we don't have to monitor or manage the tool itself. The collectors update automatically. We handle the operating system running the collector within our normal toolset. Therefore, it gets Windows updates and does all these things on its own or through that toolset. There is very little time that has to be spent managing the tool itself. We are really just managing our systems in the tool. 

Scalability is actually one of the reasons that we went to LogicMonitor from our own internal tool sets. The scalability is as big as you want to go. I've seen other customers that have thousands of endpoints in there without any issue. We certainly have not run into any scalability issues in our environments.

We have a variety of users who interact with LogicMonitor on a daily basis. We have our managed services team who work directly with the customers and are in there on a day-to-day basis doing remediation of issues as they arise. We also have our implementation group who take care of onboarding new customers, working with them on any custom data sources or custom monitoring needs that they might have. Then, our customers are able to log and see their own environment along with the dashboards and things that we built for them. It really has been a great tool for our team and customers to be able to see all of that. 

The role-based access control that LogicMonitor provides is very robust. We are able to provide single sign-on for our users as well as multi-factor authentication for our customers. Therefore, the role-based access control and authentication components of the LogicMonitor product are excellent.

Our use of LogicMonitor is constantly increasing as we roll our managed customers into the platform. We definitely plan to increase our managed services, and directly as a result, increase our utilization of LogicMonitor.

We have only had to engage with technical support on a handful of occasions over the last four years. Thankfully, the product runs very well; we've had very few issues with it. On the couple of occasions that we have had to engage technical support, they have been very quick with first-call resolution, and we've been very happy with our experience during that process.

LogicMonitor provides very wide support for just about any device that you can use in an enterprise environment. We've used it for VMware, XenServer, and Hyper-V on the hypervisor side. On the storage side, we have people using NetApp and Dell EMC. On the networking, we are using Cisco. We also have some customers running UniFi gear and Juniper. There are just a massive variety of devices that it can monitor out-of-the-box.

LogicMonitor was a great move for us in terms of consolidating our monitoring tools. We previously used a combination of paid and open source tools to monitor our customer environments. Being able to consolidate to LogicMonitor has allowed us to save significant time in server management when managing the tool. We have also seen a lot better onboarding times for our employees coming to the environment. It has been a great gain all-around.

The customer onboarding time was cut down by a half to maybe three-quarters. As far as the employee onboarding time, they only have to learn one tool instead of having to learn multiple tools. We have consolidated our collector or data source development from probably three languages down to just PowerShell. That has been a huge gain. It's much easier to find resources that can learn or know PowerShell, so that's been fantastic.

LogicMonitor replaced Observium, Zabbix, Nagios, and SolarWinds.

The initial setup with LogicMonitor was very straightforward. The team at LogicMonitor worked with us to deploy our first collector, then walked us through how to create groups and assign properties to the groups or devices. Most devices have very good metrics out-of-the-box, as the data sources that LogicMonitor provides are excellent for the vast majority of devices. Where we have had to create our own data sources has been with our managed services around more complex data sets, not a specific device.

In our organization, deploying to our internal systems took probably six hours. It was very easy.

We did the initial implementation with the LogicMonitor team. They had a very straightforward strategy as far as getting it deployed. It was very easy to get our devices added in there. As we have moved forward, we have certainly learned different tips and tricks as far as how we organize devices into categories or groups in order to effectively monitor devices with minimal user interaction.

The return on investment with LogicMonitor has been excellent. We have seen a great reduction in the number of hours spent managing the tool as well as the ability to monitor a wide variety of services and systems without significant investment, in terms of time for developing custom modules or having to dissect a tool to figure out exactly what we need to do to add the functionality that we're looking for. On top of that, being able to onboard our own employees in a much faster method with only having to learn one tool instead of having to learn four or five tools has been a gain to the net positive with our onboarding process.

Our customer onboarding process is now automated. We don't have to go in and manually create a large numbers of devices in multiple platforms. We go through the process and install the collectors at the customer site, then we have templates that we utilize to deploy LogicMonitor out to those collectors. The automation with LogicMonitor has probably saved us 20 or 30 percent in time, as far as deployment to customers goes.

