LogicMonitor Reviews

It is a complete infrastructure monitoring tool. It can be used to monitor your network devices, your servers, et cetera. It is a good tool, actually.

We didn't have a monitoring tool previously, so we monitored via independent components. Once we implemented LogicMonitor, we gained a centralized dashboard for everything. Now, we have a complete view of infrastructure in one pane of glass.

Its monitoring features and the support on offer are pretty good.

It offers one centralized view of everything.

The initial setup is very simple. 

It is stable and reliable. 

The product can scale. 

I'd like to see more automation in the tool, especially around remediation. 

We have been using it for almost one year now.

I've never had issues with stability. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. 

The scalability is excellent. I would rate it eight out of ten in terms of being able to expand as needed. 

We have an environment that covers around 2,000 servers. We may increase usage in the future, although there is no plan in place as of right now.  

Technical support is very good. They are knowledgeable and helpful.

Positive

We did not previously have a different solution in place. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's not overly complex. I'd rate the ease of setup eight out of ten. 

The deployment took around 30 to 40 days. One or two people handled the initial deployment process. 

There were prerequisites, and we made a plan on how to proceed and followed that roadmap during implementation.

The solution provided support during implementation. After that, our team took over and handled the rest of the process. 

I'm part of the technical team and do not directly deal with pricing. 

Other tools may have been evaluated; however, that process was handled before I arrived at the company. 

This is a SaaS-based solution. We have URL access to it. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall. I'm happy with its capabilities. 

I would recommend it to others as it is a very good tool.

We use it as a primary monitoring tool for our cloud offerings. I work for one of the largest service providers in Australia and their cloud solutions. We monitor the entire cloud solutions using LogicMonitor.

The plugins are easy to integrate, and LogicMonitor provides these add-ons for vendors like VMware. It becomes very easy to integrate them and take the data sources. One does not need to configure everything individually. It automatically detects all the resources by their type and starts monitoring them almost immediately.

There is a lack of automation, especially in terms of remediating problems. The problem is seen and identified, but there is a need and a gap where LogicMonitor can help us automate the remediation of the problem. I hope it will be there in the future.

My colleagues feel the ease of use is a concern because to implement the granularity of the product, you need some programming knowledge and understanding of code development.

So, it becomes a challenge for everyone in your company, especially administrators who might not know how to code. Otherwise, there is no problem with LogicMonitor.

I have been using the solution for the past four years.

It is a stable solution.

It is highly scalable. We have never seen any issues regarding resource crunch. It's an everyday thing. All of our services use it as a primary resource for monitoring infrastructure. So in my department, we have fifty-odd people, and the service desk is around twenty-odd people. Our company is significant. We are on the verge of deciding whether You want to use this for the entire organization because a bigger company has acquired us, and that company does not use LogicMonitor. And we are pushing that LogicMonitor is a good resource for us, and we should use it across the company. Right now, it is in one department, but we want to push it across the organization, then it would become really big. We would have around two thousand end users using it. So, currently, we have two, and if this goes organization-wide, then there would probably be more people getting on board for this.

It's very good. They were there when we required some assistance from LogicMonitor. I personally dealt with those cases, and I was extremely satisfied with the kind of response I received. I rate it ten out of ten.

Positive

I worked with NETGEAR and other internal tools, but nothing was as elaborate, extensive, graphically oriented, and well-informed as LogicMonitor. It is one of the best product analysts.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took us around a week to thoroughly architect the solution deployment. The collectivity takes hardly five to ten minutes to install on any machine you want to be a collector and a monitoring resource. It doesn't take more than ten minutes. And installation of an architect is just a one-time job. You don't do it every day like we did it four years back. After that, we didn't look at it. We only spent some time, like, ten minutes creating new collectors, and that's it.

The pricing can be a little aggressive. Right now, it's a bit much for smaller organizations to adopt it. But comparatively, it also provides good features. So it's a give and take.

We did evaluate it, and we saw pros and content. Looking at the cost structure, everything, and business requirements, this was the best fit for us.

