Senior Systems Engineer at Accruent
Real User
Its fine-tuned alerting lets us troubleshoot issues and resolve them quickly
Pros and Cons
  • "The breadth of its ability to monitor all our environments, putting it in one place, has been helpful. This way, we don't have to manage multiple tools and try to juggle multiple balls to keep our environment monitored. It presents a clear picture to us of what is going on."
  • "We have very fine-tuned alerting that lets us know when there are issues by identifying where exactly that issue is, so we can troubleshoot and resolve them quickly. This is hopefully before the customer even notices. Then, it gives us some insight into potential issues coming down the road through our environmental health dashboards."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

We are in four public clouds. We are in AWS, Azure, and GCP. While we do Oracle cloud, we only have a small footprint there. We are monitoring all the virtual server environments as well as all the services in those environments and alerting on various set points depending on what it is: virtual, server and service. 

We are also monitoring our colos. We have on-prem hardware, networking, and server solutions that we are monitoring with LogicMonitor. We are in both the cloud and on-prem. The breadth of cloud and on-prem that we have is a good use case for LogicMonitor

How has it helped my organization?

We have very fine-tuned alerting that lets us know when there are issues by identifying where exactly that issue is, so we can troubleshoot and resolve them quickly. This is hopefully before the customer even notices. Then, it gives us some insight into potential issues coming down the road through our environmental health dashboards.

The breadth of its ability to monitor all our environments, putting it in one place, has been helpful. This way, we don't have to manage multiple tools and try to juggle multiple balls to keep our environment monitored. It presents a clear picture to us of what is going on.

When I first started, it was less granular in terms of the fine tuning and the ability to tune out specific servers running high CPU. Keeping a global general standard has really helped. We now modify the environment where we need to alert and ignore those areas where we're not as concerned. This has helped our company in ways that maybe management doesn't even realize, e.g., we're not waking up our engineers in the middle of the night. Therefore, there is more job satisfaction in being able to get a good night's sleep. For example, we had one team that was being alerted every couple hours, which was ridiculous when you're on call and need to sleep. This was one of my first prime objectives when I started: To improve the quality of life, so we don't have as much turnover in our engineering support staff.

What is most valuable?

At the top of the list of most valuable features is the ability to modify and add data sources, to use other people's data sources, and the LM Exchange itself. It gives LogicMonitor a lot of flexibility. It gives the end user the ability to monitor just about anything that can connect to a network and send data, which is a nice. You can take the data sources for what you are trying to do, then modify and adjust them to what your new parameters are or your use cases. With a lot of other applications, you either don't have the option at all (because you have to use what they have out-of-the-box) or it takes a lot of work to be able to enable monitoring something new. That is the best thing about being an administrator of LogicMonitor.

I have written my own data sources in a number of cases. We have also leveraged existing data sources and modified them to fit our specific cases. We don't typically publish them, but I know with the LM Exchange that it's becoming easier to do that.

I know management very much likes the dashboard presentations that LogicMonitor has. They are very comprehensive. You can pull in other things and add them in as a widget. You can see more than just what is in LogicMonitor, as it gives a single pane of glass for whatever management is interested in or whatever environment they're looking at when they are the monitoring software metrics. Then, it is presented all in one location, which is really nice.

We have SLAs for uptime, all our hardware, and all our infrastructure: hardware, servers, and storage. I have spun up a number of services based on the specific metrics for all those devices, then determine SLAs based on the uptime of those metrics. We have a nice SLA dashboard that shows the uptime of all of our environments, so when my manager or his manager comes to me, and asks, "What was the uptime of our environments or this area in storage?" Then, I can quickly look at the dashboard and tell him. Therefore, I really like that feature. 

Another dashboard that we find valuable is environmental health. We have a number of dashboards for all of our products. We have product teams for whom we created dashboards to look at the product, not just see what's happening now or in the past, e.g., what is currently having an issue. We also use it for forecasting, where we potentially might see an issue with storage on this server with a CPU that generally runs high or if there is an increasing trend in network traffic on the pipe. The environmental health dashboards have helped us stay ahead of potential issues that were coming down and ensure we had uptime for our customers' environments. 

LogicMonitor has the flexibility to enhance networking gear as well as handle our unique environment: servers, hardware, cloud, and Kubernetes. There are a lot of features that we like about LogicMonitor.

I would rate it a nine out of 10 in terms of alerting. It is doing everything that we wanted it to do. We did a lot of tweaking in the last year and a half. In the last two years, since I have gotten really familiar with the product, I have been able to mesh with the teams to learn what we need to alert on. Previous to my arrival, we were sending a lot of alerts to teams, waking them up in the middle of the night. We have cleaned up a bit of their garbage so we are pretty clean in terms of what we're alerting on. It is doing a good job of letting us know when there is a problem in the environment, which is nice. 

What needs improvement?

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.

Buyer's Guide
LogicMonitor
March 2024
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For how long have I used the solution?

I personally have been using it for almost three years. The company has been using it for six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is very good. There are times when we get specific alerts based on if there are issues with this piece or that, but those generally haven't affected us. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It can handle scaling. It is like any other cloud service. There is a cost associated with scaling, so we currently don't monitor all of our environments. We monitor just the customer-facing production environments. It would be nice if we could monitor our dominant environments, but we will have to pay a lot more due to the scaling issue. So, there's a balance there between what we would like and what we are willing to pay for.

We have had issues in the past with data collection. Maybe it is due to pushing the limits of what LogicMonitor can do, or even the devices its monitoring. For example, we have a couple of F5s that are heavily used with a number of data sources on them and the SNMP couldn't actually pull all the information back in time, which was causing blind spots.

