ScienceLogic Reviews

The most valuable features of any kind of monitoring system go to its core functionality. I have to know when my customers are down, I have to be able to report back to them on SLAs, I need to be able to also report back to them on capacity. It's no longer just a question of being up or down but how up or down something is in terms of its available capacity and our ability to react to that in a timely manner.

HOSTING's vision of the unified cloud is one in which customers don't have to tightly couple the services that they want from us with a platform that we choose for them. We want the customers to have the ability to deploy their applications across whatever platform they want, be that AWS, or our VMware platform, our Hyper-V platform. We want to be able to provide them consistent experiences across all of those. Then the integration points that ScienceLogic offers, which each of those key external and internal partners are absolutely critical to us.

The two main benefits are, one, integration with their API in our customer portal has allowed us to create some really interesting visuals. It's allowed us to create some really engaging capacity monitoring interfaces. The other side, too, is they're dashboard-ing and reporting, which through Single Sign-on, we've been able to integrate directly into our portal, so we can expose their dashboard-ing capabilities directly to our customers. The job of an MSP these days has really changed from just being a hoster to really being an aggregator and a trusted advisor. In the insights that their platform allows us to deliver really enables to do that.

Things that are key for me are really good turnkey integration with external platforms. I'm seeing a lot of interest in lately from our customers is synthetic transaction monitoring. Introducing that into their continuous monitoring practice, so seeing them integrate with folks like Ghost Inspector or AlertSite that do synthetic transaction monitoring, as a service, as a platform, and being able to ingest data from their APIs the same way they do with AWS and other platforms would really be key in giving a true 360 view of a customer's application health.

EM7 is a very, very stable platform. Mileage always varies when you're a service provider. You know that whatever technology you pick for any given solution is going to be, you're going to be pushing. The ScienceLogic team has been phenomenal in working with us to allows the system to scale to exactly what we need.

Scalability is key. One of the biggest challenges that you have with monitoring systems is just simply dealing with what I call the signal-to-noise ratio. There is a tremendous amount of data coming in and the system needs to be able not only to scale to address the full install base that we need it to, but it also needs to be able to ingest all of that data and bubble it up to our monitoring teams in a way that is understandable and actionable so that we are really able, as I said, to separate the signal from the noise. Their platform really enables us to do that.

The support's been fantastic. What I really like with working with a company that has a technical founder is that it really is a company that really cares about making great technology. That's not necessarily the case for what we've seen from past monitoring vendors, so it's been really refreshing working with the ScienceLogic team. It has a great technical team and also a great technical vision.

We knew the best way that you always know something because your customers are saying to you. My boss says to me a lot, "Our customers are the ones that should be pushing us. Our customers should always be pushing us to be better." That was in a sense that's exactly where we were. We were in a situation where our ability to integrate new features into our monitoring platform was taking way too long and was way too cumbersome. Our ability to keep that system current at a current patch level with a vendor was unbelievably complicated. Realistically speaking, we had a problem that we couldn't even deliver the baseline of services, let alone innovate. You hear that from your customers. After you've heard it from two or three really big customers, you know I've got to dos something about it.

It was heavily architecturally skewed because we understand monitoring systems. I know a lot about the architecture behind the way good monitoring systems work. Having seen a lot of bad monitoring systems, I really knew what we were looking for in terms of a distributed architecture in terms of the ability for collectors to dynamically fail and devices to be able to move within a collector group dynamically, in terms of not storing local state data out on collectors and warehousing it internally. Those are some of the key components there. But, outside of that it was your core components. I want to be able to do ICMP, HTTP, TCP, SNMP, those are all my basic stuff. I also want to have turnkey integration with all of the external platforms to really go and enable the unified cloud. That's existing integration with AWS, integration with Azure. More importantly, a vision that aligned with our own. We have a very clear and a very defined vision about the unified cloud and where we're taking that, so it's critical that's to partner with vendors that share that vision.

Nothing we do is straightforward. That's just the nature of operating at the scale that we do. I can tell you that over the course of nine months with a tremendous amount of input from their and support from their team in terms of design and implementation and architecture, we were able to migrate, I want to say, around fifteen thousand devices from a legacy monitoring platform into EM7 without missing a beat. You think about a nine-month project, you consider the amount of time that went into that. Nine months sounds long, but I don't think it is. I thinks that's probably less than it should have taken, and certainly less than it would have taken with other platforms.

