Our usual use case of ScienceLogic is as a strategic monitoring tool for all the customers in our company, and because of that reason, all the accounts and projects are migrated from other monitoring tools to ScienceLogic. Before migrating from other monitoring tools to ScienceLogic, first, we need to build the database servers as well as collector servers. Once the setup is ready, we then need to build the onboarding for the devices.
Before onboarding any device into ScienceLogic, we need to check the prerequisites, such as whether ping is open from the collector to the endpoint server, whether Telnet is working, and whether WMI is open. These are the basic prerequisites that need to be met before onboarding any device into ScienceLogic. Once the prerequisites are met, we then go for onboarding. Before we onboard, we first need to build the device groups and create the credentials we are using, either Windows or Linux.
Additionally, we need to prepare the templates based on whether it is a Windows server or a Linux server, reflecting the dynamic application which is essentially a small script that helps collect information from the endpoint server. For instance, if it is CPU, the script connects to the server to capture the CPU metrics. Similar dynamic applications exist for disk memory and others, based on customer requirements. Once the template is ready, I will push that template to the server, and that's the basic onboarding. After onboarding, when the OS classification is prepared, such as Windows 2021 or 2019, we need to validate data collection issues and enable the alerting rules and configurations. Alerts can be directed to ServiceNow tickets or email notifications, and based on that, we need to create the alerting rules.
The features and capabilities of ScienceLogic that I have found the most valuable include its ability to monitor server metrics as well as application-level metrics, similar to other infrastructure monitoring tools in the market. While each tool has its capabilities, ScienceLogic stands as one of the tools that monitor the server and application metrics effectively. However, it is not as capable for OS cloud platforms like Azure and AWS, and even for Azure, we need to build the collector with multiple processes involved. In comparison, other monitoring tools such as LogicMonitor are designed specifically for cloud-based monitoring. When it comes to infrastructure-level monitoring, tools such as SolarWinds, LogicMonitor, Nagios, and Zabbix are limited to scripting.
The integration of ScienceLogic with our existing IT ecosystems has significantly benefited our organization, as all alerts now directly go to IBM Netcool and then to the ITSM tool, ServiceNow. Initially, all alerts went through email notifications to specific users, but once integrated with ServiceNow, all alerts automatically create tickets through IBM Netcool, which then are assigned to the relevant teams based on SLAs and which ensures immediate response without missing deadlines. In the previous setup, there was always the chance an email could be missed, hence the integration with the ITSM tool has improved our alert management.