ScienceLogic Reviews

The dashboard for our VNOC is one of the best tools to allow our VNOC instant access into our customers' environments. The dynamic apps for the video conferencing devices (endpoints, Infrastructure, etc) are tailored to the wants and needs of our customers. They establish baselines and thresholds based on the industry leaders. The multi-tenant environment allows us to manage multiple customers in a single platform. ScienceLogic gives us the ability to be very granular with our permissions within the different organizations (customers) that we add to the platform.

Prior to using EM7 for our proactive monitoring, we used an email notification system to proactively monitor the customers devices. This would require an inbox to be constantly monitored in case an alert came in. The inbox would receive thousands of messages from devices a day and it was the technicians job to weed out which alerts were false positives and which alerts were actual critical/major issues.

I believe the knowledge base leaves a little room for improvement. Troubleshooting can be a little difficult without the help of a ScienceLogic technician. That may not be the case for our customers of ScienceLogic but we do not currently employ a Python technician to translate the error codes.

They are also beginning to expand the video portion of the product. This will help going forward.

We begin implementing the product in March 2014. Our first multi tenant customer was added in June.

We have not encountered any major problems with the deployment. There were some hiccups that were due to internal issues. The product itself is very easy to use and deploy.

I have not experienced any issues with stability in the last year.

No issues with scalability.

The customer service at ScienceLogic is one of the best I've experienced over the last 13 years of my career. Everyone is willing to help us accomplish our goals to provide better monitoring for our customers. Their Professional Services have met with us multiple times to provide additional support for the needs of a few customers.

The technical support team is a top notch team. They are all extremely knowledgeable and I have not encountered a time when our problem wasn't not resolved within a reasonable time-frame.

We switched based on the needs of our customers.

The initial setup was very straightforward. When we purchased the product they deployed a knowledgeable architect to assist with standing up our environment. He worked with us to customize to meet the needs of our company. After the initial standup, I was able to stand up a lab environment without any assistance from ScienceLogic support. That's how easy it was!

We implemented through an in-house team. There was a group of 4 of us that initially worked with the technician to get everything setup. We have an implementation team that now works with our customers to onboard them into the ScienceLogic platform.

The Power Packs that are available are amazing. It took me ~10 minutes to fully configure multiple Pure disk arrays. The Cisco UCS power pack was even faster. Literally pointed it at the IP of the UCS and it did all the work.

Dashboards have been great. Management loves seeing all the little green lights. Steep learning curve but very beneficial.

The UI takes a bit to learn but once you get past that it gets the job done. Creating dashboards is also complex but that is because of the sheer number of options.

2+ years

We have not had any issues with the initial install or any updates. Very straight forward. No curve balls. Configuring firewalls will take much longer than settings up ScienceLogic.

Our server is overloaded but still works great. We are planning on adding more nodes to alleviate this. We were also expecting a large uptick in network resource usage but its amazingly small.

No issues with scalability. We have pushed our server beyond whats recommended and it is still chugging along fine.

10/10. Have never had any bad experiences with the customer service. Prompt responses and they always help out.

11/10!!! The support team is AMAZING! I cannot stress this enough. Every call the support team goes above and beyond troubleshooting.

Nagios. We switched because it is less effort to configure new devices in ScienceLogic. The power packs are really what sets ScienceLogic apart from other solutions.

Very simple to roll out. Have not had any issues with initial installs or any updates. The hardest part for us was configuring SNMP across hundreds of Unix servers which took some scripting.

In house install. No issues on the roll out. Fairly standard set up. Nothing too complicated. Updates are as simple as uploading the file to the Science Logic server and hitting go.

We have not done any official ROI for ScienceLogic. We do feel its 100% worth it. Management loves seeing the dashboards up and the alerting has been amazing.

Costs more than Nagios but has way more features and is 100% worth the price. The power packs make such a big difference.

We were using Nagios before and switched to ScienceLogic. I don't recall the other products we reviewed prior. ScienceLogic does everything we need it to.

I cannot stress how great the Power Packs are. The Pure Disk and Cisco UCS packs are out of this world. There haven't been many things we have not found integration for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They provide quality support - immediately after deployment and throughout.

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

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

It's an IT infrastructure monitoring tool. It's mostly used by the IT team. It monitors the environment like the server database and cloud environment. 

ScienceLogic is a good tool. It has good capabilities as an SaaS product. 