As I told you, this bigger company has acquired us. The other departments use that product, and the cost structure is not as high as LogicMonitor. But I am researching it. I still need more information. But with my initial research, I found a gap in how Icinga takes care of necessary components of our infrastructure, especially IBM web infrastructure, and how LogicMonitor incorporates that versus how Icinga does it. I still need profound information, but the preliminary research shows a LogicMonitor is better.

They have to first evaluate their options, consider their business requirements, use cases, and fix the purpose. If it is to process, LogicMonitor is definitely a tool to go for.

I rate it ten out of ten.

I use it every day. We are a small MSP in the Netherlands. We have about 90 customers, and they have a lot of on-prem hardware such as servers, switches, voice systems, and devices. We monitor their environments making sure that everything is working fine. We monitor the hardware and the software performance, basic use, and things like that.

It is a cloud product. You have your on-prem LogicMonitor agents called collectors, and they send all the information to the cloud of LogicMonitor. You can view the state of everything there.

It seems Amazon hosted on the backside, so it should be a public cloud, but I am not sure.

When we have a new customer onboarding or when a customer visits us, we can show them how far we are able to monitor their systems. It is very easy for us to deploy it for a new customer. Most of the time, we go to the customer, and we deploy the collector. After that, we can tell them where the issues are. For instance, we can tell a customer that their main performance issues are related to their disks, servers, or memory usage on their SQL Server database, which helps in getting a sales conversation. We are able to say that if they are going to be a customer of ours, we will deploy the solution, and we will be monitoring it 24/7, but for now, they can do this. That's an easy selling point for us while engaging new customers. We can really help them with technical issues by using this solution.

One thing that's very valuable for us is the technical knowledge of the people who work with LogicMonitor. We looked at several products before we decided to use LogicMonitor, and one of the key decision-making points was the knowledge of the things that they put in the product. It provides real intelligence regarding the numbers that you see on the product, which makes it easy for us technical people to troubleshoot. Other products don't provide you with such information. You see a value going up, but you don't know what it means. LogicMonitor provides such information. For instance, if a value goes up, it says that it is probably because your disk area was too low. 

The other thing that's very well done is the implementation of the product. When you are buying the product, you get a product manager from them who leads you towards the end result.

One thing that could be really better is the mapping. Auvik is really good at it. They have a really nice way to give you a visual representation of your network, but in LogicMonitor, this functionality is not as powerful and as good as Auvik.

We sometimes have glitches with the updates. You can opt-in or opt-out for the updates. LogicMonitor makes an update for a new device, such as a new device from Fortinet, so that you can monitor that. There could also be an update for the LogicMonitor collector. 

When you do an update, you might get a warning that you shouldn't have got, but it is pretty easy to roll back your update so that you don't have it anymore. You can wait for the next update, or you can ask a technician to help you in a chat. They would need to look at your products, so you have to allow them to go live with you. They mostly solve the problem for you within a day.

If I need 1,000 more servers, it is just plug-and-play. There are no problems with that at all.

We are an MSP in the Netherlands, and we have a lot of small companies that we are managing. They mostly don't have their own IT persons, so they're all managed by us. We also have customers who are able to log into their own monitoring software and see their own environment.

They're really fast. I can chat with an engineer. It's not a bot; there is a real engineer. They help me with the product. If it is something difficult, it might take them two days, but most of the time, they're pretty quick.

We previously used Zenoss, which is an open-source monitoring software, but there is no intelligence behind it to give you the answers about the things that you get on your dashboard. It is a different product. They have a free version, and they have a paid version. The paid version that they do has good support, but the intelligence behind LogicMonitor is what I like the most about it.

When you are buying the product, you get a product manager from them who leads you towards the end result. They make a real project of what you want to use it for so that you have complete monitoring access up and running with event logs and the ticketing system, which is a good thing. They really help you with that. If you are transitioning from one product to another, they ask you what you want to transfer and how long do you think you are going to need to prepare everything for the switch over and even turn off the old system. They want to be involved in that.

It is very simple to set up for technical people. It is not a problem at all. We have finished 1,000 devices in about three months. The first month was to deploy the collectors and to make all the credential settings at the company site on all devices. You have to log into the device and configure some settings. In the next month, we added all the equipment. We got a lot of alerts because everything was new in LogicMonitor. We used the last month for alert tuning. You have to tune down the number of alerts and solve some problems to see what's going on. When you get more than 1,000 alerts a day, you're not able to look at them all, and it is necessary to get a good view of the system. So, it took us three months to switch from one system to another, and we did that with three people.