As a managed services provider, the licensing model that LogicMonitor provides us is excellent. We are able to scale up and scale down as needed. The pricing is reasonable for the amount of features and support that they provide.

As a managed service provider, we have the highest level of licensing that they offer, so we don't have any extra fees. I believe there are some add-ons for some of the lower tiers of LogicMonitor service, but that's not something that we use with our agreement.

We found that the amount of time that we were spending on managing the tool or doing upgrades was significant. We found that the cost of LogicMonitor was less than the cost to maintain some of these open source products that we had running. The other side of that is there were some new features that we wanted to roll out to decrease our footprint as far as what we're monitoring. The time that we would have taken to develop or enable those modules in our toolsets would have had a higher cost than moving to this software as a service based product.

We evaluated a handful of options. The ability of LogicMonitor analysis as a managed service provider really shined. A lot of the other products didn't have a great MSP portal or their role-based access control was not really mature enough to handle multiple tenants. Therefore, LogicMonitor won out very quickly when we started to evaluate most of the players out there.

We looked at SolarWinds and a couple of other solutions.

If you are looking to implement LogicMonitor for the first time, work through their available documentation. There are a couple of certifications that they offer which are very good and give you a good foothold into the process. Then, talk with people who are currently using LogicMonitor. There is a great support community out there with people who are more than willing to help.

AIOps does provide a very useful data set. They have been continually improving it. AIOps is one of those things, which is there and we use it a bit. While the dynamic thresholding is interesting, the anomaly detection is probably more a nice to have, and not more of the primary features that we use.

We have not utilized the automated discovery and deployment. With managed services, we have to keep track of how we charge customers. Generally, we have a specific list of devices that we're going to monitor, so we don't use the discovery features on LogicMonitor.

As far as monitoring platforms go, I have worked with a wide variety. I would give LogicMonitor a 10 out of 10.

It is to monitor our customer’s infrastructures. We provide the service as part of our managed service offerings. We monitor our customer networks and infrastructures for things, like availability, vital statistics, and the various services, that they have running in their environments. We provide a NOC and Service Desk that actually responds to alerts that come up and use the tool to allow them to be proactive in looking after their environments.

It is clean and clear compared to other products that we have used. This has made it easier to get to the root cause of a problem, because it's easier to see (through the visualization) where the problems lie.

I have worked on several data sources where I've either customized what's there already or created additional ones that don't exist. Also, LogicMonitor have been very flexible in terms of providing resources to assist with building custom data sources. If we have a requirement, we can approach LogicMonitor and they will assist us in getting the data that we are after.

It has improved our control over the environments that we manage. With a lot of products, you can just pop a device and get a metric out the system. With the LogicMonitor, you can do a lot of manipulation through scripting, then calculate the results that you're getting. It makes you more efficient and able to get the data in the particular format that you want.

You can do a lot of tuning of alerting, from the device group down to the data source and individual instances of those data sources. This is very flexible. We have many customers who have their own requirements of what they want us to do alerts on, so I was asked to be more flexible with our monitoring and alerting. I now can provide more bespoke, customized services for them.

LogicMonitor alerts us if the cloud loses contact with the on-prem collectors and we have found this advantageous. We have email alerting and an integration with our ticketing system. In some instances, we have automated text messages and phone calls for the more critical services. When our collectors do happen to go down, that's a P1 situation because we've lost complete sight of the customer's environment.

We have started using Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) capabilities more for the anomaly detection and for troubleshooting. The root cause analysis is something which we're testing now to see how it will work for us. These features will take a lot of noise away from the alerts when they come in.

One thing which has really helped is the integration that we have between LogicMonitor and our ticketing system: The ability to be able to log and update the ticket. We do have additional functionality to this integration as well, where if we have a number of alerts for a particular device in a period of time, then it will then create a problem ticket in the ticketing system and attach the associated incident tickets. All of these pieces help dramatically in terms of keeping everything central in the ticket. We know when things have gone down or cleared. It's not repeatedly opening and creating tickets for every single failed poll. In terms of the whole ticket management process, it's helped immensely with that.