It has good monitoring capabilities across cloud environments, data centers, and hybrid environments. 

It covers lots of technologies from a monitoring perspective and with its AIOps and event management there. It has good capabilities around that. 

I like the APM, the topology mapping they have, and the business service mapping that they can pick up and then feed into any CMTP like in the ICMTP. It has a good feature in that area. It's a good tool from a utilization perspective for monitoring the environment.

The scalability is excellent.

From a performance perspective, it needs to improve a lot. Even though it says that it's enterprise level, we have seen lots of issues from a monitoring perspective. When we monitor a huge volume there are problems. We need more customizations on the templates. They're not that useful. To customize it, you have got to go through a lot of effort. 

The professional support that ScienceLogic provides most of the time does not have that skill set to help.

The stability could be better.

I've been using the solution for five years.

We have had issues with stability. When it is in a huge environment, we did have seen some issues around the stability in that area when using it for monitoring large environments.

The product has outstanding scalability. We did not see many issues around that so far.

Support is lacking. They are not very knowledgeable sometimes. 

Neutral

It is easy to set up. It is a SaaS product and has agentless monitoring. From a setup perspective, it is easy.

The deployment depends. It can be set up in two weeks or six weeks. However, normally, we're seeing the deployment done in two to three weeks. It's a quick deployment that is happening. It all depends upon the environment and the requirements that need to be there. Generally, it's a quick deployment.

We have seen an ROI.

The monitoring tool does not give a return on investment in the first year. Normally, it happens in the second or third year. In the first year, it is more about improving the capability of their environment, and managing the environment. From the second year, they resolve incidents or improve visibility. So from the second year onwards, ROI may not be that high, however, we have seen that customers are getting that benefits.

They are subscription based. From the pricing model perspective, it's very simple, and licensing is not very complex. It's based on the number of network devices. They have some calculations which are very straightforward and very easy to use. There are no hidden charges.

We are a partner and reseller.

The product has multiple deployment options. They do offer us a SaaS product. Therefore, it's available in the public cloud. Users have the option to deploy on-premises. It can be deployed in a private cloud or according to the customer's requirements. It has the flexibility to do that.

I'd rate it a seven out of ten. 

It's a good tool for monitoring hybrid environments. I would recommend it to others from a hybrid monitoring perspective and from a server database perspective. However, it does not have good capabilities for monitoring networks. It should not be used as a network monitoring solution. It needs to be more focused on infrastructure.

This tool is the combination of ITSM and EMS. 

My organization would like to see the following improvements to ScienceLogic:

1. ScienceLogic should provide detailed documents to customer as the current documents are not sufficient. 
2. They should add CLI command modes and scripts for high performance.

Its ITSM and EMS combination is really amazing. There is no need to purchase two products, one for ITSM and a second for EMS/NMS.

They should include chat support, like Zenoss. The ScienceLogic support team takes too much time.

We did face issues with its older version 8.1. 

We have not experience any fatal issues with EM7 

We have never faced any issues with scalability. 

We are using this tools for approximately 50 customers.

They should improve their support process.

We used multiple applications for NMS. Now, we are using this tool due to its dual functionality.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy. Just mount its media and follow all the steps.

With vendor team, we had a very good experience. I would rate them a seven out of 10.

Science Logic provides distributed and all-in-one concept in monitoring, you can easily customize the features in this product. Its distributed architecture makes it special. It comes with the OS built in, so no need to purchase an OS license or DB license.

They should improve database issues in HA and Failover mode, and provide documentation for all users , even if they are not customers.

One year.

Yes.

No issues in tools.

It depend on cost, on the customer, and the architect.

 It is straightforward.

 It depends on the customer, what he wants.

Yes, I evaluate a product and check all requirements before choosing.

Before implementation, be sure to clarify all the customer's requirements, then choose products accordingly.

Power packs.

With all the new devices being deployed, it is great to see the vender supporting them as they come out.

Addressing duplicate IPs: There is the ability to edit the DB and fix this, but adding some logic to understand them would be a plus.

Five years.

Never.

Never. It runs at 100% and performs at 100%.

No.

It is top rated. I have never waited on hold for help.

It is top rated. They always have a solution or an answer to my questions.

SevOne. EM7 is just more feature rich and stable.

Very easy and straightforward.

In-house.

100%.

Plan for adding more to it. Once you see EM7 in action, you will want to keep adding systems to monitor.

SevOne.

If your looking to have an OSS, demo EM7.