There were three vendors that were a part of that evaluation, yes. Testing the system scale is not easy. There's a certain amount of art to that to extrapolating out how a system will behave at scale because we weren't going to roll the entire thing out just to see how it worked. We spent a lot of time doing functional testing and also a lot of time doing integration testing. It's key for us to be able to integrate with any platform that we're building both on the service delivery side, so we have the ability to automatically ingest devices that we provision in whatever cloud automatically into our ScienceLogic environment. Then be able to bubble performance and applicable alert data about those devices up into our customer portal. I would say the key evaluation areas were going to be around the presentation layer, so the ability for us to be able to leverage their dashboard-ing, their reporting capabilities, natively, which we integrated with through a single sign-on, their ability to expose an API that had a parity with their user experience.

It's interesting because whenever you ask somebody, "How's your API?" They always say, "Our API's great." Really the question you want to ask them is, "Does your API have parity with your UI? Is there anything your UI is doing that is special or hidden or doesn't use your API?" If the answer's yes, then you got to dig into that. Basically, what we found is that there is tremendous completeness with their own UI and their API. Realistically, we were able to build out a very, very full and rich experience in our own portal that we could expose up to customers. I would say the other real criteria there was around multi-tendency. A smart person once said, "Nobody builds products for service providers. We figure out how they work and we make them work the way we want to." In fact, it was my old boss that said that.

I would say that of the platforms that we evaluated, ScienceLogic was most built for service providers. They really had a good grasp around multi-tendency, a good grasp around organizational relationships with the monitoring system. We didn't have to force the data model to understand how we wanted it to think, it was well understood. We were very happy with our ability to integrate our customer base into that.

No platform is perfect, and if anybody tells you their platform is perfect, they're probably in sales. Realistically speaking, when you talk about the technology behind a platform, you talk about entering into a partnership with somebody like this to operate at this kind of a scale, it's what I call a five-year decision. It's something that I want to do and then not have to think about for at least the next five years. You don't do that with just technology. There's no one technology that you're going to do, that you're to select that's going to give you that. The package really is the technology and the people that are behind it. The team at ScienceLogic has done a phenomenal job helping us to scale and helping us to tackle any hurdles that we run into.

ScienceLogic is multi-tenant from the ground up, starting at the code level. With many other tools, you have to trick them into behaving in a multi-tenant fashion.

It gives us the ability to monitor everything from Windows and Linux servers to physical and virtual servers, SANs, network equipment, and firewalls.

Built-in event correlation and analysis intelligently suppresses expected and known events, while escalating alerts for urgent events.

The built-in runbook automation has helped drive greater efficiency.

The ability to quickly build our own monitoring templates for non-traditional equipment and network interface support.

It’s a platform which we’re able to integrate with. It's very flexible.

We now have intelligent alerting to distinguish between critical and normal notifications. The monitoring can scale as we grow.

Improved efficiency by using built-in runbook automation.

Extended monitoring coverage to non-traditional equipment.

We were able to reduce the number of environmental related tickets going to our helpdesk, by over 40%

We’re a growing cloud services provider, and set out to build a framework that would provide the scalability we needed to support future growth. ScienceLogic provides scalability beyond our current needs.

We were using a number of different tools to monitor our infrastructure and a large amount of time was spent separating urgent alerts from notifications. We needed to consolidate tools. We found that we could consolidate nine of our tools to their one monitoring platform.

In the end, the level of coverage, ability to scale, and built-in multi-tenancy gave ScienceLogic’s platform the edge in our comparative analysis.

The ability to see precisely what's happening and how those parts are interacting with a client's IT system.

True multi-tenancy has benefits because we can provide clients with their own fully transparent information from our system of what's going on at their network. It’s a real plus especially for clients who have their own IT teams and want to manage the networks themselves but with the reassurance that our teams are in the background.

It enables us to monitor a diverse set of vendors that we deal with. We work with major vendors such as Microsoft, Citrix, Cisco, Symantec and Dell and we were looking for something which out of the box would enable us to monitor all of these solutions.

For example, at its most basic level - if we have a server volume increasing in disk space we can avoid it filling up to the level where something goes offline. By being proactive and avoiding the problem it takes far less resource time for us to deal with that issue.

