The initial setup is straightforward. There are not too many steps. The process for doing it within the portal is very easy. It is step by step. It is very simple to do and understand. The steps are very clear and well written. It doesn't take long. The installation of the collector does not really have any settings to put in. It is just opening the installer and clicking "Next" a few times. Deploying a collector to a site takes five minutes. 

The initial deployment is a gradual thing. Our IT estate has grown considerably since we started using LogicMonitor. When we put LogicMonitor in, we probably had less than 100 devices. Now, we are already looking at uplifting our commitment to 450 to 500 devices. We have gradually grown it, so we haven't necessarily had to do a complete rollout for 500 devices in one project. We have been adding 10 to 20 a month. It doesn't take long at all. It's not something that we are looking at how to streamline, because it is already so quick.

LogicMonitor reduces new customer onboarding time because the collector rollout process takes us a couple of minutes.

Once we were given our initial tutorial of the product, before we onboarded ourselves, it was very easy to do and we have found onboarding and implementation very pleasing. In terms of an MSP onboard, their documentation is some of the best documentation I've seen from a vendor. Based on their documentation, you can very easily onboard yourself. But we also had an executive-level onboarding demonstration.

Our original deployment had professional services involved and it took three or four weeks. But our customer deployments usually take a week. The biggest issue with our customer deployments is having the customer give us the right level of access. Slowdowns don't usually happen from the LogicMonitor side, they're usually from the customer side.

In our own company, we don't have a ton of devices to monitor, so it was really about making sure we got everything incorporated into the monitoring platform, including our cloud services.

In terms of maintenance, the collectors have software that needs to be maintained. The collector software is relatively easy to update. We can do it all from the portal itself. It handles the updates and restarting of the services, and it does so pretty quickly. Generally speaking, there is no downtime for the customer, whenever that happens. Outside of that, there are data sources and other source files that need to be updated on a monthly or  quarterly basis, according to how they're released. At times, those can cause some false positive alerts if they are not handled correctly on the import. In general, I'm the one who handles deployment and maintenance in our company.

Setting up LogicMonitor isn't very complex. We quickly learned that we could do some collector load balancing. As we're adding devices to a series of collectors, it can do its own load balancing to ensure you don't have too much on one server doing S&P polling. 

The initial setup for LogicMonitor was somewhat complicated for us because our network management was done by a third party. They had to add some ACL rules in the configuration of the network devices to give us access because they had it fairly locked down.

The team in the USA or the partner who implemented LogicMonitor earlier is not in the proper shape of architecture or deployment. So, it's got some issues with the network device group and servers. So, all are messed up. We decided to fine-tune the hardening of this LogicMonitor.

Personally, the way we implement it here. I feel it is not easy to use.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

There was planning that was required before the rollout of this product. That planning is to ensure that the product aligns with our monitoring requirements. In terms of planning, there will always be planning before you introduce any sort of tool like this, i.e., an IT monitoring tool, in terms of how you would like to structure the platform. This foundational planning is ultimately what affects your capability to create efficiencies in alerting and problem identification. 

There is obviously consideration around your alerting. I think alerting is probably one of the key features that any digital IT provider would use, whether it is an MSP or if you are monitoring your own infrastructure. One of the key things that you want out of a platform like this is its ability to promptly alert when there is an issue in your environment, then ultimately triggering a chain of events that would occur after that. So, in terms of planning, you will need to sort of assess your current monitoring and see how you would structure the architecture of the alerting. A lot of it comes down to that. 

It is quite flexible in that sense that no matter what sort of company you are, whether you are an MSP or internal IT looking to deploy a new product in your environment, it comes down to what your requirements are. So, there is not a set timeframe because there are a lot of factors involved, like understanding what your alert rules look like and the classification of the infrastructure. You might have some critical infrastructure, and you will need to consider that and put it in its own group. There are many different methods of doing this, but it all comes down to the requirements.

In terms of configuring and rolling out the platform, once the planning component of it was complete, the actual rollout was quite straightforward as it aligns to the structure that we defined prior.

Deploying the tool is easy but may require some fine-tuning after the initial setup. While the deployment process is straightforward, we found some adjustments were needed post-deployment, particularly in fine-tuning thresholds and configurations. Maintaining LogicMonitor is straightforward. Once the initial implementation is done, our Level 1 team handles maintenance requests. One person is generally sufficient to handle configuration and maintenance tasks. 

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.

I know that we have added extra Collectors, and it's super simple. We get to a point where we have too many instances on a Collector and it starts working too hard because it's just a VM. So, we spin up another Linux VM, download their Collector code, install it, and then you have another Collector running in 30 minutes. It's pretty straightforward. We add collectors fairly regularly, and it's pretty easy.

I know getting it installed is not that big of a deal, but getting things migrated off of old stuff can be time consuming. However, I wasn't around for it.

If we were implementing LogicMonitor now, we would need to identify when to pull the plug on Nagios, then identify what we wanted to monitor so we were not running duplicates.

The tool's deployment is very simple. 

From the outset, as a brand new user when we first started, there was a fairly steep learning curve to LogicMonitor. However, now that we understand how to get good value out of it, we find it quite easy. We are at the point where we're starting to automate the configuration so we don't have to spend anywhere near as much time as we did when setting up our first couple of customers.

For organizations picking up LogicMonitor for the first time, I would suggest they take advantage of the onboarding teams from LogicMonitor, their success manager and their account manager, to get from start to operate as quickly as possible.

