LogicMonitor Reviews

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.

We use the solution for network monitoring. 

LogicMonitor helps us prevent potential downtime. It's pretty good. It generates low-level warnings that aren't necessarily preemptive but can still alert us to issues we should investigate. These warnings allow us to correlate data and identify areas where we should take action, even if the issues aren't critical.

The most useful feature we've found in LogicMonitor is its ability to deploy templates automatically. It's quite smart in this regard. When we add a device, it detects the type of device and deploys the appropriate template for it.  

The tool's alerting system has been pretty good for us. We receive SMS alerts if we're not in front of our screens, which has improved our response time to potential issues. The escalation chains feature has been particularly useful in this regard. Overall, it's easy to use and simplifies our alerting process.

The tool is highly integratable. 

LogicMonitor should improve its logging features. It can become expensive and should be cost-effective. It would be great to see prebuilt templates for alerting methods in LogicMonitor that are similar to the prebuilt dashboards. Currently, users have to build their alerting configurations. 

I have been using the product for more than two years. 

I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the product's scalability a ten out of ten. 

The response time for support needs to be better. They're pretty fast in responding, but there are many areas they won't cover; it often falls out of scope. While they're good at getting back to us, they're not owning the issue and assisting. 

Neutral

The tool's deployment is very simple. 

The solution is not expensive. 

We use Datadog for cloud monitoring. I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

We primarily use it for unified observability, network compliance, and the benefit of an easy-to-administrate SaaS-based solution.

I'm familiar with LogicMonitor, mainly through my clients. Its key features include network discovery, user-friendly dashboards, and robust reporting capabilities.

Once you have your data within LogicMonitor, whether it's for network, server, or storage data, your LogicMonitor has many dashboards built out of the box. So, all your data is consolidated in a nice, efficient way. Suppose a customer needs to provide reports to management or understand which devices have been added during a certain period or are out of compliance.

LogicMonitor needs to invest more in APM functionality. The solution's core focus is infrastructure monitoring, but LogicMonitor is endeavoring to expand into the APM space with the tool. It works adequately but could benefit from additional investment to enhance its performance.

I have been using LogicMonitor for three to four years.

I've had no issues. I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is suitable for enterprise customers. Twenty users are using this solution.

Scalability is excellent. Many other solutions cannot scale up to a sizable footprint without hiring more staff, allocating more resources to infrastructure, or obtaining additional budget.

They offer various support levels to clients, allowing them to choose the level of service they prefer. Typically, enterprise customers opt for premium support or even higher levels. With round-the-clock availability and resolution within an hour or two, custom support is also available.

Positive

The initial setup is easier than other solutions, so we partnered with LogicMonitor.

The pricing can vary yearly or monthly, depending on the clients we're working with and their size and scale. For example, the pricing for a customer with ten thousand licenses versus a hundred licenses can vary.

LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based solution, but users can deploy it wherever they want. They can deploy collectors in the cloud, on-premises, on their servers, or VMs. It's flexible in how it can be deployed. However, unlike many other monitoring tools, you don't need to set up a lot of infrastructure.

For an enterprise customer, LogicMonitor may not be considered excessively expensive. It tends to have a higher price tag compared to legacy monitoring solutions, yet it offers more value. Smaller customers with only a few hundred licenses might perceive it as pricier since they have fewer items to monitor and fewer demands. The true value of the solution shines in large, intricate environments where it can effectively monitor hundreds of devices.

In terms of advice, anyone currently using a monitoring solution is likely aware of its shortcomings. I suggest not hesitating to challenge the status quo and explore alternative solutions. LogicMonitor, among others, represents a significant step forward in SaaS-based monitoring solutions. These platforms offer considerable value with minimal ramp-up time and learning curve. Considering a solution like LogicMonitor, it's crucial to identify the gaps in your current monitoring environment. I encourage you to try it; reach out to a reseller, such as myself, or directly to LogicMonitor to explore the platform. It's one of those situations where seeing is believing; you need to experience the value firsthand.

