What is our primary use case?
When discussing network devices, for example. When you enable network monitoring, you should be aware of what is being monitored, such as devices, switches, and hubs. You must be aware in order to enable monitoring, but when you try to discover a device within ScienceLogic, it performs granular discovery. You don't have to worry about which location, site, place, or subset or subset of devices is installed or placed. It performs granular discovery.
We know when we talk about certain appliances, such as XClarity or certain Cisco appliances or other appliances, many nodes or hub switches, servers, and devices are connected to a single hub in an appliance. When you find a specific appliance, it will perform a granular discovery until the last child is found. If you try to find a parent, it will only find up to the last child, which is not the case with other monitoring tools. This is one of ScienceLogic's best features.
This happened in our previous company's environment, they didn't have a proper inventory where they could have given us the details of devices, hubs, and switches, because if it's a large company with a large infrastructure, they rarely get to have an updated inventory. It is extremely difficult to obtain each and every inventory when working on such projects or transitions. That's when ScienceLogic came up with this granular discovery, in which it discovers each and every child within that specific parent, appliance, or device.
As a result, we were able to return a report. Essentially, ScienceLogic is used as a reporting tool. Instead of giving us the inventory, we ran a report after the entire discovery to show the customer, what they have in their environment that they were not aware of. It was a nice thing to boast about because they were unaware of their inventory, but we were able to provide them with that inventory.
Another application was to use ScienceLogic as a source of truth. When we say the source of truth, we generally refer to CMDB in large environments. When we go for ticketing or any kind of event management, it generally refers to the CMDB, pulls the data, pulls the server information, drags it to the ticketing into the system, and it provides all the details in the ticket.
But sometimes the CMDB is not updated, either because it requires manual updating or because someone is attempting to upgrade or update it through some script or something, and somewhere, there is a miss. However, when we use ScienceLogic as a source of truth, there is nothing to miss because whatever is discovered within ScienceLogic can be used as a source of truth. Essentially, ScienceLogic would have the information that CMDB does not have.
These were two cases, test cases, or things that we came across. And we were overjoyed to offer the customer the solution, that they could use ScienceLogic as a source of truth, instead of referring to CMDB. That's when we suggested that they integrate ServiceNow with ScienceLogic and use ticketing instead of a CMDB. At the time, we had completely removed CMDB. Maintaining CMDB is also an expense. We actually save the customer money with the help of ScienceLogic.
How has it helped my organization?
As I previously stated, as an example, ScienceLogic can help you save money. It is not necessary to monitor your environment with multiple tools and applications.
When it comes to business problems, the first thing that comes to mind is cost reduction. I believe that most companies have a CMDB, I believe that if you want to cut costs, that can be a very good business value. It adds monetary value to the company. That is one of the factors.
Another issue that arises in the course of doing business is billing. Billing the customer, and billing the client. ScienceLogic can be an excellent tool for taking out or reporting such inventory, KPIs, and so on.
ScienceLogic can be used as a reporting tool.
When I was working as a transition manager, we had to create these reports every day after discovering certain devices. We had to create these pie charts, graph charts, and other graphics and then present them to the customer. We would tell the customer how many devices we had built, how many are being phased out, how many must be in place by next month, and how many have been temporarily shut down. It provided us with a comprehensive view of the entire infrastructure.
What is most valuable?
When it comes to features, the power pack is the most valuable. When you look at the current IT industry or IT market, you will notice that there is a lot of trust in the market. Everyone wants to integrate with a monitoring or event management system. I also understand that SAP and Oracle, for example, have their own monitoring tool. However, even if they have their own monitoring tool, they also require a ticketing tool, an automation tool, or a tool that generates tickets for those events.
In this case, we have ScienceLogic. With the help of these power packs, we can integrate any third-party tool. When it comes to storage, network devices, and third-party applications, there are over 400, 500 power packs available on the market. You can always integrate those third-party application tools within ScienceLogic and use them to create an event management solution.