We have probably close to 100 users who use LogicMonitor, not all of them on a regular basis:

  • We have infrastructure engineers who maintain the infrastructure of our environment.
  • We have product engineers who maintain the IT server environments for the products. They work closely together with the infrastructure engineers.
  • We have our automation team and DevOps team who use LogicMonitor to do performance modeling on their environment and learn the automation processes that they have. They also use the API fairly heavily. 
  • We have software engineers on the teams who are monitoring specific server processes.

There are heavier and lighter users in all those areas. We have primary admins who administer LogicMonitor, and we're the heaviest users of it.

How are customer service and support?

Their technical support is very good. When we have an issue, they are usually knowledgeable enough to handle it. If not, they at least know what the issue is. It seems like they're sitting right next to a DevOps software engineer because it doesn't take them long to escalate to the developers. They are very good at getting back to us. I would give them 10 out of 10 in terms of their response.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

LogicMonitor has become our standard for all the products. Each product is basically an acquisition, e.g., we got rid of Datadog recently and phased out Splunk. The other solutions all came with their own tools, and we have gotten rid of all those other tools. A lot of that happened before I joined.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What was our ROI?

We haven't had as big a cost for downtime, so that has saved us a lot of money.

I am on a call every Monday where we evaluate all the alerting that has been done in the previous week. We have gone from constant complaints two years ago down to basically nothing.

When we spin up new servers and network devices, we have NetScans that are going on in LogicMonitor. It's a weekly scan on each subnet. If it detects a new device, then it will look it up in the DNS. From there, we have everything named appropriately, such that they are named in a way where LogicMonitor can, using property sources, figure out who the device belongs to and what the device does. This is in addition to it doing a standard SNMP network monitoring for the device to determine what it is. It uses that information, along with the name and property sources, to automatically assign where that device goes in our resource tree, then starts holding that device. That has been a lot of work, but it has been very fruitful in terms of being able to be hands-free and hands-off for bringing new devices into LogicMonitor. This saves us about five man-hours a week.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

When we were evaluating software packages (and we were already using LogicMonitor at that point), LogicMonitor became one of the few solutions that ended up on our short list because it can handle cloud and on-prem. They are really good at both. Solutions, like Datadog, don't give you the option to monitor on-prem hardware. They assume that you are just in the cloud because why would anyone be on-prem when there is cloud available, then you can spend a lot of money in the cloud. 

What other advice do I have?

We have used dynamics thresholds in only a couple of cases. We didn't necessarily see the application of dynamics thresholds in looking at critical alerts. So, we haven't used that a whole lot. Also, we haven't really leveraged the AI pieces of LogicMonitor. We are at a point with our tuning that we haven't needed to do so. If teams started complaining about specific alerts, like specific servers showing trends, increasing or decreasing, then we would probably do it, but we have been able to handle those concerns with static thresholds at this point.

I would rate the solution a nine out of 10.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Network Architect at Envision IT
Video Review
MSP
It consolidated our monitoring tools, reducing our onboarding times
Pros and Cons
  • "The dashboarding is very useful. Being able to create custom data sources is one of its biggest features which allows quick time to market with new features. If one of our vendors changes their data format or metrics that we should be monitoring, then we can quickly adjust to any changes in the environment in order to get a great user experience for our customers."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

We are a managed service provider, so we have a wide range of deployments. LogicMonitor, as a whole and software as a service solution, is deployed with collectors on-premise, which also ties directly into cloud providers.

We primarily monitor Citrix environments for customers. That varies from the delivery side, so network Citrix ADCs as well as virtual desktops and the supporting infrastructure around that. That's probably our primary use case.

While we do some NetFlow capture for other managed service clients, the primary use case would be Citrix monitoring.

How has it helped my organization?

LogicMonitor really improved our workflow as a company. Previously, we had been using a combination of about four or five tools. We were able to consolidate those all into LogicMonitor, which significantly improved our response time to new customers and onboarding time for new employees.

We can create granular alerting for devices. Then, since we are a managed service provider, we can have very granular alerting, not only for our own purposes, but where customers would like to be alerted directly on specific issues. It is very easy to build escalation chains that include the customer as well as our own team.

LogicMonitor's AIOps give us a great view of performance over time and potential changes in performance.

We have been able to tune LogicMonitor very granularly and eliminated most of our false positives. Any monitoring platform is going to give you false positives to some degree, but we have definitely reduced our false positives with LogicMonitor by at least a half.

What is most valuable?

The dashboarding is very useful. Being able to create custom data sources is one of its biggest features which allows quick time to market with new features. If one of our vendors changes their data format or metrics that we should be monitoring, then we can quickly adjust to any changes in the environment in order to get a great user experience for our customers.

We have created custom dashboards for our customers to give them a single pane of glass view as far as what their environment looks like in relation to their Citrix environment or VMware Hypervisor environment. LogicMonitor is a combination of things that they have pre-built. Especially along the VMware infrastructure, they have some great dashboards canned and ready to go. On the Citrix side, we have developed a lot of our own dashboards for customer use. We have gotten great feedback from those, as they're very easy to throw together and provide a lot of value to our customers.

We use custom data sources extensively. It's one of the greatest features of LogicMonitor, as a product. We can have very granular control over our data sources. Customizable data sources are one of the primary draws to LogicMonitor, and we do use them extensively. Developing new LogicModules is very simple. We primarily use PowerShell, but there are also a myriad of other options depending on what your target operating system is.

LogicMonitor alerts us very quickly if one of their collectors loses connectivity with the cloud. Occasionally, we will get alerts for customers where we don't have extensive monitoring in place, and they may not be aware that their site is down or that there are other issues with their environments. We have had occasions where the alerts that we get from LogicMonitor that the collectors are down might be our first indication where a customer is having an issue.