Life before ScienceLogic was quite responsive. Although we did managed services to a degree, they were more of a point in time check for the health of the client system rather than real time deep analysis. Now we’re able to resolve client problems not only before they have a problem but also when we have to troubleshoot we can look back in time and can get a picture of what was going on with the network to avoid repeat occurrences.

We used to spend a lot of time traveling to customer sites with engineers to do what we call a health check before we took new clients on board. This was nothing more complicated and sophisticated than an engineer driving to the location and filling in a Word document while on site - kicking the tires to see what a particular server was doing. We’re now able to deploy a data collector very quickly. We can even send collectors out that report to us without even going to the client's firewall and so we can very quickly get a picture of the prospective IT system that we're looking to support.

ScienceLogic also has much more efficient troubleshooting than what we were using in the past.

No issues with deployment. Deployment and time to value is rapid. It's very easy to install and agentless deployment means you can very quickly get meaningful information back from the system.

They provide quality support - immediately after deployment and throughout.

Previously we were using a whole mix and match of different tools to achieve different kinds of service delivery but the key problem for us was there was no holistic view of what was going on deep inside our clients IT systems. We knew that we needed to consolidate and get one tool that would give us that deep visibility.

We looked at a number of different solutions, but nothing matched what ScienceLogic could offer, both in terms of company personnel and the product itself.

ScienceLogic works with us to solve our problems and make our services better. We were able to reduce faults and nuisance alarms by 40 percent within a short time of implementing and using the ScienceLogic platform.

We chose the ScienceLogic platform because it really met and exceeded all of the requirements that we had put forth in the RFI. We will be moving a lot more services off premises to cloud providers and ScienceLogic already provides monitoring capabilities for public cloud providers. It fits in very well with what we expect to be doing in the future.

The number one requirement was the ability for the product to import our MIB files and start monitoring our custom applications right away. Because we produce our own custom equipment and applications the ease with which we could make our own custom monitoring templates was quite important to us. We were able to set-up our custom monitoring with very little support from ScienceLogic and that was something many of the other vendors we evaluated surprisingly couldn't actually do.

The platform has helped us streamline our processes for event management and the entire way we monitor our services. One of the ways we restored the confidence in our NOC operations folks was combining SNMP collected objects with other objects to reduce faults and nuisance alarms.

We were growing very rapidly and what we found was that we had too many tools. We had one tool for SNMP monitoring, another tool for monitoring infrastructure, a third tool for making graphs and reports plus a whole slew of home-grown scripts. We were worried that NOC operations would start to lose confidence in the tool sets which required a lot of extra training.

We interviewed many different vendors looking for the right solution to meet our requirements. We narrowed it down to a couple candidates and actually did a bake-off at our offices.

You don't need an army of consultants to get really good results out of the toolset. They've met all of our requirements plus other requirements that were less tangible in the RFI.

Coverage for Amazon Web Services. We can automatically discover, map, and apply the right monitoring policies to resources as they are deployed into AWS.

Support.

Savings for our IT Operations team.

Ability to automatically detect the dependencies that exist between our AWS based resources and onsite resources.

Intuitive and simple to use - frees up our technical efforts for other tasks.

Enhanced predictive analytics.

We can monitor many different areas of infrastructure: database, network, Wintel, Unix, Linux, etc. and combine them into one dashboard instead of needing to send out alerts. For example, instead of a CPU alert, we can provide a dashboard and allow the team to manage it themselves. I don’t need to send the events anymore, I can provide a visual representation of what’s going on in their environment.

We were able to increase the monitoring coverage of both our legacy and public cloud based infrastructures, while also cutting costs by over $2 million across a five year period.

We expanded monitoring of infrastructure elements by over 500%.

Our previous solution lacked monitoring support for hybrid IT environments. We would have needed to invest more than $10 million to retool our then monitoring solution to meet our needs. We knew that we needed to move from a Legacy Based Framework Tool to a Hybrid IT Monitoring Platform.

We decided that a “cloud first” strategy was the most appropriate strategy for us and began deploying new workloads to Amazon Web Services. Our move to a hybrid IT model presented several challenges, one primary challenge was monitoring an environment split across datacenters and AWS. Our existing IT operations management solution did not provide monitoring for both onsite and AWS based resources. Further, it did not provide the flexibility we needed to discover and monitor elements that appear and disappear in moments within a cloud-based environment.