We haven't had any issues with LogicMonitor. All of my clients have loved it and are renewing their subscriptions. It has been fantastic compared to many other tools we've used, especially in the reusability space.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

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 primarily use the solution for managed services, Azure/AWS, Kubernetes, and website monitoring.

We look after all sorts of devices and being able to have monitoring coverage of 90% of things we need is great and saves us time. If we need to make some specific change we can and it's relatively easy to do.

Having a suite of modules that do all the work for you rather than having to set up loads of things yourself and it be there straight away ready to go is mind-blowing.

Being able to use this tool with relative ease makes it a worthy monitoring solution.

LogicMonitor allows streamlined use and offers ease of use with an all-in-one monitoring solution that is SaaS-based. Having this solution SaaS-based means we don't have to handle the platform updates.

Having a full team at LogicMonitor for support is super helpful as they are available all the time to answer any questions you may have.

Having a super easy tool to work with allowed our support staff to get up to speed quickly and has made dealing with alerts and incidents a breeze.

LogicModules are great. Creating these is super easy and fun. Allowing users to make their own modules allows monitoring to be covered from all angles. We can make a script, for example, and go get metrics that may not be there out of the box.

The dashboard is helpful for showing off all that data you collect and impressing customers. Dashboards are a real good selling point as showcasing the data you collect all in one place makes troubleshooting and keeping an eye on things way easier that a giant alert list. Having them on a slideshow is super neat too.

Role-based permissions could be better and updating modules could be smoother. They are my biggest complaints as they are lacking in comparison to other tools I have experienced. That said, all the feedback we can give to help improve the product as it matures will help the LogicMonitor team build an amazing solution in years to come.

Roles just miss some extra permissions such as allowing people to see certain instances yet not the full device. We'd like to allow for dynamic groups to be made without the need for root permissions. 

Module updates are important and you have got to stay on top of them. However, this needs work to make it easier as the loss of data can occur if you are too out of date.

We've used the solution for over five years now.

I have never had an issue where the stability of the portal was affected.

The solution offers very good performance and can scale easily and flexibly. 

I'd advise new users to set it up the way they want and make sure they update/import everything they can.

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 use it to make sure that proper tuning is done for the existing monitoring.

In addition, our university has a number of schools and each is a customer of the main IT organization that manages and provides support for all the colleges, like the law school, the business school, the medical school, the arts school, etc. The goal, and one of the main use cases that we were planning and thinking about, was to be able to onboard all the devices, all the applications, all the databases, as required by individual schools.

We also wanted them to be able to create their own dashboard, tweak it, manage it, delete from it, and add to it. 

It's deployed as a SaaS model. LogicMonitor is out in the cloud.

When we were using Nagios and we had alerts but there was only red, yellow, green. Here, the good thing is that you have escalation: level-one, two, three, which are clearly defined, and what action needs to be taken for each level. The clear escalation chain and tuning helps, because we don't want to wake up the director for 80 percent of the cases. That would be ridiculous. But when necessary, the right people should be alerted, especially for the production environment. If something has been "red" or there has been no interaction for half an hour, it's important to know that and to take the necessary actions.

That's a key thing, being a production-operations team member, because I don't want my team to be flooded with all the noise of alerts for something which can be tackled by a specific team. Having escalation chains, so that the alert goes to the right team to look into that and take action, means the prod-ops team doesn't need to even look into it. We don't even need to ticket it. We only keep aware of it through the daily alert dashboards. That has made a big difference in our overall resource planning, because previously we had 400 to 450 daily alerts. By using this feature we cut that down to 150 to 200 which are "candidate alerts" that production-operations needs to take action on. They may require creating a ticket, or calling the right people, or doing some activity that needs intervention or escalation to the next level. We have been able to cut down on our resources. We don't need to have four members actively looking into the dashboard. We can validate things with one or two employees.