It is not necessary to use ScienceLogic solely as a monitoring tool, because, to be honest, ScienceLogic has some limitations when it comes to application monitoring. If you ask my opinion on ScienceLogic, I believe it is a very good tool for infrastructure monitoring. You can use ScienceLogic for event management at the same time. Where will you make the dashboard, where you integrate third-party applications and create tickets and other solutions of this nature.
There is a lag somewhere on the application monitoring side. People typically use their own application monitoring tool. Take, for example, SAP. SAP-mon is its own monitoring tool. It selects its own application tools, SAP-mon, but ScienceLogic can be integrated with SAP-mon and events generated in our system. You can then create tickets from ScienceLogic for the SAP-mon team and the SAP team. As I previously stated, ScienceLogic as a tool has several power packs and there are numerous options for integrating a number of applications and integrating several third-party applications with ScienceLogic.
What needs improvement?
I didn't work much on ScienceLogic, but I was completely involved in the integration and transition of the product, as well as meeting with management and discussing the product.
In addition, I have worked as a visual contributor to discover devices and communicate with the networking team about how to come up with solutions.
Aside from all of this, there are limitations. When I mentioned limitations, one of the things I mentioned was application monitoring. However, if I talk about infrastructure monitoring, as I previously stated, I would prefer to use ScienceLogic as an infrastructure monitoring tool. When it comes to infrastructure monitoring, we have options such as Windows, and Windows environments. Each and every customer will have their own Windows 80 servers, as well as their own active directory and other Windows-based servers. When it comes to Windows-based servers, ScienceLogic suggests using PowerShell to monitor them.
PowerShell configuration, resource groups, and so on are not simple. Because, when you first start using PowerShell to monitor, you must manually configure all of these things by logging into the server, because PowerShell is not always configured. PowerShell has not been updated. PowerShell has some issues that you must troubleshoot. Believe me, I literally worked to discover approximately 12,000 Windows devices within the previous company around the world. When I first tried to discover it using normal discovery, it only found about 5,000 devices. Where exactly are 5,000 and 12,000? I literally had to work on each and every one of those 7,000 devices to figure out why it wasn't being discovered.
When it comes to Windows monitoring, we must plan ahead of time before we begin discovering devices. We must have knowledge of where the devices are and what exactly the legacy servers are, can just get rid of those legacy servers, what are the active directory servers, and how many active directory servers are there.
When we talk about Linux, Unix, AIX, and these devices, your storage devices, and network devices have little trouble. However, if you want to find these Windows-related devices, you must plan ahead of time. This was one of the issues I encountered.
ScienceLogic does not have application monitoring. We definitely need something integrated within ScienceLogic to monitor applications so that we don't have to rely on monitoring tools to monitor other applications. At least the ones that are market leaders, such as SAP, Oracle, and others.
It may try to start a monitoring application at some point. At the same time, it should have some automation options, such as the ability to automate events. Though it has, it does not have inside the box; however, we will need to do some scripting and other things to automate things. Perhaps it could include some within-the-box automation that can assist us in consolidating events or taking action on the consolidated events within ScienceLogic.
Buyer's Guide
ScienceLogic
February 2023
Learn what your peers think about ScienceLogic. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2023.
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For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with ScienceLogic for two and a half years.
I worked for a company that initially had a monitoring tool called Netcool, which was an IBM product. We were in charge of transferring ITM monitoring from IBM Netcool to ScienceLogic, as well as infrastructure and some aspects of cloud monitoring.
I worked for the previous company until last year. I worked on the transition project for one and a half years, during which we had to replace the IBM tool monitoring with ScienceLogic. Essentially, I was working as a transition manager as well as an individual contributor due to a resource crunch. We had to manage all of the customer requirements' sites.
I changed jobs after one and a half years. I returned to my current company, where similar to IBM when they have these managed services for customers, for monitoring, they have this GSA solution, which is completely a Kyndryl or an IBM-based solution. They have now decided to switch from ITM monitoring to ScienceLogic monitoring because ITM is an expensive product. The license is very expensive. As a result, we are currently working to transition from ITM to ScienceLogic. We are currently working on the integration phase.