At this time, we are using AIOps for dynamic thresholds and anomaly detection. For anomaly detection, we found it quite helpful because it will give us an idea of when there is an anomaly in the environment. For example, if you have a backup job that normally would run, but it isn't running or if there is a bulk data transfer that wouldn't normally occur at a particular time, we can have it alert one way or another. That is a great feature, as far as LogicMonitor's AIOps toolkit.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using LogicMonitor for about four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

LogicMonitor's stability has been very good for us. We have not experienced any major outages or issues with LogicMonitor as a product in the several years that we've been using it.

We have a team of a couple of people who handle the implementation and deployment of LogicMonitor. We have a larger team who handles the day-to-day support. One of the great features of a LogicMonitor being a software as a service product is we don't have to monitor or manage the tool itself. The collectors update automatically. We handle the operating system running the collector within our normal toolset. Therefore, it gets Windows updates and does all these things on its own or through that toolset. There is very little time that has to be spent managing the tool itself. We are really just managing our systems in the tool. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is actually one of the reasons that we went to LogicMonitor from our own internal tool sets. The scalability is as big as you want to go. I've seen other customers that have thousands of endpoints in there without any issue. We certainly have not run into any scalability issues in our environments.

We have a variety of users who interact with LogicMonitor on a daily basis. We have our managed services team who work directly with the customers and are in there on a day-to-day basis doing remediation of issues as they arise. We also have our implementation group who take care of onboarding new customers, working with them on any custom data sources or custom monitoring needs that they might have. Then, our customers are able to log and see their own environment along with the dashboards and things that we built for them. It really has been a great tool for our team and customers to be able to see all of that. 

The role-based access control that LogicMonitor provides is very robust. We are able to provide single sign-on for our users as well as multi-factor authentication for our customers. Therefore, the role-based access control and authentication components of the LogicMonitor product are excellent.

Our use of LogicMonitor is constantly increasing as we roll our managed customers into the platform. We definitely plan to increase our managed services, and directly as a result, increase our utilization of LogicMonitor.

How are customer service and support?

We have only had to engage with technical support on a handful of occasions over the last four years. Thankfully, the product runs very well; we've had very few issues with it. On the couple of occasions that we have had to engage technical support, they have been very quick with first-call resolution, and we've been very happy with our experience during that process.

LogicMonitor provides very wide support for just about any device that you can use in an enterprise environment. We've used it for VMware, XenServer, and Hyper-V on the hypervisor side. On the storage side, we have people using NetApp and Dell EMC. On the networking, we are using Cisco. We also have some customers running UniFi gear and Juniper. There are just a massive variety of devices that it can monitor out-of-the-box.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

LogicMonitor was a great move for us in terms of consolidating our monitoring tools. We previously used a combination of paid and open source tools to monitor our customer environments. Being able to consolidate to LogicMonitor has allowed us to save significant time in server management when managing the tool. We have also seen a lot better onboarding times for our employees coming to the environment. It has been a great gain all-around.

The customer onboarding time was cut down by a half to maybe three-quarters. As far as the employee onboarding time, they only have to learn one tool instead of having to learn multiple tools. We have consolidated our collector or data source development from probably three languages down to just PowerShell. That has been a huge gain. It's much easier to find resources that can learn or know PowerShell, so that's been fantastic.

LogicMonitor replaced Observium, Zabbix, Nagios, and SolarWinds.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

We did the initial implementation with the LogicMonitor team. They had a very straightforward strategy as far as getting it deployed. It was very easy to get our devices added in there. As we have moved forward, we have certainly learned different tips and tricks as far as how we organize devices into categories or groups in order to effectively monitor devices with minimal user interaction.

What was our ROI?

The return on investment with LogicMonitor has been excellent. We have seen a great reduction in the number of hours spent managing the tool as well as the ability to monitor a wide variety of services and systems without significant investment, in terms of time for developing custom modules or having to dissect a tool to figure out exactly what we need to do to add the functionality that we're looking for. On top of that, being able to onboard our own employees in a much faster method with only having to learn one tool instead of having to learn four or five tools has been a gain to the net positive with our onboarding process.

Our customer onboarding process is now automated. We don't have to go in and manually create a large numbers of devices in multiple platforms. We go through the process and install the collectors at the customer site, then we have templates that we utilize to deploy LogicMonitor out to those collectors. The automation with LogicMonitor has probably saved us 20 or 30 percent in time, as far as deployment to customers goes.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

As a managed services provider, the licensing model that LogicMonitor provides us is excellent. We are able to scale up and scale down as needed. The pricing is reasonable for the amount of features and support that they provide.

As a managed service provider, we have the highest level of licensing that they offer, so we don't have any extra fees. I believe there are some add-ons for some of the lower tiers of LogicMonitor service, but that's not something that we use with our agreement.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We found that the amount of time that we were spending on managing the tool or doing upgrades was significant. We found that the cost of LogicMonitor was less than the cost to maintain some of these open source products that we had running. The other side of that is there were some new features that we wanted to roll out to decrease our footprint as far as what we're monitoring. The time that we would have taken to develop or enable those modules in our toolsets would have had a higher cost than moving to this software as a service based product.

We evaluated a handful of options. The ability of LogicMonitor analysis as a managed service provider really shined. A lot of the other products didn't have a great MSP portal or their role-based access control was not really mature enough to handle multiple tenants. Therefore, LogicMonitor won out very quickly when we started to evaluate most of the players out there.

We looked at SolarWinds and a couple of other solutions.

What other advice do I have?

If you are looking to implement LogicMonitor for the first time, work through their available documentation. There are a couple of certifications that they offer which are very good and give you a good foothold into the process. Then, talk with people who are currently using LogicMonitor. There is a great support community out there with people who are more than willing to help.

AIOps does provide a very useful data set. They have been continually improving it. AIOps is one of those things, which is there and we use it a bit. While the dynamic thresholding is interesting, the anomaly detection is probably more a nice to have, and not more of the primary features that we use.

