What needs improvement with LogicMonitor?

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.

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.

LogicMonitor has good features, but the ease of use is a little bit confusing. Additionally, we are looking for workflow automation, which is a little bit tricky for LogicMonitor. But we are still exploring more and do not have detailed training in LogicMonitor. Moreover, the deployment process needs improvement. The thing is the deployment or whatever the standard deployment should be implemented here. That is not fine-tuning. In my personal opinion, for workflow automation and other stuff, we have Python or scripting knowledge, and that part is very tricky. Whenever we try to call the service or the LogicMonitor team, and we open a ticket, it is chargeable. In future releases, we would like to see a configuration backup manager. A feature that automatically backups the device configuration will help us. So, instead of going with another third-party tool, this will be good.

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

I'm a learn-by-example person, so it would be nice to have a cookbook for enterprise management. They have a rich API process, but there aren't many examples of how to do enterprise-style work. It is peculiar about how to do it for one device, but not necessarily thousands. LogicMonitor can effortlessly pull data from one item at a time. I have yet to find an excellent way to get LogicMonitor to show me all the WAN devices and how they're doing in terms of capacity.

Dashboarding capabilities could be enhanced. It is cumbersome, you must do it all at once, and then you must repeat the process every now and then. If you ask me, I would rather it be automatic because they know what I monitor. If they have a template that they can provide, I can create a dashboard without even trying. The issue right now is that I'll have to combine tens of widgets to create my own dashboard which is a little time-consuming and inconvenient.

LogicMonitor should always improve AI because we are always striving for real intelligence. An additional feature we'd like to see in the next release of LogicMonitor is more in the area of identification of when the dominant workload is working. There are certain devices and applications that have cycles of their own. Some are used primarily during prime time, and some are used during the overnight timeframe, and better identification and classification of those workloads would be helpful. For example, we could then do some more planning about, for this particular set of devices, as it has a prime time environment, and we don't want to see a 24-hour average, as we want to see what is the 75th or 90th percentile utilization during the prime time when it is being used, whenever that prime time is.

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 would like to see more functionality around mapping of topologies, in terms of networks. An improvement that we would like to see is added functionality to get more detail out of mapping. For example, if the LogicMonitor Collector identifies a connection between two network endpoints, it would be great to actually see which ports are connecting the two endpoints together. That functionality is something we greatly desire. It would actually make our documentation more dynamic in the sense that we wouldn't need to manually document. If this is something that the platform could provide, then this would be a great asset.

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.

The only functional area I can think of that has room for improvement would be the dashboards. They could use a refresh. It would be nice if there were more widgets and more types of widgets.

Their Logs feature is quite new. It is not as feature-rich as we would like it to be. There have been a couple of conversations internally around other log management tools, like Splunk, which may do more for us than LM Logs. The benefit of LogicMonitor is that our staff know how to use it, so we don't really want to move away from it, if we don't have to. I fully expect there to be more development in this area. It is their newest feature, so it is understandable that it hasn't evolved as some of the other stuff. It would be good to see a bit more development in this area, but I think the monitoring side of things is spot on.

I would give reporting an eight out of 10. LogicMonitor takes the data from us and does an average on the graphs. So, it doesn't show the absolute case. This is one thing that is a pain and flaw with LogicMonitor. For whatever data that gets collected from the hardware, it shows the average of one minute. This is basically a pain because we don't know what is happening in those couple of seconds, because what you see is the last minute's average. For example, if there is a surge of over 100, we will not be able to see the 100. It will turn down to the average of 50 or 80. Then, it becomes a tug of war with customers, where we will say that it was because of a surge it closed at 120. They reply, "No, in the graph, it is showing 50. How can you say 120?" Then, we tell them, "No, LogicMonitor pushes the average out every minute." We keep some of our services at a threshold of about 100. Whenever the threshold crosses 100, then the service will fail. However, the graph never shows 100. The graph will show 50 or 80, because it is an average per minute. We are working with LogicMonitor to get flexibility to see the absolute running numbers, rather than doing an average. They can keep the average for customers who want it, but there should be a way to at least show the real numbers, which are coming every second on the screen. This is not something new that we are asking for. There are a couple of freeware available in the market, Munin or WhatsUp Gold, which have these capabilities to show real, absolute numbers as well as the average, min, and max. What we get from LogicMonitor is only the average, min, and max. The absolute is not there. We are not asking anything new or out-of-the-box from LogicMonitor. Our customers realize that these things are available in freeware versions in the market. Also, whatever is added as free should be a part of their paid subscription. Everybody is moving onto their mobiles. In the last five years, the development of their mobile application has been very slow or non-existent. Whatever the improvements have been made, they were made on the desktop view. However, on the mobile side of it, it only has the monitoring. As an administrator, if I need to create a user, then I need to open a laptop or go to a desktop to create a user. I can't create a user from the mobile application.

One of the areas that I sometimes find confusing is the way that the data is presented. For example, a couple of weeks back I was looking at bandwidth utilization. That's quite a difficult thing to present, but they should try to dumb down how the data is presented and simplify what they're presenting. With some data types, it's not really possible to do that. But that's one of the good things about LogicMonitor: You've got all of the data there. The sheer wealth of data that it gathers means that you can take that data and manipulate it in other ways, if you want to.

We have found LogicMonitor's reporting capabilities to be somewhat lacking. That is one of the only areas that we really thought was not as strong as it could be. One of the great things is the dashboard functionality, which we were able use to work around the reporting functionality. Instead of having a canned report that gets emailed to our customers, they have a live dashboard that they can log into and view the things we would normally include in a report. They can have a live look, where they can really drill into the data and see what is there. LogicMonitor's reporting capabilities definitely could use an improvement. We have made do with the dashboarding and done what we can to make that work for our customers. However, there are definitely customers who would like a PDF or some kind of report along those lines, where we have been utilizing other tools to provide them. The out-of-the-box LogicMonitor reporting is the only thing that we have been less than impressed with.