The setup is pretty straightforward, and it can be easily done by one person. For a small environment or a small company, it will take one or two days to set up the product to be able to log in and see things. 

Its management, of course, can't be done by one person. That's because there are a lot of views and alerts, and there are a lot of things you need to do and manage every day. It needs maintenance. When you get a disk warning, you have to get an engineer to replace the disk. When you get performance issues, you have to contact that customer because they need more licenses or more hardware. It is not a product that you just look at; it is a product you have to use every day. It gives you information about the things that you need to do. For example, when you're driving your car and you get a maintenance warning for your engine, you have to plan maintenance at the garage. The car only gives you the information. Similarly, LogicMonitor only gives you the information.

We are able to provide help with a lot of last moment troubleshooting. If a customer says that they have a problem, we ask them when did they have it last. We can go back in time, and we can look at the logs and say that it was this server that was doing something, which makes troubleshooting easier. 

We have bought Unomaly functionality, and we can search across all event logs from our customers. We can search with a name, or we can search for the last 12 hours. It gives us every event of every server and its time. It is a very fast way to look at a log file. It even has some intelligence in it, but that's a different story.

It is pretty expensive, but we now need one less full-time engineer. With on-prem, we used to have one more engineer in our department. That engineer has now moved to another department. Our capacity is better with this product than the previous one. It is easy for us to manage the sites.

You have to choose between the standard account and the premium account. With the premium account, you get a lot more than the standard one, and you can also buy some extra features. It is a good thing to look at them because you would probably want to buy them. You should take your time and negotiate the price. They are easy. Like all cloud providers, they are able to discuss the price and if necessary, change the price.

We reviewed other solutions. One of the key reasons for going for it was the knowledge of the things that they put in the product. The other products we reviewed give you a lot of things for monitoring, but when something is happening, they don't give you the information about if it is good or bad. 

For the test management software for server environments, we have used a product called Kaseya, which is not a big company. They have Kaseya Traverse that's a very intelligent program for monitoring. It is the next best thing for me to look at. It is a real competitive program for Kaseya Traverse.

They are adding features faster than we can implement them. They have a very good development team. They have also made some acquisitions. They acquired Unomaly that did log analysis. It was from a Swedish company. That product is now completely integrated with LogicMonitor, and we bought that extra piece of software because one package doesn't fit all. It is a package that we are using to enhance our product catalog for logs, and it is a very useful one.

I would advise making a good project plan for migrating. That's the most important thing to do. Make a good choice while buying, and take your time. Don't rush into anything. When you're looking for monitoring software, you need to know what you need and what is nice to have. There are always things that you want to have, but they are not really necessary. You should choose products that can fit them all. As a system engineer, I want to have one pane of glass to look at everything. I don't want to switch screens to look at another log file or another system. I want to have it all visible in one system. That's the most important choice you can make as an engineer.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. Its price makes it a nine for me because it is pretty expensive. Otherwise, I would choose it over everything else. I will look at another product, but I'm sure I will come back to LogicMonitor.

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.

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.

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 in a few different ways:

• For general monitoring of operating systems. 
• Leveraging some customized offerings, specifically for creating application monitoring. 
• Some external site-to-site monitoring in various places, ensuring that our websites and external pieces are available over an Internet connection. 

It has given us a clearer view into our environment because it's able to look in and pull things off of the event viewer or log files. We have been able build dashboards and drill down on things, which has helped improve our time to respond. Also, in the case of specific conditions being met in X log, we have been able to get in and take a look at that a lot faster rather than trying to connect and parse through the log and figure it out. It's able to flag that and work us towards a solution faster than normal.

We have a few custom data sources that we have defined, especially for our application. It is able to leverage a specific data source and build monitoring rather than just having it be a part of the general monitoring. It is segmented and customized for what we actually need, which has been pretty helpful.