We have not utilized the automated discovery and deployment. With managed services, we have to keep track of how we charge customers. Generally, we have a specific list of devices that we're going to monitor, so we don't use the discovery features on LogicMonitor.

As far as monitoring platforms go, I have worked with a wide variety. I would give LogicMonitor a 10 out of 10.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Buyer's Guide
LogicMonitor
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about LogicMonitor. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,415 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Systems Engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
Real User
Saves us cost-wise in the amount of time we're not spending with false errors
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution’s overall reporting capabilities are pretty powerful compared to ones that I have used previously. It seems like it has a lot of customizations that you can put in, but some of the out-of-the-box reports are useful too, like user logon duration and website latency. Those type of things have been helpful and don't require a lot of, if any, changes to get useful content out of them. They have also been pretty easy to implement and use."
  • "It needs better access for customizing and adding monitoring from the repository. That would be helpful. It seems like you have to search through the forums to figure out what specific pieces you need to get in for specific monitoring, if it's a nonstandard piece of equipment or process. You have to hunt and find certain elements to get them in place. If they could make it a bit easier rather having to find the right six-digit code to put in so it implements, that would be helpful."

What is our primary use case?

We use it in a few different ways:

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

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

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

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

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

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

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

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What was our ROI?

We have definitely seen ROI.

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

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

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

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

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Solutions Engineer at Black Box Network Services
Real User
Reduced our false positives significantly, improving our reliability, SLAs, and uptimes
Pros and Cons
  • "The dashboards are the big seller for us. When our customers can see those graphs and are able to interact with the data, that is valuable. They can easily adjust time ranges and the graphs display the data fast. We've used other tools in the past, where you'd say, "Hey, I want the last three months of data on a graph," and it would just sit there and crunch for five minutes before you'd actually see the data. With LogicMonitor, the fast reliability of those dashboards is huge."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for alarming on Cisco Voice systems, the Unified Communication stuff. We monitor all the gateways, trunks, SIP trunks, servers, and make sure all of the application is functioning, calls are being completed, and that there are no performance issues on the network or the voice system.

How has it helped my organization?

We used a different monitoring tool to do the Cisco Voice monitoring and our customers were very unhappy with us. It was missing stuff when monitoring, meaning it wasn't fully knowledgeable about checking all the OIDs and other things. It wasn't robust enough to allow us to customize it and build it out. Customers were getting very unhappy with that and they didn't like the dashboards, the graphs, and the reporting that came out of the other tool. When we moved over to LogicMonitor and we were able to show everything that we could actually deliver, a lot of our customers that were leaving came back to us or have provided us more services. We now have a proper tool that can deliver the services that we actually need, and that we've actually quoted and have contracts for.

The solution's ability to alert us if the cloud loses contact with on-prem collectors means we get alarms when a customer's collector isn't calling home anymore. That allows our engineers to know that there's some sort of serious outage. Either there's a power outage, the server crashed, or the internet's down. That's something that triggers our engineers to look at the customer and figure out why the monitoring solution is down. Is it the monitoring solution itself, is it the customer, or is it an act of God?

In addition, we had a lot of false positives before because we used a lot of VPN tunnels with other solutions. Moving to a SaaS solution and using LogicMonitor and the cloud has helped us a ton because it's improved reliability, SLAs, and uptimes. We've seen a 70 to 80 percent decrease in false-positive alarms.

Another benefit is that we went from three monitoring systems down to one. The first solution was Prognosis, which was developed by Integrated Research. The other tool was N-central, which is now provided by SolarWinds. We consolidated those two tools down into just LogicMonitor.

We've also been able to automate things such as cleaning up disk space or restarting a service. If the monitoring system catches a service not running, instead of initially sending off an alarm and creating a ticket, it's going to do some self-healing, to try to restart that service or run a script that cleans up some disk space. If that still doesn't fix the issue, it then passes the alarm on to create a ticket for a human to look at. 

That saves us time because, obviously, it doesn't disrupt an engineer and force him to try to log in to that customer and try to start the service or look at logs. It just says, "Hey, we restarted it. Everything's up and running," and there is no real impact to the company or business. It didn't take time for an engineer to look at it, respond to a ticket, and close the ticket. If a single service isn't running, that's about 15 minutes, at least, of an engineer's time. If an engineer doesn't have to do that three times a day, he's saving about an hour.

What is most valuable?

The dashboards are the big seller for us. When our customers can see those graphs and are able to interact with the data, that is valuable. They can easily adjust time ranges and the graphs display the data fast. We've used other tools in the past, where you'd say, "Hey, I want the last three months of data on a graph," and it would just sit there and crunch for five minutes before you'd actually see the data. With LogicMonitor, the fast reliability of those dashboards is huge. Allowing our customers and nontechnical people to see what is happening in their environments in an easy, friendly way is huge for us. That's the big feature we use and push on our customers. 

I have two favorites when it comes to dashboards. I put together a few dashboards for the voice systems that allow the customer to to see how the performance is going: green light/red light. They see green and everything looks good. Being able to click into that and interact with the dashboards to then drill down and get more info is awesome. The other thing that I really like is their Google Maps widget that goes inside of a dashboard. That is great for customers that have multiple locations across the country. They can see, "Oh, hey, I've got a regional outage in St. Louis, or the West Coast has a power outage, or everything is green. I see all my sites in my countries are green. Everything is good in my environment." 

Another valuable feature would be their logic modules. They are little scriptlets or settings so you can say, "Hey, I want to monitor this OID or these services," etc. That's huge in terms of customizability and having the system be robust. Out-of-the-box, monitoring solutions don't always have everything you need. You might say, "Hey, I know that there's this new OID for this new firmware," and you need to be able to write something to call that and pull it into the monitoring system. The logic modules within LogicMonitor, being so robust, is awesome because I can easily go into the tool, add something and push it out to all my customers and, boom, I'm off running with all this monitoring. And it took me five minutes to put it together.