I have struggled a bit with the SLA calculations though, because I have some issues with the reporting having no data. However, I have worked around those issues and we have a solid process for reporting the SLA. Automated remediation of issues has room for improvement. I don't know how best to handle it, but I know that they're kind of working on it. I know there are some resources that can do automated remediation. I would like them to improve this area so it could be completely hands-free, where it detects an issue, such as, if a CPU is running high. There are ways to do it even now, but it's a bit more involved. Also, for a LogicMonitor program, it really depends upon the hardware and environment that it is running on to make that call. In terms of when it alerts, there are times when we do get alert storms because one device kind of fails on an interface where there are a number of things. Even if only one out of the five things on the interface fails, then everything on the interface will alert. I would like it to able to create network maps and connectivity structures so you don't have to manually do it. This piece hasn't been a big hitch for us, but I imagine there are other customers who would really like to see the mapping piece of it grow and become a little bit more automated.

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.

Some more application performance type monitoring would be nice. For example, an APM type solution, which would not necessarily completely replace it, but be able to tie into to what we're seeing on the application performance side so we can correlate what's going on with the application versus the underlying infrastructure.

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.

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.

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.

The process of upgrading some of the collectors has been a little bit confusing. I need to understand that better.

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.

Reporting is definitely a weak area in LogicMonitor. There's just not as much flexibility as there is in other areas of the product. Some of this can be overcome by using the REST API, but more of it should be out-of-the-box. Also — I know that they're working on this — a situation can arise when you have a logic module and you change the devices to which it applies. Now the version in their repository is different from the one that you've downloaded, even though it's essentially the same. You made a very minor change. So when you look for new data sources or logic modules, that one will show up as being different. And you have to go in and say, "Oh wait, no, it's not really different. It's just that I changed the 'Applies To'". Or say you've made a change to a threshold on a data source. It may be that LogicMonitor updates the data-gathering method for that. There's no good way to import the update without overriding the changes that you've made. That can be difficult.

The biggest area of improvement is with mobile. I'd love to see them improve the mobile app side. That's something I've mentioned to them on multiple occasions. It's one thing to be sitting in front of my computer when a problem or an alert comes up. It's a completely different thing when I'm remote from my computer and it would be nice to be able to have the same dynamic capabilities in an app as it would from the desktop. But otherwise, at the moment, what there is, is very sufficient for our purposes. My biggest thing would be to focus on the app side of things.

There is room for improvement with the UI. The UI is not that innovative. Although in general I like the UI, because it's very easy to use and very easy to customize, when you look at LogicMonitor for the first time, you don't think that it is a very cool tool. I do think this is a very cool tool, but the UI looks like an old UI. I would like to see more SQL monitoring and database monitoring. Although it has some basic functionality there, I would like to see more advanced database monitoring. I would like to be able to drill down into the SQL execution plan or the storage processor or query performance. In SolarWinds there is a model for SQL database monitoring. LogicMonitor has some, but not at an advanced level.

The reporting capabilities are okay but they are not perfect. There are some drawbacks in terms of differences between the information that can be found in the portal when compared to the reports themselves. We can see some of the information on the portal by clicking and navigating the menus, but if we want that same information within the reports it can be tricky, depending on the specific information we're talking about. In general they are okay, but the biggest disappointment is that reports haven't been developed in the last couple of years at all. That's something we hope will change in the future. I would also like to see a dark theme in the portal. I'm aware that it has been requested many times before, but that's something my team and I have been wishing for for quite some time. We would like a dark theme instead of having the white background and the very light user interface.

The reporting is okay. We don't use it that heavily. It is probably one of the less developed parts of the platform. We don't use it very much, but it could do with some improvements. They have been toying around with new graphical designs recently. Most people are probably happy with the way it looks at the moment (the original design is quite nice), whereas the new graphic design stuff has been a bit bright and colorful. It monitors most devices out-of-the-box, but not all. There is still improvement to be had in the devices that it monitors. It doesn't monitor some storage devices that we use, which is quite frustrating. It wasn't able to monitor Dell EMC Compellent Storage. In terms of what it can monitor though, the list would be enormous. E.g., it has very good VMware support.

The user interface is being addressed at the moment. It is about to be refreshed within the product. Certainly, there is room for improvement in that area, and I think that's recognized and being dealt with. Some of the dashboard capabilities are being extended. There are a few bits and pieces that they could do to make them even more flexible than what they are.

With the email alerts that we get, it would be nice if the subject line were a little bit smaller, and if it showed the system that is out as the first thing. Sometimes you have to open the email to see what that is.

The graphs are not intuitive and I think that they can be improved to help find issues faster. As it is now, I need to dig in more and try to filter things. Graphs are meant to be read easily, but in this case, they're not. There are different styles for CPUs, such as spiking with lines, and personally, I don't like that. I like more dots because with the display now, you never know what the limit is. When it is past the limit, that is where you need to check. Really, I'm not sure if any monitoring tools do that.

* I would like to be better able to monitor Oracle processes. A web-based interface is easy to use, but it is cumbersome to make changes across several devices.

Easier to get more data out from the API. a simpler search function in the portal (may come in 115 release) More datasources for Azure regarding backup and site-recovery

More customization and settings-tweaking so that we can make even more specialized data-sources/monitoring setups.

Bring back right-clicking in the UI, as I didn't notice I missed it until you removed the option to, which now just gets frustrating.

There are always things to improve of course. I haven't found any big issues though. There are small things, such as, it would be nice to have better looking charts.

The current user reporting module is terrible. There is a lot of room for improvement.