We use it for monitoring our customer networks, for monitoring network devices, and we also use it for monitoring our hosted environment.
We're a managed service provider. We have LogicMonitor deployed so that we not only have our devices input into the system, but we also manage a lot of resources for our clients in it. We have it set up so that they can only see their items in there, through a lot of access control. We have a local presence with the collectors, the polling stations, while the data resides in the cloud. Once we pull the data, it then shifts all the data up to the cloud for long-term storage. LogicMonitor is all SaaS-based, other than the local collectors.
Before LogicMonitor, we were using another tool, and deployment of that tool took a lot of time, effort, and energy from our team, and it was very customized. While the end-product could have been great, because everything is so customizable, the problem was that we couldn't get up and running very quickly. With LogicMonitor, we didn't lose any of that customized look and feel, but we were able to get up and running so much faster. We went from onboarding even simple networks over the course of weeks to down to about a week.
We're able to monitor most of the things that our customers worry or care about. That's mostly because of the flexibility of LogicMonitor. The beautiful part about this is that if something is not currently in the system at the moment, the support from LogicMonitor has meant that it gets ramped up pretty quickly.
For customers who have multiple monitoring platforms, it's definitely very easy to simplify and get to a situation where there is one place for monitoring everything. That's definitely been helpful for them.
LogicMonitor's collectors, along with its templated integrations and dashboards, enable us to automate our onboarding process and roll it out to new customers. We've learned how to make it our own, based on what LogicMonitor provides us. We've been able to make ourselves more efficient, absolutely. The faster we can get online and onboard customers, the faster we can get to the point of turning their service on. That means that we can go from a non-paying customer who has agreed to work with us, to a paying customer who's now fully onboarded. We then have them working through the specifics of a managed services solution, outside of the monitoring tool, which is very important for us.
The breadth of things it's able to monitor, the simplicity of the deployment, and how quickly we can get it up and running are the biggest factors when it comes to helping us win new business. Functionally, there are no aspects of LogicMonitor that hinder that ability. It has definitely helped our margins, as an MSP, especially on the monitoring side, because we can get up and running so quickly. It's an absolute must for us to have the tool.
Seeing how easy it is to manage devices, how simple it is to add, remove, or modify a device, and the amount of data that's included out-of-the-box whenever you add a device, makes it far superior to any product. There are no add-ons needed. You license a resource or a device and you don't have to worry about adding a plugin to get all the additional metrics and the full depth of device data. This just happened last week on a customer demonstration call with a customer that has experience with SolarWinds. The customer saw how easy it was to get up and running on LogicMonitor and they were immediately sold and said, "Okay, give me a quote." That's a real scenario in which this product helped us. It's those aspects that not only help us gain new customers, but also to retain customers.
Overall, LogicMonitor saves us time. It's hard to quantify how much now, given that we've been using it for as long as we have.
When I consider LogicMonitor for future-proofing our business, with the ability to monitor customers' future IT environments, I'm pretty comfortable with it. That's because anything that we have come to them to request—whether it be a new feature, or having input into the UX and UI designs—they've been very open and very responsive to. Their support has been very accommodating. When it comes to looking at what could potentially be coming down the road, or to being future-proofed, I feel pretty good, given my experience with the types of special requests I've brought to them.