LogicMonitor has also helped to consolidate the number of monitoring tools we need. We had some third-party monitoring, four or five things, and they're all consolidated with LogicMonitor. The only exception is IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler. But what we did was we integrated that via Slack. I'm not really sure why we weren't able to consolidate TWS. The plan is to get rid of TWS, but we could not do so immediately, until there is an alternate route. But apart from that, everything has been consolidated using LogicMonitor.

We were especially able to consolidate third-party cloud monitoring for AWS. There were discussions about how we could also integrate or combine Azure monitoring resources through LogicMonitor. The team has mentioned that it has plug-ins that it can use to combine that. We also had separate backup scheduling software, a tool that had separate monitoring, and that has also been combined with LogicMonitor.

And LogicMonitor has absolutely reduced the number of false positives compared to how many we were getting with other monitoring platforms. At a minimum they have been reduced by 50 percent. The scope of more tuning and going through the learning curve helped to bring it down. Within the first two or three months, we were able to bring the false positives down by 50 percent. That's a big achievement. That is the main reason we initiated this project of getting into LogicMonitor. There have been further talks internally about how we can eliminate them further, and bring it down by 70 percent compared to the false positives we were getting. That's our goal. So far, it has reduced the time we used to spend on them by 50 percent, both offshore and onsite, as we have an offshore team in India that works 24/7. We used to have multiple people in each shift and we have reduced that down to a single person in each shift. That's a big step in the right direction.

Tuning is one of the main components. We like to make sure that only the right alerts are escalated, and that alerts are being sent to the right members, as opposed to every alert being broadcast to everybody. The main thing is the escalation chains. We feel that is a very good thing, rather than sending all the information to everybody at each level. Having the ability to make those sorts of changes doesn't require you to do too much, out-of-the-box. You just need to create the basic entities, like who are the different people, who are the contacts, or email groups, and cover the data source and events which should be alerted.

Another feature from the technical aspect, the back-end, is the ability to allow individual users or customers to have their own APIs. They're able to make changes using the plugins covered by LogicMonitor. That is a very powerful feature that is more attractive to our techno-savvy customers.

In terms of basic functionality, from a normal user's perspective, the escalation chains and the tuning part that are embedded in LogicMonitor are the two most important things.

Among my favorite dashboards are the alert dashboards. Being a prod-ops team, we took the out-of-the-box alerts dashboard given by LogicMonitor and we have kept on tweaking it by adding more columns and more data points. The alert dashboard is something which is very key for us as a team. In general, it gives us more in-depth information about uptime, the SLAs, etc. LogicMonitor has done a good job of providing very user-friendly dashboards, out-of-the-box. There are so many things that we are still learning about it, how we can use it better, but the alerts dashboard is my favorite.

The reporting is something which I have explored, to send me an email every day with how many alerts, in particular how many critical alerts, there were. It's a good starting point. The reporting can be sent in both HTML and Excel and is accessible on the dashboard after you log in. These two things are very good. This is the first feature I looked at once we went live, because I want to know things on a day-to-day basis and a weekly basis. I activated the email feature because I want it to send daily, weekly, and monthly reports of my alert dashboard data.

We use LogicMonitor's ability to customize data sources and it's a must, because ours is a very heterogeneous, complex environment. Changing data sources is important for at least some of the deployments. For other organizations, it may not really be required to change the default data sources provided by LogicMonitor. But here, it was important to change them. That's where the capabilities of the embedded APIs really helped us. I'm not part of the team that makes those changes, but I worked actively with the teams that did, and I always got very positive feedback from them on how they would get the right answers from LogicMonitor. They had to make a lot of changes to the data sources, for each customer, and it worked out well.

There are a few things that could have been done better with the reporting. It could have a more graphical interface.

The dashboards can be improved. They are good, but there is a pain point. To show things to management, to explain pain points to other customers, to show them exactly where we can do better, the dashboarding could be better. Dashboards need to show the key things. Nobody is going to go into the ample details of Excel sheets or HTML.

Automation can also be improved. 