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I was at the company for enabling the cloud and Kubernetes, which was a fair amount of work to pull that information in and reconfigure the cloud devices. We had them monitored as regular resources, but needed to migrate them over to monitoring them as cloud devices. It was a fair amount of work with no good way to automate it.

The initial setup with LogicMonitor was very straightforward. The team at LogicMonitor worked with us to deploy our first collector, then walked us through how to create groups and assign properties to the groups or devices. Most devices have very good metrics out-of-the-box, as the data sources that LogicMonitor provides are excellent for the vast majority of devices. Where we have had to create our own data sources has been with our managed services around more complex data sets, not a specific device.

In our organization, deploying to our internal systems took probably six hours. It was very easy.

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

The initial setup was very straightforward. Installing the collector at a customer site is super-easy. You do a basic default install, "next, next, next, finish," and it's calling home. 

Adding devices and getting customers set up, whether they've got one device or 1,000 devices, is easy. I can import a CSV and it starts going out, scanning, setting up everything, and auto-discovering all the different services. There is a lot of automation that makes it easy for us. Before, with other systems, if I knew there was a Windows server and it had SQL, I would have to add these special SQL packages and then add this other package. And then I might forget: "Oh, hey, there's a special service I was supposed to monitor." Having all those data sources and automation within LogicMonitor makes it easier for us to set up and deploy.

The solution's automated and agentless discovery, deployment, and configuration is that ease of use. No matter how many devices there are, being able to easily import and add them in is great. Having it automatically know it's scanning SNMP, for example, when it finds this name in this one OID it knows it's a Dell Storage unit and that it needs to automatically apply all of these special Dell Storage unit monitoring services. It will scan how many hard drives there are. If it finds there are 12 hard drives instead of 24, then it only monitors 12. Or instead of having two power supplies in this unit, if I'm only seeing one power supply, I should only monitor the one. That automation is awesome.

LogicMonitor also monitors most devices out-of-the-box. For us, it's a lot of the Nexus switches and VSS, which are the Cisco Virtual Switching System. There was so much stuff and we didn't know what we could monitor with our other solution. We saw only the basic stuff. When we installed LogicMonitor for this one customer, and added the Nexus switch, all of a sudden we saw module stuff, a lot more interfaces, and different hardware things. All of that was out-of-the-box and we were blown away by that. We didn't realize we were missing 70  percent of what we could monitor on this one device until we switched to LogicMonitor. 

That was actually the big savior for us for this very large, high-profile customer. We were using N-central for them and it required 15 collectors to monitor these 4,000 devices. We were able to use LogicMonitor and get that down to two collectors to monitor all that. The customer had been calling us out on it saying, "Hey, how come you don't see this? How come you don't see that?" We had to throw our hands up in the air. Once we introduced LogicMonitor and showed them what we did within five minutes, and all of the stuff we could see, they said, "Perfect. We'll stick with you guys. You seem to have the right solution."

The initial setup was very easy because they have product manuals and provide guidance. What they have maintained on their website is very concise and their team is very eager to help as well.

If I go through their manuals and website, they cover a lot of devices out-of-the-box, including Cisco and even customized development.

LogicMonitor has a long list of OEMs that they can monitor and service, like Barracuda, Fortinet, FortiGate, and Cisco.

I believe LogicMonitor monitors most devices out-of-the-box, but that was done with the setup which I wasn't involved in. We've got a lot of different customers. They've all got different types of network hardware. They've all got different storage arrays. Some of them have different types of hosts from different manufacturers. But we're able to monitor all of them with LogicMonitor because the information that LogicMonitor is pulling from them is common across them. The devices include Dell and HPE hardware, such as storage arrays, including Nimble, as well as a lot of Cisco networking gear. It will even monitor stuff that isn't enterprise-grade, but provided that something is enterprise-grade, it typically conforms to all of the WMI monitoring capabilities that LogicMonitor plugs into.

We have about half-a-dozen people who use LogicMonitor, and they're mostly third-line support engineers, so they're quite senior engineers. We have first- and second-line support and they just do the monitoring, but a lot of the really serious investigation, if there are any issues, go over to senior roles.

The solution’s automated and agentless discovery, deployment, and configuration has been helpful. I've used some of the automated discovery, especially when we've changed data centers and put a bunch of new hosts into our data center. I used their discovery tool. It was able to find and pull in most of the resources that we actually wanted. Even though I wasn't there for the initial deployment, for the times that I have used it, it seems very helpful. There are still some manual processes and checking that we do, but it has helped out a lot.

Out-of-the-box, it was able to monitor vSphere virtual machines, which was the biggest for us. We also have network load balancers, switches, and firewalls that it was able to pull in. We had to do very little to get it monitoring and reporting correctly.

The initial setup is easy.

The deployment took one day to complete.

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment. However, in terms of configuration, I have done many rearrangements of specific hardware and discovery of new equipment. That was pretty easy. It didn't take that much for the configuration, mostly for storage or infrastructure, like hypervisors. It was pretty straightforward. The Help page is pretty straightforward too. You will find what you're looking for.

LogicMonitor monitors most devices out-of-the-box. I was pretty amazed with all the documentation on how to configure specific hardware, like Citrix NetScaler ADC and PureStorage FlashArray. Those were pretty easy to configure. Other things it was able to monitor out-of-the-box include Veeam Backup, NetBackup, VMware, Windows Server — all the versions that we're using are supported — SQL Server, Linux servers, Red Hat, Oracle. Those are a few that come to mind.