We researched for 3-months in order find the best hybrid IT monitoring platform for our needs. I did an analysis of 25 distinct vendors comparing 100 different capabilities and 100 separate security concerns. After the completion of the analysis, I put the top 3 providers in a weighted average spreadsheet hiding their names, to ensure an unbiased result.

We were looking for a monitoring platform that, beyond supporting our hybrid IT needs, could provide separate dashboards to individual contributors, dramatically reduce costs, proactively alert when potential problems were approaching, and significantly cut the time it took to perform root cause detection.

We’re now able to monitor our entire IT environment, both onsite and offsite in AWS, from one solution, with 1/5 of the staff that would have been required with the legacy solution.

We now have a solution that lives on our customers’ sites. It actually pulls in the data real time and gives us the proper alerts when we need them.

The dashboards give us an added level of service offering to our customers.

The key features that we really appreciate are

• The built-in monitoring templates are very good for video.
• The platform enables us to do a lot of customization with our customers helping us to go the extra mile and differentiate our services.
• The multi-tenant environment is very good because we’re able to manage all of our customers from one view, while ensuring they only see their data.

Being able to email people when an alert happens and notify them right away is a big help to us and our customers. We've looked into things like having them log in to have their own dashboards. Certain executives like to see things that are going on or certain IT professionals for our customers.

Reporting and other features in the product give our customers a self-service ability so they don’t always have to contact us. Our customers now have a way to login themselves to use the product as well as we do.

We're working on the reporting stuff, that's probably our next phase- to work on the reporting, this way we can automate everything.

Before ScienceLogic, our monitoring was fairly difficult to do. We were kind of limited in our capabilities.

It has allowed us to grow. We’re able to offer new services to our customers that they didn't have in the past. So this is opening a whole new door of monitoring offerings to our customers and what we can provide for them on top of what we already are providing.

1. Registry information for better inventory pull information
2. Event information to granular level
3. Adding support/KB notes to events

Improved network infrastructure monitoring which reduces any unplanned outages.

Need to have a better export data/copy to clipboard option to transfer the data to do more analytics on the events/trends/graph.

I've used it for two years.

Error information doesn’t have a good information if something goes wrong while doing a device discovery (I tried this a while back- couldn’t be more specific).

Never got to know since we have two to three instances running.

I haven't needed to call them.

I haven't needed to call them.

Yes, and we switched because it had a heavy GUI and was impossible to suppress certain events.

In-house.

The many features offered for one price, including discovery, asset management, alerting, and ticketing, with simplified ease of integration across all features.

The ability to integrate a lot of data into one platform, with the ability to use the content to support operational and business groups.

Support for vendor private MIBs, simplify the approach to setup monitoring of all available SNMP data for a given platform type.

I've used it for over two years.

The lack of support for private MIBs required some custom professional services support. The vendor also needs to improve their attention to detail when defining the scope of professional services and managing the execution.

No issues with stability.

Use the professional services proposed solution to support private MIBs, we are encountering what appears to be poling time outs, which creates false positives. We are still working through this issue.

3/5, but you have to push the issues to ensure a good response and timely follow up.

3/5 overall, but their advanced support teams are very solid and I would give them a 5/5.

We used Openview, but the administrative skill set required specialized staff. We were looking for a replacement for basic monitoring and discovered this solution, which offered a lot more features, some of which were on our priority list and did not expect to find in one solution.

Straightforward, but once you get past discovery you have to learn how to setup monitoring and event messages. There is a lot of automation as discovered, but you have to understand what is automatically setup and why. Then you can look at customizing things for your environment.

Vendor team whose skill level I would give a 4/5 for the understanding of their platform.

The original investment started at $25K, with an additional $225K to scale it to support our requirements across a large enterprise with up to 5,000 devices and access for thousands of users.

Yes, but we ended up to an extended evaluation of this product and none of the other ones we found offered the broad range of features.

Commit resources to focus on learning and exploiting all of the features. With so many features it can be a distraction. Need to have a clear set of requirements that you are looking to satisfy. Then you can layer on other features to compliment your original strategy.