Most of the products that we work with it does monitor out-of-the-box because we work with a lot of the big vendors, like Microsoft, Cisco, Palo Alto, Citrix, etc. They are very good at having the data sources readily available for those.

The most valuable feature is the visualization of the data that it is collecting. I have used many products in the past and they tend to roll up the data. So, if you're looking at data over long periods of time, they start averaging the data, which can skew the figures that you're looking at. With LogicMonitor, they have the raw data there for two years, if you are an enterprise customer. If you are looking at that long duration of data, you're seeing exactly what happened during that time.

I have probably two types of favorite dashboards:

1. Dashboards that give a general overview of our whole environment and a complete sort of NOC-level view that can be drilled into if there isn't an alert.
2. I like the dashboards that can be very granular into a particular service or piece of equipment. For example, if you were looking at a dashboard just related to Citrix, you can have a huge amount of detail on one page. Taking all the metrics into visual graphs, pie charts and big number widgets which makes it a lot easier than having to work your way around the devices that you are monitoring to bring the data that you're interested in altogether.

We are quite a large networking company. One of the features that we like with LogicMonitor that they have out-of-the-box is NetFlow, which is a great tool to help troubleshoot something. This has improved how we can provide a service to our customers.

The anomaly detection is a very good tool because you can compare the statistics that you're looking at against a week or month ago to see if it's something that's truly out to the norm or not. The visualizations that I get are very powerful. These capabilities enable us to be more proactive in resolving issues and preventing problems. If you are managing a customer's network as you should be, you should be looking at these tools and visualizations on a general day-to-day basis to understand what is happening with the customer's network. It's very useful to use these tools to learn about what's going on and know what the norm is for those networks. Then, you can get to a point where you're tuning your alerting to be a bit more in tune with what the actual norm is for that customer.

The solution has consolidated the monitoring tools we need into one. A reason why we moved to LogicMonitor would be the additional features that are provided, like NetFlow. We would use a separate solution for that and configuration management as well. Just to have those additional items built into the product has been a really good part of the product.

The topology mapping is all based on the dynamic discovery of devices that could talk to each other. There is no real manual way that you can set up a join between two devices to say, "This is how this network is actually set up." For example, if you have a device, and you're only pinging that device for availability and not getting any real intelligent information from it, then it can't show you which devices are actually connected to it. Before the topology mapping was released, I was working with product management and did raise this issue at the time. I haven't seen it yet, but it was something that I suggested to them that they should allow customers to be able to build their own topologies, or at least to override what's being discovered, just for visualization more than anything.

I can completely understand that the old topology mapping is how the root cause analysis and the alert suppression work, which is all dependent on that as well. So I wouldn't want to override that in terms of functionality. But, in terms of a visualization on a map, it would be a big plus to be able to do that.  I have been told that this is being worked on in the background.

Just over two years.

It is a very solid platform. I haven't noticed any real outages from my point of view. I've seen when LogicMonitor emails out to say, "There is currently a problem in these particular regions," but I don't think I've actually seen myself experiencing those issues. They are very good at communicating out what's going on. In terms of actual availability, I've never really seen an outage on the platform at all.

Because it's a SaaS offering in terms of scalability, onboarding customers is more on the LogicMonitor side. They are the ones who need to have the capacity to onboard these customers, and I've never had an issue so far. From my understanding, they are growing month on month in terms of their infrastructure.

There are definitely limitations with the sizing of the devices that LogicMonitor provides. It's based on the number of instances in general. A lot of the time, I have customers on a large collector who say something like, "It needs to be a particular spec for 10,000 instances." On the customer sites, I have the same spec device with 50,000 to 60,000 instances, and it's working perfectly fine. So in terms of the actual scalability, there are restrictions, but I think LogicMonitor has been quite conservative in terms of what they've published and say that they're actually capable of. In my experience, I've been able to push those boundaries a fair amount.