In terms of the solution's reporting capabilities, I look at it in two ways. One of the ways is the dashboards. Being able to take all those dashboards and say, "Hey, I want a recurring report every quarter for QBRs," is awesome. On the technical side, for all the back-end stuff, being able to use reports to export information so that I can use it to inventory or check properties of stuff in the environment — do assessments — I really like those as well.

In addition, the solution's ability to customize data sources was big and something I did a lot of to build out the Cisco Voice monitoring, so that we could deliver what we've been contracted to do.

Another big thing we use a lot is LogicMonitor's granular alert tuning for devices. A customer might say, "Hey, we know this SIP trunk is going to have this utilization, so tweak the threshold for that one interface or that one SIP trunk at this level, but leave everyone else at the default." Or, "Hey, we're going to be doing maintenance on a power supply, so we'll need to set downtime or suppress alarming for that power supply, but let everything else that we're monitoring for that system go through." Using that granular ability is great for that. It's also great for adjusting alarming. They'll say, "Hey, we want this specific interface to be a priority-one alarm," but it's default is priority-two. Being able to tune that within the alert rules and get that granular and say, "This specific interface is going to be different, it's going to go somewhere else," or "it's got a different priority," is important.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I used LogicMonitor about six years ago at a different company. It was brought in there and I used it for a few years. Then I transferred to a different employer at which time I brought LogicMonitor in. It was in about 2014 when I first got exposed to it. With this new company, we've been using it for about four or five years now.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I am happy with the solution's stability. I haven't had any issues with reliability, with the service going offline or not being available.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

LogicMonitor will be able to scale to many more devices, if we need it to.

We're monitoring about 1,200 devices currently. That's a bit of a misleading number because there's so much more stuff we monitor, like virtual machines that don't really count as licenses, or even phones. We're also monitoring Meraki devices and cloud stuff. We're monitoring almost 30,000 phones with the tool, but they're not really devices in terms of licenses.

How are customer service and technical support?

Their support is fantastic. They're always there to answer your questions and they're very knowledgeable.

How was the initial setup?

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."

What was our ROI?

We have definitely seen return on our investment with LogicMonitor, especially once we showed how we could replace that Prognosis tool with it. The cost savings were through the roof. As an example, for one customer of ours, for one year with the Prognosis license, it would have cost $180,000. With LogicMonitor, it only costs us about $8,000 to $9,000. That's a huge savings, and it's great for the customer because it means we can lower our cost and they think we're losing money, but we're still getting so much. That was a huge benefit.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's affordable. The price we get per license is a lot cheaper than what we were getting with some of the other tools. There are other monitoring tools out there that are cheaper, but what you get with LogicMonitor, out-of-the-box, makes it worth the cost. It works well.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

There were a few other tools we looked at. Their pricing, how complex their setup was, and even their dashboards and reports were all considered. LogicMonitor seemed to fit all those categories for us and give us huge improvements. It was a no-brainer.

We looked at WhatsUp Gold. We looked at the main SolarWinds package and there was a tool called ScienceLogic that we looked at. And there was also Nimsoft.

What other advice do I have?

Do it. Your customers are going to like it, once you show them the dashboards, the pretty colors, and the ability to easily interact with it. That's going to win over your customers. I guarantee it. I've seen it happen. You can say, "I've got this tool that does everything," but if the customer can't tangibly see what the tool is doing, they'll say, "Well, what am I paying you for?" And they don't want to see generic spreadsheets. They want something that's easy to use and interact with.

I like how they've been improving on it over the years. It seems like they're going in the right direction. LogicMonitor fits what our company needs, and we plan to keep on using it for at least five more years, until something else gets better or they're out of business.

We don't use its AIOps capabilities for things like anomaly detection or root cause analysis yet, but that is something we are looking into. I know they're releasing those features in phases. They've got the first phase of AIOps and then they're pushing the next one with the dynamic thresholds, and that is definitely something we're going to be using, especially when you're looking at Cisco Voice systems and how they perform throughout the day. Dynamic thresholds are going to be huge for us, so that's going to be exciting.

We have about 100 people who work directly with LogicMonitor in our company. They're all the way from managers down to the low-level NOC people who are answering the telephone, to the Tier-3 engineers, and even the sales and marketing people. Everyone interacts with LogicMonitor in some way, either supporting a customer, running reports, or looking at the capabilities and what we are monitoring.

Overall, I've been very happy with the solution so far.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Vice President at Bypass Network Services
Real User
You can bring up your hardware and software stats in a single windowpane
Pros and Cons
  • "Whenever we reach out to our customers, we give LogicMonitor as a dashboard to them so they don't need to monitor the hardware side separately. For example, if my service is running on their hardware X, that means they don't need to monitor hardware X and our services too. LogicMonitor has the capability of monitoring their hardware as well as our services. This is how LogicMonitor helps us."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

If I summarize LogicMonitor, it is a single windowpane. You don't have to run four hardware stats and software stats on multiple screens during the monitoring of services. It gives you flexibility. It has the capability to pull up your data sources as well. So, it is like a single window, where you can see all your resources recorded, e.g., what value are you deriving out of your software?

We have our own product that we are specialized in. We needed something to help us with the setting up of the monitoring part.

Our customers are very happy. They are running Dell EMC hardware, so they don't need a Dell EMC monitoring window and our software windows. With LogicMonitor, they can see what is happening inside Dell EMC in a single, unified view that completely monitors their alerts.

How has it helped my organization?