We have two parts when it comes to monitoring. One is for monitoring, and the other is for event management. As a product, ScienceLogic can enable event management. IBM has decided to stay with NetCool because they have certain customization on GSM's side and they don't want to get rid of NetCool as a product. At the same time, they want to switch from ITM to ScienceLogic for infrastructure-level monitoring. There are quite a few advantages with ScienceLogic. That's when we decided to use ScienceLogic as our infrastructure monitoring platform instead of ITM.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability is fine. To be completely honest. I have been using ScienceLogic for almost two years. I don't believe there is a problem.
So far, performance has been satisfactory. As I previously stated, we had some issues with this Windows PowerShell. If you're talking about the PowerShell part, if we have a solution in the future, I believe it should be good enough. But, once again, PowerShell is a major issue within Microsoft. ScienceLogic has nothing to do with it, but there are certain businesses that are at ease with SNMP configuration. If you use SNMP to configure Windows machines and don't have any security concerns, you'll be fine. You can see that you don't have any infrastructure issues.
I don't believe there is any issue in terms of performance. Only the fact that, as I previously stated, I believe ScienceLogic, which is widely used by everyone these days, lacks application monitoring. I believe if it comes up with certain, within-the-box application monitoring or something along those lines. I believe it will be an excellent replacement for market monitoring tools.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
When we were doing this transition phase, three of us worked, but later we had a team of 12 because the project started working.
We began receiving numerous requests for user creation, followed by your adding of devices, discovering devices, fixing issues with PowerShell, and fixing issues with other connectivity.
We used to have infrastructure issues from time to time. For example, the database layer is ScienceLogic's main layer; everything fails if it fails. We had some Docker issues at times. Everything will come to a halt if Docker is not running. The application is stopped.
We had to create ScienceLogic support cases. Then we had to sit with them, figure out what was wrong, and troubleshoot. We had a lot of other things, a lot of other work that gradually began to pile up in our queue.
Then there was a team that was solely responsible for reporting, every day we would pull out a report and see how many servers were collecting data and how many were failing to collect data.
We had to troubleshoot why the ones that were failing to collect data were failing to do so. There were numerous BAU-related activities.
When doing a project activity, you don't need many people at first, but when you start working at a BAU level, you definitely need a team of at least ten.
As a tool, it is quite effective, but there are a few issues here and there, that we have to look into.
We also have this Azure environment, that we have to ensure is scalable, has high scalability, and high availability, and that you don't have an issue with all of those things. It all depends on how you intend to build your infrastructure. When it comes to scalability and high availability, I don't believe there will be any problems because we are using the cloud, which should be properly planned.
How are customer service and support?
When we first started doing this we are not given any instructions. Every time there is a new problem, we must file a complaint or open a case with ScienceLogic technical support. We have professional services as well as technical services. Professional services are services that you will be provided with when you first approach ScienceLogic as a product and want to have it in your environment.
Professional assistance Hours are the time you spend on integrations, building your intranet, and other tasks. After planning, you implement your environment, and when you begin working on a BAU, you begin working on technical services.
They offer two different types of services. One is professional, while the other is technical. Technical is mostly used to support BAU-related issues and activities. For example, as I previously stated, Docker will occasionally fail to work on the database layer, and when this occurs, you must refresh, stop and restart specific processes, and sync all data collectors and message collectors with the database layer. There are some steps that you must take.
In general, I've noticed that they don't have a step-by-step process. You must always log a case whenever you encounter a problem. They will arrive and log in. And that's when they go over all the steps with you, "Do this, do that, do this, do that." And they will assist you in resolving the problem. Again, their assistance is prompt. I will not say that we had to wait for something or that they made us extremely frustrated at any point in time because their support is extremely quick and pleasant. Whenever we had a problem, we filed a complaint, and they responded quickly.