Finally, while this is a very good tool for monitoring and responding, if there was a way they could do something like PagerDuty or another third-party solution for alerting, integrate both monitoring and alerting, that would be an ideal scenario.

I have been using LogicMonitor for close to a year. If I remember correctly, LogicMonitor was implemented in my organization as a replacement for Nagios. I was actively involved in that project right from the beginning of verification through going live. In the initial stages we may not have been actively using it, but we started learning about the tool and how to implement it about a year ago.

Overall, the stability has been good. We didn't have any issues during the phase after we set up and went live. 

The performance was also pretty good. We didn't have to wait for a response for any of the attributes on the dashboard or reporting.

LogicMonitor has the ability to alert you if the cloud loses contact with the on-prem collectors. We had a challenge within one or two months of deployment. The problem was the way we were using the collectors. We were actually using our Nagios server as one of the collectors. We were trying to eliminate that server altogether, because it was giving duplicate alerts.

Initially we had a challenge of not getting any alerts when the connection to the collector was lost. Later on we found that there was a routing table or there were some firewall changes that were needed. I would attribute that more the learning curve and what the best practices are.

Since correcting that problem, we haven't had an issue of any collector being down. There's no question about any of the alerting.

The impression we got when we provided information about the number of servers, the number of end-users, and the number of networks that were part of Nagios back then, was that LogicMonitor said they could expand and double that, if things were to grow. There is scalability in that environment to support a big data buffer. So there should not be any problem with scalability.

In terms of DR, discussions are still going on as to what would happen if there were a disaster. 

As a whole, the organization has to use a monitoring tool. It could be Nagios, it could be LogicMonitor. There was a phase in which most of the schools were using both in parallel. But one after another, they are all happy to be using LogicMonitor. Usage-wise now, it's only LogicMonitor. Nagios has been cut down, so nobody is looking for any monitoring system apart from LogicMonitor.

There are some schools that still need to tweak it and tune it, because they have not given it much attention or have not really been required to actively monitor their solutions. We know where the priorities are, which school is the top priority and which schools were using Nagios more actively. But all the major customers that were using Nagios, once we unplugged it, have been happy with the LogicMonitor implementation. There are a few schools which are not actively using any monitoring system. They may get to the stage of actively using it, but, university-wide, everybody is using LogicMonitor. There is no other monitoring tool out there.

We have evolved and have kept on making changes, as per the requirement of the customers and one good thing about LogicMonitor is that it has a very good support system. We have had chat sessions with them to ask questions which help each school, and the IT organization as a whole, to evolve a better monitoring and alerting tool.

The way LogicMonitor support responded during our initial setup was amazing. That's something I really enjoyed a lot. They never said something like, "This question should not be asked," or "This question is not a candidate for the chat session." For every question we would get a reasonably quick answer which we would be able to implement right away. They would also log in remotely and help if something was something beyond an individual's capability. That helped to migrate and complete this process in a quicker manner. LogicMonitor has a very highly talented support team that can answer the questions and help the customer right away. It's been wonderful.

I don't see that happening with all vendors. With other organizations, when you submit questions in the chat session, they'll take the request and they'll say, "Okay, we'll get back to you." LogicMonitor — and it's a differentiating factor — is there to provide solutions right away, rather than putting it into their ticketing system and escalating to level-2 and to level-3.

I really don't know if that level of service is only for specific customers, based on the contractual terms and conditions, or if it is the way they do it for everybody. If this is the way they do it for every customer, they should definitely be very proud of the way they are doing it. Their team is there to help support the customer instantly, versus taking their own sweet time.

I would encourage LogicMonitor to continue that same level of expertise, of people being there 24/7 to support customers. That would be a big differentiating factor compared to competitors.

The main reason for migrating to LogicMonitor from Nagios was to eliminate the noise of alerts. It may have been because alerts were not properly tuned, but the visibility with Nagios was not complete. It became a bottleneck. 