We have some customers who are running a mix of Dell EMC, HPE, and Cisco hardware. We have our own software, as a service organization. We don't sell hardware. Whenever we reach out to our customers, we give LogicMonitor as a dashboard to them so they don't need to monitor the hardware side separately. For example, if my service is running on their hardware X, that means they don't need to monitor hardware X and our services too. LogicMonitor has the capability of monitoring their hardware as well as our services. This is how LogicMonitor helps us.

LogicMonitor has the ability to alert us if the cloud loses contact with on-prem collectors. We have more than 50 on-prem collectors, and there is the flexibility of putting an escalation chain to every collector. So, if a collector goes down, then whatever escalation mechanism is bound to that particular collector can fire. For example:

  • If an email has been attached to that collector, that email will come. 
  • If a call is attached, that call comes via mobile. 
  • If an SMS is there, then that SMS comes via mobile. 
  • Third-party external integrations over PagerDuty or any HTTP delivery also happen because they have the ability to send alerts through Slack as well.

What is most valuable?

We use the LogicMonitor dashboards with a couple of widgets. We have some custom dashboards as well. The CPU and memory usage dashboards are very cool to run, because if the hardware is intact, then your hardware services are working fine. 

We have around six to seven customers working with customer data sources. It helps us give more reports to our customers. For example, the CPU and memory usage are standard dashboards which count how much memory and CPUs are working. However, there are certain things that our customers want from the application side, like how many signups you're doing. We created those data sources on LogicMonitor and helped our customers see the same dashboard on the same screen. This has helped us a lot.

The solution provides us with granular alert-tuning for devices. They have three thresholds out there: warning at 70, error at 80, and critical at 90. You can segregate whether you want to call it a warning, error, or critical. There is flexibility, and we are happy with that.

Go-to-market is very easy with LogicMonitor. Today, if my customer needs five dashboards of software and 10 dashboards of hardware, then I am capable of delivering that with LogicMonitor.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I just started using LogicMonitor.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is fine.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I don't see any challenges with scalability. Whatever my product is capable of delivering, LogicMonitor is delivering that too.

The users of this solution include my team members. They use the LogicMonitor Portal for customer account creation and credentials, such as changing a password or creating dashboards. Also, all our customers have read-only access for their dashboards.

We monitor close to 100 devices. We have plans to increase that usage in the future.

How are customer service and technical support?

The support is very good. We are happy with the kind of attention that we get from our customer service manager (CSM). 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

In 2016, we started off our organization. The same thing happened with LogicMonitor. The timing was that we were both startups at the same point in time, so we grew at the same pace. We never checked another competitor of LogicMonitor, and LogicMonitor was our first buy of its kind. We have been with LogicMonitor since day one.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What was our ROI?

There is no ROI. We are mitigating outages for our customers, but not really saving time.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

LogicMonitor is competitively priced at the same level as other vendors, like Datadog.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We have not tried another operator, like Datadog, or other solutions out there. We were early adopters with LogicMonitor, and we have stuck with it until this day.

It takes a lot of time to develop a data source to put on the LogicMonitor platform. It's not easy for us to plug out of LogicMonitor and plug into Datadog. Plugging out and plugging in will work only in cases where we are monitoring basic things like CPU memory, which comes with the default package. When it comes to custom data sources, LogicMonitor has given us the option to write a script that they can make visible in their dashboards. 

When I talk to competitors, like Datadog, they have their own ways of handling data. To consider switching, we would need to invest our time in understanding which formats work with their product and how that will impact our customers and their timelines.

What other advice do I have?

LogicMonitor has evolved drastically in the last couple of years. They have made a lot of changes and are moving very fast. They are getting accustomed to machine learning, AI, DevOps, etc.

Don't reinvent the wheel. Just concentrate on your business and put your monitoring on LogicMonitor.

The solution has helped consolidate the monitoring tools that we need to an extent. For example, if our customer is running an HPE machine and doesn't have a license for HPE monitoring, they can at least see the basic hygiene level of hardware through LogicMonitor.

In the last month, we deployed the agentless collectors. We are still in the phase of commissioning those devices, so I don't personally have any experience on this.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10). 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Google
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Pre-Sales Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Consultant
Enables us to consistently wow our customers and set high SLAs because it reliably tells us if there is a problem anywhere
Pros and Cons
  • "It's the depth of data that it gathers that I find really useful because there's nothing worse, when you're trying to find information about something or dig deeper into something, than hitting the bottom of the information really quickly and not having enough information to work with. With LogicMonitor, there is a load of information to dig through. It's a really good solution for that."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

We use LogicMonitor to monitor our customer environments. Some customers opt to look after their own environments, but some customers have us monitor them for them.

We use it to monitor the availability of servers and of network hardware. We have some storage array networks that are being monitored by it as well. We really use it as a guide to help. We monitor all of the key components in the different environments that we have running under LogicMonitor, and we use LogicMonitor as an early-warning system. If a problem develops in a customer environment, and we're monitoring it with LogicMonitor, then we get fairly rapid notification that there's a problem so we can start looking into it and doing something about it.

Also, along with all of that monitoring comes a lot of information logging for things like bandwidth, so we can see how much data is coming and going over different links. If a customer came to us and said, "We're thinking about downgrading the network links that we have," we have evidence to present to them to say, "Yes, it's okay to do that because you're hardly using the network link." Or we can say, "We wouldn't advise you to do that because we've observed that you're using most of that link and, if anything, you need to increase your bandwidth."

The device numbers being monitored is definitely on the order of several hundred among our three or four dozen customers. We're probably monitoring 50 different environments.

How has it helped my organization?

The solution's ability to alert you if the cloud loses contact with the on-prem Collectors is the crux of the solution. The customers are relying on us being proactive and highly responsive to any outages in their environments. A lot of the time, when we're phoning the customer up and saying, "We've detected that you've got an outage here," the customer doesn't even know about it. It hasn't even filtered through and their people haven't reported it. LogicMonitor enables us to consistently really wow the customers by sorting that out. They're saying, "I didn't even know that there was a problem in the environment," and we're already getting on and fixing it because LogicMonitor has allowed us to do that. It's really good.