Custom data sources have given us a bit more information from a point in time and historically viewpoint. In the console, it is easy to compare week-over-week or month-over-month traffic and numbers. As changes are made in the environment, we can look and have better historical knowledge, and say, "We started seeing this spike three months ago and this is the change we made," or, "We started seeing this CPU usage reduced after the last patch or software update." It lets us be able to compare and get a better insight into the environment over a longer period, rather than just at a point in time, when investigating an issue.

The solution has allowed us to have specific alerting for specific messages. If we know that X messages on a notification let us know this state has happened, we can then set that to be either an email notification or a tracking notification. In the cases of a log meaning that we have a specific issue, we can have it send an email and let us know. Thus, we have a better, faster response. We also have integrations with PagerDuty, which allows us to be able to make things very specific as to the level of intervention and the specific timing of that intervention. It has been nice to be able to customize that down to even a message type and timing metric.

The solution’s ability to alert us if the cloud loses contact with the on-prem collectors has been helpful to know. E.g., if we are having an issue with our Internet connection or some of our less monitored environments, such as our lower environments in different data centers where we don't have as heavy of monitoring. Therefore, it's helpful to have that external check there versus our production environments which are heavily monitored. Typically, we are intervening before it times out to say that it's lost the connection. It's been helpful to have that kind of information. This way, we know either via a page or email if there is any sort of latency or a timing issue with it connecting to the cloud. It's been helpful that it's not just a relying on the Internet connection at our site, but is able to see into our environment, then it monitors when there are connectivity or timeout issues.

We use it for anomaly detection because our software is designed to function in a specific way. Therefore, anomaly detection is helpful when there are issues that may not be breaking the software but when it is running in a nonstandard way, then we can be alerted and notified so we can jump on that issue. Whether the issue will be fixed it in the moment or handed off to development to find a solution, it's helpful to have that view into how it's running over the long-term.

It is a pretty robust solution. There are a lot of customizations that you can put in for what you want it to be checking, viewing, and alerting on. As we get alerting and realize that that's not something we need to be alerted on or it happens to be normal behavior, a lot of that information can be put back into the system, to say, "Alright, this may look like an anomaly, but it isn't." Therefore, we can customize it so it gets smarter as it goes on, and we're really only being notified for actual issues rather than suspected issues.

It's been helpful to be able to have some information to be able to pass along to development that's very specific as to what the issues are. E.g., we can see an anomaly during periods of time while this is running, then pass that along so development can figure out, "Is it a database issue, an application issue, or possibly a DNS level issue?" They also determine if there are further things that need to be dug into or if it is something that can just be fixed by a code change. 

The solution’s automated and agentless discovery, deployment, and configuration seems to work pretty well for standard pieces, like Windows servers and your standard hardware. It has been able to find and add those piece in. Normally, if I'm running into an issue with finding something, it's usually because it's missing a plugin or piece that just needs to be implemented, which just needs to be added in manually. However, 99 percent of the time, it finds things automatically without a problem.

The flexibility to be able build a custom monitor is its most valuable feature. Because it's just a general CPU or memory, it doesn't always give you a full picture, but we can dig into it, and say, "These services are using this much, and if these services are using more than 50 percent of the CPU, then alert us." We can put those type of customizations in rather than use the generic out-of-the-box things with maybe a few flags. It's been very nice to be able to customize it to what we need. We can also put in timings if we know there are services restarting at 11 o'clock at night (or whenever). We can put those in so as long as it's doing exactly what we want it to do, which is restarting the service, then it won't monitor us. However, if there are any issues or errors, then it monitors us right away. That's been really helpful to leverage.

We use a few dashboards. A couple are customized for specific groups and what they maintain. As I am doing projects, I'm able to make a quick dashboard for some of the things that I'm working on so I can keep track without having to flip between multiple pages. It seems pretty flexible for making simple use cases as well.

I have a custom dashboard which monitors each site and does virtual environment monitoring, such as CPU, memory, timing, etc. It was easy to get in place and adjust for what I wanted to see. It has been one of the go-to dashboards that I have ended up utilizing.

We can kind of get a single pane of glass and be able to view specific functions, whether it be sites or the entire environment. We are able to quickly get in, see what's going on, and where issues are coming from rather than having to hunt down where those issues are. Therefore, it's helped us more with our workflow than automating functions.