Only one or two people had active access to tune things. If anything had to be done, there was just one guy who had to do it. We wanted to move towards a self-managed model. LogicMonitor is a solution which can be in that category, once it's deployed and there is a transfer of knowledge to each school.

We want each department to self-manage: manage their own dashboards and create their own reports based on their requirements. If they have a new device coming up, they can spin up a new AWS instance and onboard that, etc. It's the initial phase which is going to be challenging. But once we have the handover call with the individual customer, it's going to be easy, and that was not possible in Nagios.

We also wanted to have a proper escalation chain, which was not present in Nagios. That's something we have made use of in LogicMonitor.

Finally, we switched to use fewer resources and to speed up turnaround.

The initial setup is complex. It's too picky. I'm a hands-on technical guy, although I don't call myself an SME, but I know everything right from networking, servers, databases, firewalls, to clustering, support, and operations. The initial phase is definitely a little bumpy for somebody who's not completely technically savvy. I understand that it's because there are so many features involved, and there are so many ways for onboarding and using the custom APIs, etc. To me, LogicMonitor, looks like too much of a technical-savvy company. There's good and bad in that. It depends on how you look at it.

The automated and agentless discovery, deployment, and configuration are good. We used that a lot initially. They did a good job with that. One thing that could be done is to make the naming conventions — adding different names like the IPs, the DNS lookup — a little better. They could eliminate some of the duplicate entries when you're onboarding it. I saw a lot of duplicate entries, which goes into the licensing. Apart from that, the way they provide a template or a flat file to the system for onboarding is good.

As for monitoring things out-of-the-box, it seemed that our database team spent more time in configuring stuff, whether MySQL or Oracle, etc. Now, LogicMonitor has come up with a very easy way for configuring and monitoring database components out-of-the-box. But that's something which I felt was a little bit of a pain point. I don't know whether it was that our team made it more complicated or LogicMonitor didn't handle it out-of-the-box.

Apart from that, LogicMonitor has done a good job of out-of-the-box monitoring of the basic resources within the servers — memory, CPU, disk configuration, etc. — as well as for HTTP, the web components.

While I wasn't actively involved in the planning for the implementation, I picked up things from the team which was actively involved in planning and implementation. The process was primarily to engage with LogicMonitor. Our team — the product owner and team members — worked together and was in touch with LogicMonitor to gather all the existing features that were available and how we would make use of all that. That was the initial phase during which we got to know the product completely.

We mapped all of the devices which were in Nagios to make sure we onboarded everything that was in Nagios to LogicMonitor.

We had several internal discussions where we told the schools how we were actively engaging with LogicMonitor to make sure that we would go in phases. The initial phase was knowledge-transfer, the second one was to onboard a school, or at least one application, to make sure that it was tested completely and then remove that from Nagios. We took time to make sure that they were getting proper monitoring and proper alerts, out-of-the-box.

While doing that, we found that there were a few things which were not properly configured in LogicMonitor, compared to Nagios. The goal was to improve on Nagios, minimize the false alerts, and have better features for reporting, dashboarding, escalation chains etc.

We had six to seven people actively involved in the process. Two to three were purely technical, and made use of LogicMonitor support very extensively, especially for some of the customized activities like using custom APIs. From the LogicMonitor side, there were two to three members from the front-office who were actively involved, and on the technical side they designated a couple of people whom we could directly contact on a day-to-day basis. We had a daily, separate session with each of our teams, like networking, business, operations, and DevOps, so that each team could ask questions about its pain points and get better information so that we could do things ourselves and, for things that were beyond us, to learn how they could help. We had a month of one-on-one sessions with them, every day, for two or three hours.

When we initially started the engagement with the LogicMonitor team, they came onsite to run a one-week session with all the key stakeholders: the customers, the technical team, and back-end operations team. That was a very useful session that helped kickstart things. At that point, not everybody knew completely how LogicMonitor works and how we could plan to migrate from Nagios to LogicMonitor. What were the things that we could retain? What were the things that we could just ignore? Overall, the exposure to LogicMonitor during that one-week phase, in terms of customer-engagement, was really a great experience for me. We also had the ability to quickly use the chat session online and ask questions.