The deployment is all automated, once we've selected where we want the Collectors to go. It saves us time because we're not having to faff around doing it. That might save us an hour per customer. The agentless aspect of it speeds up the deployment. Once we've got a single Collector there, we can leverage the information that that Collector can gather from all of the other devices. That's also really good.

What is most valuable?

The monitoring is the most valuable feature, the ability to have Collectors monitoring the health of different services. That's the thing that really helps us.

Among the dashboards, it's the availability ones that are my favourites. We have them set up so that they're only going to flag problems. If we look at the dashboard and it's completely empty, then we know that everything's in the green. If we look at the dashboard and there are entries on it, it means that somebody, somewhere, has a problem.

We use LogicMonitor's ability to customize data sources where a customer is providing web services or when looking at the availability of shared storage arrays. That's where we've started to customize it a little bit more to look at specific metrics that the Collectors have.

LogicMonitor provides us with granular alerts tuning for devices and that enhances our monitoring. The granularity that LogicMonitor goes into is really good. At first it can be a bit overwhelming because there's so much to it. But once you've distilled down the bits that you need to be paying attention to, and the bits that you're not particularly interested in, then it makes it quite simple. And when I say "all of the bits that you're not interested in," you're not interested in them right now. But that's not to say that in the future a requirement won't come up where you actually need to look at those bits. The fact that it supports so many different monitoring features is really good.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using LogicMonitor for three or four years now. We're partnered with LogicMonitor, so we can resell the solution as well.

I work in a pre-sales role, so when customers need new solutions they will come and ask. If I'm looking to scope replacement hardware, or if I'm looking to review the bandwidth utilization at a customer site, that's when I would go into LogicMonitor. Our service desk, predominantly, does the day-to-day monitoring. Whenever I come to LogicMonitor, it's a case of delving into historical data. At the same time, I've got an appreciation of how the solution works and the cool stuff that it'll do.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I've got no reason to believe that it's unstable, at all. I've not heard of Collectors crashing or the main console being unavailable for any extended period of time. There are periods of maintenance where it would be unavailable, but I'm certainly not aware of anything that was cause for concern with regards to the stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It scales well; no concerns whatsoever.

How are customer service and technical support?

I've never actually used their technical support, but I know that our guys have, and they've always been able to fix problems fairly quickly. The technical support, as far as I'm aware, is really good.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What was our ROI?

It gives us the ability to talk about our monitoring solution and service with a very high degree of confidence in ourselves. And we can set very high SLAs because we know that LogicMonitor is reliably going to tell us if there's a problem anywhere. That will enable us to start working on it very quickly, which in turn will help us to deliver very high SLAs  and very rapid response times to our customers. Obviously, customers are going to be happy about that because they want things fixed quickly. That is the best benefit that I see from it.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's an enterprise-grade solution and competitively priced compared to the other solutions that are out there. If it were extortionately expensive, we wouldn't be using it. If it weren't doing what we needed it to do, we wouldn't be using it. Our organization is not huge, but LogicMonitor is worth every penny that we pay for it. I've never heard anyone say, "I'm not sure that we're getting good value for money from this product." It's integral to our business.

When you compare it to competitors, maybe some of the competitors' products are going to be a bit cheaper, but it comes down to the functionality that you're getting. You're paying for what you're getting, so I would say it's good value for money.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

The solution's overall reporting capabilities are pretty good. We've assessed a lot of different solutions, because if we're offering a monitoring service to customers, it needs to be really good. We looked at SolarWinds and other ones, but LogicMonitor was the one that consistently came out on top across the monitoring requirements. LogicMonitor was hands-down the best.

LogicMonitor consolidates the monitoring tools that we need in one solution. We didn't have any tools in place originally, but all of the different types of things that we want to monitor comprised one of the reasons that LogicMonitor came out on top. It was the sheer breadth of functions that it has. A lot of the monitoring solutions that we were looking at would only do maybe 75 percent of it. They would monitor the uptime of servers and they would monitor the availability of network links, but they wouldn't give us any information around the bandwidth utilization of those network links. Other solutions would give us the bandwidth utilization, but then they wouldn't be able to monitor the servers. LogicMonitor gave us everything in one package.

What other advice do I have?

It's the depth of data that it gathers that I find really useful because there's nothing worse, when you're trying to find information about something or dig deeper into something, than hitting the bottom of the information really quickly and not having enough information to work with. With LogicMonitor, there is a load of information to dig through. It's a really good solution for that.

I'm not aware of any false positives that we get through LogicMonitor. That could be because we've tuned it over time so that we've tuned out any of those false positives. But generally speaking, if LogicMonitor flags something, there is a problem. Sometimes those problems are transient and something is just flagged because there was a blip in the system for whatever reason. But then it resolves itself without any intervention. LogicMonitor still allows us to see all of that stuff.

There are always lessons learned when you're running anything like this at scale. You set things up the way you think they should be set up initially, and then, with 20/20 hindsight you invariably decide, "Well, we didn't need to do that. We should have done this." But the solution allows you to do that. You don't end up fenced into a corner where you configured something the wrong way initially and you can't undo it. If you do see ways of doing things better, you can change them as you go.