The solution’s overall reporting capabilities are pretty powerful compared to ones that I have used previously. It seems like it has a lot of customizations that you can put in, but some of the out-of-the-box reports are useful too, like user logon duration and website latency. Those type of things have been helpful and don't require a lot of, if any, changes to get useful content out of them. They have also been pretty easy to implement and use.

It needs better access for customizing and adding monitoring from the repository. That would be helpful. It seems like you have to search through the forums to figure out what specific pieces you need to get in for specific monitoring, if it's a nonstandard piece of equipment or process. You have to hunt and find certain elements to get them in place. If they could make it a bit easier rather having to find the right six-digit code to put in so it implements, that would be helpful.

Personally, I've been using the solution for about a year. We've had it in place for about a year and a half, but I came to the organization about a year ago.

I don't think we've really had a time where the application or monitoring nodes have failed. The connection to LogicMonitor has been very stable. We haven't had any connection issues to the SaaS offering. It's been pretty resilient and stable from our end.

The scalability seems fine. Every time we've had to expand and add elements, we've not run into any delays or issues with it. It seems to expand with us as we've needed to use more features. We haven't had any issues with delays or timing. It's been able to handle what we've thrown at it.

There are at most 10 users at our company, who do everything from application monitoring to platform engineering to some developers who have access into the solution for some monitoring pieces. Varying segments have been able to get in and they all seem to have had pretty good luck with accessing and using it.

We are using LogicMonitor pretty extensively. We're using it from low level environments, development, quality assurance, all the way up to user testing and production. We have leveraged it in as many segments and parts of the business as we can. It has been really helpful to have it be able to handle different workloads, but also be customized. This way, we're not getting triggered at 2:00 AM because a switch is on in the office reporting an issue, instead we can adjust those timings to report for specific times of the day rather than any time during the day.

We have about 1,000 totals including VMs and physical devices.

The technical support has been pretty good. I haven't had to leverage it, but some of the people I work around have taken it on when we have had questions or issues to leverage the process. They seem to be fairly responsive and the timing of it is usually good. We are usually hearing back in minutes instead of hours. We haven't had any major issues with them.

We've eliminated three different monitoring tools by leveraging LogicMonitor. We had two different in-house, custom built tools that were used for a long time that we were able to roll off, and we also used Nagios. I have also used Zabbix and Orion.

LogicMonitor has reduced our number of false positives compared to how many we were getting with other monitoring platforms. We leveraged the solution to focus it down and only look at the specific things that need monitoring, e.g., rather than every time a service is down we get notified, instead if it's not a critical service, then we can just get a flag, go back, and check it. This is rather than getting spammed with hundreds of emails about specific things being down. Thus, we can customize it for what we actually want to know and need for non-issues.

It had already been implemented before I joined the company. We've added a few functions since then, but the core and initial launch of it had already been implemented and heavily used at that point that I joined.

We have definitely seen ROI.

We have seen probably a 80 or 90 percent decrease in false flag alerts.

We move our people so they're able to be more proactive on things, rather than having to deal with parsing through and figuring out if something is an issue or a non-issue, that cuts down on our personnel time of managing the day-to-day processes. That's been helpful. At least from conversations I've had with management, they've seemed to have found it to be a good investment and solution for getting our normal work done, but also for making sure that we're ready to go if something does go wrong.

It definitely pays for itself in the amount of time we're not spending with false errors or things that we haven't quite dealt with monitoring. It has been good cost-wise. 

I would definitely recommend LogicMonitor. It's something to look at either when signing up for a trial or for a use case process . It's been a great product. It has customizations when you want them, and out of the box solutions if you don't want them. It works and is reliable. Compared to other monitoring platforms I've used in the past, it seems to be the most powerful and robust that I've dealt with.

The solution monitors most devices out-of-the-box, such as, Windows, Windows Server, Linux, F5 load balancers, Cisco firewalls, and Cisco switches. Those have been pretty easy to monitor. Our issues have been with one-off or nonstandard platforms that we've implemented. Otherwise, everything has been pretty easy to implement.

I would rate it as a solid nine (out of 10).

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.