The implementation team's role and its way of engaging with the customer was amazing. That's something which I really appreciated. That helped me. Once the engagement was over and the contract started, the online support was available. If we had a problem, we could type in our question or our problem right away. The support team would respond and fulfill our requirements. They would fix the problem.

Our deployment took two to three months. That includes the visits by the LogicMonitor to do some knowledge transfer and give hands-on experience to some of the key stakeholders. But during that time, not all places within the university were onboarded. Some schools were not really interested. I don't think they were properly updated. That was something that was more of an internal issue, because we were doing our own "selling" to tell them what the differences are between LogicMonitor and other things. We had to tell them that Nagios was going to be pulled and that they would be completely in the dark if they were not moving to LogicMonitor. So during those three months, there were still quite a few schools which were not migrated to LogicMonitor or didn't onboard all of their resources. But the majority of them were done in three months.

In terms of maintenance, we have three to four people involved. One guy was actively involved in the Nagios implementation and its maintenance. He was part of decommissioning that and completely taking ownership of LogicMonitor's technical aspects. One person is the product owner who interacts with all the stakeholders, the different schools, to make sure that they have their requirements met using LogicMonitor. One is a manager. And there is a person from the business point of view, who provides his pain points, and what they're seeing on a day-to-day basis. So those four people are actively dedicated — I would not call it to maintenance — but to the day-to-day LogicMonitor stuff.

There are the users as well. Each school has its own applications and services that they offer internally. I don't have exact numbers but there are about 20 of them.

It allows us to accomplish more with less by minimizing the false alerts.

And by giving the "keys" to the individual owners, it makes things faster.

Also, as I mentioned, we don't need to have as many people in each monitoring shift, in the 24/7 environment. Previously, we had alerts that went to everybody and everybody was up and looking into why we had a given problem. Now that we are splitting the problems into different buckets, we are not tapping into all our resources' time. That's an area where we're saving. As a rough ballpark, we are saving about 50 percent of the resources from an operations perspective.

We have a separate team involved in licensing. I wasn't involved in that.

I believe they evaluated two or three other tools, but I was not part of that process.

For the initial phase, rather than having only one or two functional guys participating, it's always good to have one or two technical folks in the discussions. That helps a lot. You don't want surprises if an organization decides to go live with this tool, and then realizes that technical things are not on board with the ideas of the functional team. That's something I can say based on my journey and experience.

Another thing that is important is to keep on having internal conversations; that you value and give importance to everybody. It's good to educate them. Use the help of the LogicMonitor support team for internal question/answer sessions and do anything that will help them feel more comfortable. It's not about two or three members being really happy with this. LogicMonitor is something which can only be successful in automation if all the key teams and team players are on the same page.

The biggest lesson has been how we could make everybody be part of the mission. Previously, monitoring used to be in the hands of one or two, and each of them had a lot of overhead to deal with. But by doing this, we have reduced the complaints from individuals and each stakeholder. They know how they're configured. They know what the escalation chain is, so they're confident. If there is something not working, it's because of the way they have it configured.

By doing this we have minimized the internal noise. We have given everyone the opportunity to know the pain involved in monitoring and what it takes to have a better monitoring system in place, and how each person can contribute and think outside the box. They know how to put into place the right parameters and the right numbers. Previously, 70 or 80 percent of things were escalated internally. There was no involvement of the particular customer. If there was a problem for a team, it was somebody's problem, not their problem. Now, it has all become their problem. This is a very high-level benefit of using tools like LogicMonitor, which involves everybody more.

I would give LogicMonitor an eight out of 10. There are a few things that LogicMonitor is also learning from their experience with the customer. Most of the customers are giving feedback to LogicMonitor for improvements and to make changes. I'm sure that very soon it will be a 10, but at this point in time, from my experience and journey, it's an eight.

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.