I would rate LogicMonitor a 10 out 10. I've used other monitoring solutions over the years, and LogicMonitor does things really well. The console may not be quite as flashy as others that I've seen, but it's perfectly functional. Having a flashy console is not necessarily the be all and end all because, often, if the console is flashy, and it distracts you from what you're looking at. Every time I've ever used LogicMonitor, it's given me everything I needed out of it. I've got no complaints about it whatsoever.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
IT Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
We can more finely tune the details of our monitoring
Pros and Cons
  • "The alerting would be number one in my book. The thresholds for getting alerts for different criteria are pretty well-thought-out. We don't get many false positives or negatives on the alerting side. If we do get an email alert or some similar alert, we know that it is something that has to be looked at."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

The biggest things are infrastructure monitoring and alerting. This is mostly for our virtual machines, but it is also for other networking equipment and a few other pieces as well.

We are at the newest update. It is a mix between on-premise Collectors and their software as a service (SaaS), which is the newest update. Our Collectors are also on the newest version right now. While they don't have to be the newest version, they tend to get pretty close to the newest version to work properly.

How has it helped my organization?

We have used the solution’s ability to customize data sources to a small degree. We are able to more finely tune all the details of what we are monitoring. This comes down to the false negatives or positives, and being able to alert on the actual details that we want to be alerted on.

What is most valuable?

The alerting would be number one in my book. The thresholds for getting alerts for different criteria are pretty well-thought-out. We don't get many false positives or negatives on the alerting side. If we do get an email alert or some similar alert, we know that it is something that has to be looked at.

I built a remote workforce dashboard, which is my favorite dashboard. When the company pretty much all started working from home, I put together a lot of different graphs of types of infrastructure pieces necessary for users to be able to work from home and put those all onto one dashboard. Therefore, at a glance, we could view the health to make sure anybody working remotely would be in good shape and be able to work successfully.

The reporting capabilities are pretty effective, if you know what you are looking for. We don't use the reporting features a whole lot. However, when I have gone in to create reports, as long as you know what you want to be included in the report, it's definitely pretty quick and easy to get the reporting started.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

Our company has been using it for four to five years. I personally have been using it within the company for about three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's been highly stable. We have had two brief outages, which lasted less than an hour, in the three years that I have worked with them.

We have two people (at any time) dedicated to deployment and maintenance. They are our systems engineers.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is easily scalable.

We have about 20 users working with the solution who are mostly systems engineers. We also have some DevOps engineers and a few software architects who use it.

We have 1000 resources that we are monitoring with a couple hundred websites. As our company grows, we do plan to increase usage, but nothing major. It will probably be about a 10 percent increase over the next year or two.

How are customer service and technical support?

I'd rate the technical support pretty highly. The few times that we have had to put in a ticket for support, they have been very helpful. Every time that I can remember, the issue has always been something on the actual resource being monitored. While not technically LogicMonitor's fault, they were still able to help us quickly identify and resolve it.

Twice in the last three years, we have had brief outages between LogicMonitor and our solution. We received phone calls almost immediately from LogicMonitor indicating this. It was a very quick reaction. We know the issue isn't on our side, which is good, in these particular cases.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

LogicMonitor was able to replace at least two different solutions that we had in the past for monitoring. One of them being Logicworks. LogicMonitor was able to monitor a wide variety of websites, devices, and virtual machines. We were able to consolidate some of our monitoring so we are one single source now instead of multiple.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What was our ROI?

We have definitely seen ROI with LogicMonitor. We used to provide 24/7 IT support for our users. We have since been able to change to operating just within normal business hours for IT support, and LogicMonitor was a large part of being able to accomplish that.

LogicMonitor has reduced our number of false positives compared to how many we were getting with other monitoring platforms. We have seen a 50 percent reduction in false positives, possibly more.

What other advice do I have?

It really just comes down to making sure that we're getting alerts on something that actually does need attention.

We're starting to look into the solution’s Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) capabilities for things like anomaly detection, root cause analysis, or dynamic thresholds to see if it might be useful for some of our services.

Take a look at your environment and at what level of detail you will need for monitoring. One of the advantages to LogicMonitor is just monitoring your vSphere environment without monitoring the individual VMs within it. You still get a lot of detail about those VMs as instances. To put a VM in as a resource, instead of an instance, you get a lot more granularity on the operating system side for what you can look at. However, just monitoring your vSphere environment alone gives you a surprising amount of detail.

The biggest lesson I've learned is you need to understand what role your different devices play in your infrastructure in order to successfully monitor them. Get a detailed list of the devices that you do have in your environment that you want monitored and why you want them monitored. The why you want them monitored will tell you what different things you might want to be alerted on because LogicMonitor will collect a lot of information about your devices. Narrowing down what you actually want to be alerted on is the important part.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Director at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
Useful for traditional infrastructure monitoring, easy to set up, and technical support is helpful
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature of LogicMonitor is the infrastructure monitoring capability."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

LogicMonitor is predominantly used in modern cloud monitoring tools. You have servers that you want to monitor for performance, CPU, memory, and so on, or you have a cloud environment that you want to monitor for EC2 instances, ALBs, and more. 

Our LogicMonitor keeps track of everything. LogicMonitor basically gives you the ability to monitor the infrastructure side of your application ecosystem.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of LogicMonitor is the infrastructure monitoring capability.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with LogicMonitor for seven years.

We have the latest version. LogicMonitor is a SaaS product.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

LogicMonitor is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

LogicMonitor is a scalable product.

In our company, we have 5,000 users.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is good.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is easy.

The deployment took one day to complete.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

They are expensive for the cloud.

What other advice do I have?

If you only want to use LogicMonitor in the cloud, there's a better tool available. But if it's for traditional infrastructure monitoring, it makes sense; it's a useful tool. 

However, if you are a cloud-native organization and want LogicMonitor, I believe it will be a costly investment because there are many better cloud monitoring solutions available.

There are numerous options, including CloudWatch itself, or Grafana with a connection to a CloudWatch data source. You can use Grafana to monitor as well as others, there are numerous tools available.

They are good, I would rate LogicMonitor a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free LogicMonitor Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free LogicMonitor Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.