From our company's point of view, there are probably about 50 to 55 users who access LogicMonitor to use it in one way or another. Then, we provide logons for our customers as well, if they want to see their own environment. Service desk and NOC analysts are the main people who use the platform, then we have our service management team who log on there to get information for monthly reports or outage queries.

We do use quite a lot of the platform. There is room for growth, but it's just one step at a time while we're getting used to the platform and as and when we have a requirement for using additional features.

The great thing about LogicMonitor is that you have the inbuilt chat within the platform. You're getting through to people that know the product and not getting through to people who are just logging tickets. Most of the time, you're either getting an answer straight away to your problem or they try their very best before they actually have to escalate it somewhere else. I seriously can't fault their technical support.

LogicMonitor replaced our other monitoring solution, ScienceLogic, which was very similar to this platform in terms of multitenancy and customisation. The previous platform charged a premium cost for the additional features that come with LogicMonitor. To have the additional pieces native in this product is a huge advantage.

We evaluated about 6 products before moving to LogicMonitor.  The decision to move was based on features, ease of use and commercial elements.

Most products are very good at onboarding devices onto the platform. LogicMonitor is no different either. Once it has some credentials that it can use, it will automatically discover the metrics that it wants to apply against them. They are very good at setting some good baseline thresholds, so they give you a good starting point with those data sources to say what you should be alerting on and at what levels. Because of that, it does reduce the time down it takes to onboard a customer.

For the average onboarding time, you have several factors that can contribute to it. You must make sure that you have the right credentials to access devices and the devices themselves are accepting access to them. The LogicMonitor process has improved how long it takes to onboard a customer, especially with the time it takes to provision a collector. A collector takes minimal time at all. Whereas with my previous vendor, towards the end of our relationship, it was taking a long time to get the collectors up and running. A lot of the time, you had to get support involved because it wouldn't happen properly.

We used the professional services of LogicMonitor.  They were amazing and extremely efficient.  They had experience of migrating from our previous platform and were able to automate as much as possible.

I think that we have seen ROI. We moved to LogicMonitor because of the types of devices that we are monitoring. It’s better for us now with the efficiencies that we're getting from the platform. It's definitely benefiting us. It's more than just having a tool. It's something we can use day in, day out, giving us good insights to what is happening.

It has saved time because you have the information that you need in one place. In turn, the productivity is better because of it.

The licensing side of things with LogicMonitor, is quite simple. It is one license per device. LMCloud and LMConfig is slightly different but still a simple model.

The standard license it's very straightforward versus my previous vendor where there was like six different tiers of licensing on the devices that you're monitoring based on the number of metrics they were getting per device.

From what I understand, they are bringing out a number of new features, where there will be a different licensing model for those features. So, it will be interesting to see how that comes about and affects things. However, today it hasn't been too bad. It has been a very straightforward licensing model.

Take your time with it. A lot of the delays that we had were around customers not giving us access to their networks to get the collectors installed. We had a very strict timeline that we had to follow when we were doing the migration because our contract was ending with our previous vendor. We had to get everything all up based on a particular date, and it was down to the wire. We were very close to actually not monitoring a couple of customers because they just weren't giving us the access we needed. So, my advice is if you're onboarding the product and you are dealing with many customers, then just make sure you give yourself enough time.

The reporting capabilities are within average. They are good for certain point-in-time reports that you might need. However, most reporting that we do is service reports that we provide our customers at the start or end of the month. Because we try and look at various data from multiple systems in one report, we use an external product to get the data from the LogicMonitor API that we want to put into one report. With the reporting in LogicMonitor, you would have to run many reports to try and get all of those pieces of data. Therefore, we use a third-party product so we can just run one report, have it all automated, and take away the administrative headache. There is nothing wrong with the reporting. It's just for our requirements: We need the data to come from LogicMonitor and other platforms as well.