They provide support around the clock, so we never had a problem with them. Whether it's with professional or technical services.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
When compared with NetCool. The first point I'd like to make is about licensing. Every company would like to have some rule that is budget-friendly. When it comes to ITM Netcool, the licensing is far more expensive than any other product on the market. At the same time, IBM never sells its products as standalone products. If a person wishes to purchase only Netcool/OMNIbus, they must do so as part of a package. ITM will come with Netcool/OMNIbus, Netcool/Impact, and Netcool dash, you'll have to buy everything together.
Customers do not always want everything. They only want one component of the product, but IBM refuses to sell it, and in that case, you're paying far more than you should. When it comes to Netcool Tivoli, one of the main constraints is money.
The second issue is that Tivoli is an old product that lacks many issues and granular monitoring. When I was talking about ScienceLogic, I told you that if you find one appliance, it will find all of the child's devices. In ITM, this is not possible.
However, there is also log file monitoring, for example. Log file monitoring is a common practice within IT infrastructure. Any team may wish to monitor or log. Whereas in ITM, we have to write custom scripts, which is not as simple. When comparing ScienceLogic to the ITM, we have power packs that allow us to integrate any number of third-party applications. We can't do that at ITM. There are times when I have to use IT-Cam to monitor applications because I cannot use ITM.
There are many differences I believe I have used a lot of monitoring tools, such as Nagios, Zabbix, and others. These are free and open-source tools. However, once I began using ScienceLogic, I discovered that the main thing that fascinated me was discovering each and every child, which I had never seen in any monitoring tool. It surprised us, and it surprised the customer as well. They were surprised to learn that switches, and hubs existed in the environment. Customers were pleased with the inventory report and that the product is so efficient, that it picks up everything.
How was the initial setup?
We were working on the cloud; our entire infrastructure was set up on the cloud, and we were using the Azure cloud. Our overall architecture was built on the Azure cloud. We also had specific collectors. ScienceLogic has three layers.
The collection layer, the main servers, the user interface or administration portal, and the database layer were all always based on Azure, but the collection layer was deferred. We also deployed the collection layer and message collection at the Azure, GCP, and AWS levels. Our infrastructure was mostly cloud-based. This was a private cloud environment for the company I worked for, as we never used a public or shared cloud environment.
The initial setup is not complex at all; in fact, it's quite simple. It's fairly straightforward because we already have the binary and images. There is nothing complicated about enabling the ScienceLogic environment.
When I deployed it for the previous company, there were only three of us. We also never worked together because we had shifts and a ScienceLogic support team that was initially assisting us on a few buildings. Because the support team is spread across the globe, two people had to work on the US shift, a few on the EMEA shift, and a few on the India shift. We had to report to management during the EMEA shift because the company is based in Switzerland, and we had someone to report all the issues and handle all the requests from the customer and other stakeholders. But, to be honest, you don't need much; it all depends on the environment, and how big your environment is. As the previous company is a large environment, we only had three resources working around the clock.
Initially, prerequisites must be met, we worked with the Azure team to open up all Firewall requests and such. The length of the process varies from company to company. After all of the prerequisites were met, it didn't take us a long time. Because we only needed three layers, the entire environment was built in about two weeks. The administration portal, the database layer, and the collection list are all available. There were two collection layers. The first was a message collector, and the second was a data collector.
Message gatherer, It's similar to an SNMP-based collector. It gathers information. It does not send any data. The data collector will collect data from other servers. When I mention servers such as AIX or Windows, or servers that send you data, I mean that all data is accumulated in this data collector. However, there are some devices, such as network devices, that continue to send without being asked. A message collector is required for these data.
Initially, when you try to implement an environment, not everything happens at once. You must take it one step at a time. The customer will initially advise if they want to go ahead with AIX or go ahead with Linux or go ahead with what is the easiest. An environment contains numerous elements, such as storage, network, Windows, AIX, Linux, hubs, switches, and a variety of other components.
We first decide which ones will be the first to be discovered. As a result, we develop data collectors. We continue to add data collectors as the load increases. You cannot decide that we need this many data collectors all at once. However, you should have the inventory ready when planning the implementation. In terms of the initial inventory, you will know how many data collectors to install. You begin with those items and gradually expand your data collector. However, as I previously stated, I believe that two to three weeks is sufficient for the initial setup.
When we talk about maintenance, we have to keep checking because the IT environment changes so quickly. We have a lot of switches, and a lot of child components coming or attaching to the appliances, and in those cases, we must constantly monitor the RAM, how it is being used, how loaded it is becoming, and how many child devices are being added, and so on.
When it comes to maintenance, we don't have to think about it because ScienceLogic has its own dashboard. You can add widgets to the dashboard, as well as all of your components, such as collectors, data collectors, message collectors, portals, and database layers. You can create a check in your dashboard.
On a daily basis, you can simply go to the dashboard and see how your environment is performing. It keeps alerting you that the file system is now full, or that we are using too much RAM, or that the processor is being overworked, and so on. It alerts you. We can create a dashboard like that.
There are some things that we need to check on a daily basis such as the collector because collectors are responsible for collecting data. Occasionally, too much data is loaded during data collection. That is when we must investigate.
We have this dashboard, and you can create your own. You continue to check your health on a daily basis. Whenever you decide to start working on any product, not just ScienceLogic. There are always these health check scripts, health checks, or dashboards. You can create that and have something ready or, actively look into it on a daily basis, and avoid unwanted situations.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not the best person to discuss pricing, but what I do know is that it's a use-and-go structure. You use this much storage and pay this much for it. That's how it is. Every time, we continue to add a large amount of data to the environment.
We are constantly adding new devices. Initially, if you have taken, say, 500 GB of storage within ScienceLogic, because ScienceLogic also needs to store your data, to report or to do anything, or to do any survey or data analysis, it needs to store, so you must have storage. Or perform any activity automation on the events, consolidate, or do anything with the events, you need storage.
When monitoring a company's entire environment, you need more and more storage. When you first started implementing ScienceLogic, you may have needed one GB. You'll need five GB tomorrow as you add more and more devices. You are adding data. You continue to pay each time you add storage to your application. They have brackets where you pay this much from this GB to this GB. or If you use more, you will be charged more. It's not on a usage basis; the licensing is not on the product, but on the storage that you are using.
What other advice do I have?
We need good planning when implementing ScienceLogic. And planning in the sense that, for example, when I was transitioning from ITM to ScienceLogic, I'll just give an example to make it clear. We already had certain monitoring for the customer when I switched from ITM to ScienceLogic. First, we must collect all of the monitoring data and create our own inventory. Then we must determine what is the current application that the company desires to have in the future. We must look at the present, the future, and the past. And we have to create a good plan for what we will see. And documentation is critical for any and all planning. After receiving those documents, you must have them approved by the customer.
We sometimes think we can do things on the fly. But, as I previously stated, ScienceLogic performs granular discovery in this case. Sometimes, such as with the network team, granular discovery is not desired. Because they do not want certain devices monitored, we must ask them again, what devices they need to be monitored. These are some of the things that should be considered or thought about. That is why I emphasize the importance of proper planning when implementing ScienceLogic. This is what I discovered because once you start discovering devices in ScienceLogic, you can't stop. It will discover everything from A to Z.
When you discover everything from A to Z, that, in turn, will cost you storage it will cost you everything. Then, when you start reporting it, there will be a lot of data, unnecessary data, that it will slow down your CPU.
There are numerous possibilities. When it comes to planning or implementing ScienceLogic, you must have a solid plan in place, as well as documentation and technical documentation. All of these factors are critical if ScienceLogic is to be implemented.
I would rate ScienceLogic an eight out of ten.
I'm working on a monitoring environment and would like a product to monitor a specific part of the application. Not more, not less, but a little of both. When we talk about SAP and ScienceLogic, for example, I know you can integrate SAP with ScienceLogic. You can also monitor processes, but only at the process level; you cannot monitor at the application level. That brings us to this point. However, I would give it an eight because the infrastructure was excellent. It appears to be a far superior product to IBM Tivoli. However, it does not support application monitoring. It had some collector issues at one point, but I'm not sure if it has since been improved or if new versions of ScienceLogic have been released. But, based on my limited experience, I like the product.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.