If we had other tools that were more complicated, we would need to hire more staff, and then our staff costs would be higher. Therefore, the costs of the products or services that we sell to our customers would then, naturally, have to be higher. Having a wide number of features under one product, which are very easy to use, means that we don't need to have highly skilled expert people running the solution. It can be run by more junior members of staff, and we don't need to have a lot of different products and software, which would increase our overall costs, which we would then have to pass on to our customers.

LogicMonitor saves us time. If there was a problem and we didn't know where the problem was, we would potentially spend hours of time trying to locate where the problem was. Whereas, LogicMonitor helps us pinpoint where problems are. Instead of spending hours looking at something and finding out if it is an issue, we might spend minutes instead.

LogicMonitor reduces mean time to repair. If we didn't know where a problem was or weren't able to pinpoint it, we could spend hours or days, potentially, looking for the cause or source of a problem. Whereas, with LogicMonitor, we can do it in minutes or hours, depending on how complex the problem is. It probably halves, if not more, the length of time it takes us to get resolutions.

LogicMonitor has given our customers visibility into issues they didn't even know existed. In some cases, when we do assessments, we will actually load a customer's devices into LogicMonitor. In many cases, it gives us visibility into things like misconfigured stack modules or broken stack modules. Stacks or switches won't be stacked correctly. They'll actually be just this side of failing, and nobody has noticed it. Sometimes there are environmental issues that the customer hasn't noticed, where a particular location gets hot every day around the same time. They don't notice it and eventually it's going to result in something failing.

New customer onboarding, for us, usually consists of two things. One is getting access so that we can get it deployed and get visibility into the customer environment. And the second part of it is access for our team. We don't want the LogicMonitor component to take a lot longer. And, in fact, we're able to get LogicMonitor up and running for our customers much quicker than they're able to give us accounts.

It also reduces mean time to repair. When we see an alert, more often than not it's intelligent enough to help us come up with some sort of a solution faster. We can see a service or a server or a switch go into a critical state. A lot of the time, without something like LogicMonitor, which has the full visibility into the device, you would have to log in to the device and do some troubleshooting to figure out what's going on. It could just be that the temperature of the chassis is elevated and it's causing the system to underperform. I can't tell you how much time it saves us on something like that, but scenarios like that are what we experience on a daily basis. It definitely cuts time off of our troubleshooting and response. It's everything from temperature alarms, to disk space, to bad memory modules, and bad hard drives. You name it, we see it. And instead of having to log in and troubleshoot for an hour or two hours, the data is right there in front of us already and we can automatically dispatch somebody to go repair the device.

We've certainly seen a return. One of the features we use extensively is Netflow, which helps us better understand what is consumed in the WAN environment. For example, we can determine that the DICOM processing is unnecessarily using up the WAN. It can go over a Meraki network, which is an encrypted process going over the general internet. We have highly secure Opt-E-WAN environments that most traffic goes over, but we also use the public internet to send other encrypted data.

LogicMonitor helped reduce the length of an outage of a facility because of the identification of a fiber cut, so my company was able to be on top of that faster, so in that respect, the product gave us less than one year's worth of ROI.

The quicker that we can onboard, the quicker that we are able to collect metrics to give us insight. Then, we are able to provide value to the customer and insights on their environment more quickly.

The return on investment is having the capability to offer more advanced features as part of our service offering. By having that capability, we have an advantage because we can offer different capabilities and functionalities within a single platform.

It has quite an advanced feature set, especially with its functionality like AIOps. It definitely gives us an edge and advantage to be able to provide these services to our customers and allow our customers to utilize our infrastructure for their own monitoring or reporting purposes. I definitely think that the functionalities are quite good and advanced. It definitely gives us that edge. From the perspective of the services that we can provide, we are able to offer more services to our customers by utilizing the features of the LogicMonitor platform.

From the feedback that we have received from our customers, they are quite happy with the tools that we have been able to offer, things like dashboards and centralized backups. From that perspective, I think that our customers are happy, having provided their feedback on LogicMonitor.

In certain circumstances, the AIOps functionality helps prevent outages. It really comes down to the circumstance. There are multiple factors involved. Being able to promptly receive information that could be anomalous, from the AIOps feature, allows us to proactively investigate alarms prior to any outages occurring, and this is sort of down to circumstance. From this perspective, time is being saved in respect to resolving an issue.

LogicMonitor has given us visibility into issues we didn’t even know existed. It comes down to the consolidation of data and being able to have dynamic dashboards and effective alert rules. It can provide information where something unrelated to the device may cause an alarm to be produced. It might not be directly related to the device that you are concerned with. However, it could prompt an investigation outside the scope of that device which may help us identify an issue downstream or upstream.

An example where LogicMonitor has provided visibility into an issue is it could highlight if there is a configuration issue. We predominantly monitor networks with this platform. Any example of networks using LogicMonitor's mapping feature can give us visibility into what physical links are connected between devices. When there is an alarm in the window where you look at the mappings, it actually identifies the alarm on the device. So, you may be able to identify misconfigurations. 

Another example is using the LM Config feature. If there has been a change to a running configuration file, it actually flags this change. So, if you have a change management policy that needs to be adhered to, and somebody has made a change without authorization, you can actually flag this information. Even though it may not cause an immediate outage or issue to be triggered, being able to have the visibility that somebody has made a change can prompt an investigation that could prevent an issue which may occur later.

LogicMonitor saves time in terms of its ability to proxy a connection through a device. For example, if you are troubleshooting a device, which you may want to connect to, you can proxy this connection through the platform. As a support resource, I don't need to use multiple platforms to connect to a device to further investigate the issue. It is all consolidated. From that perspective, it saves time because a resource now only needs to use one platform.

It saves time because the resource does not need to leave the platform. Depending on how many activities or issues that you are working on, that time could vary. From a consolidation perspective, everything is accessible within the platform. I definitely see the value in a resource not having to actually leave the platform to remediate an issue that is present.

The solution reduces mean time to repair. An example of this is when the resource no longer needs to look at logs manually on a device. It could actually be integrated into the platform. By having those logs right in front of you, it is very quick to make assumptions or conclusions about issues. Whereas, in the past, you might have needed to log into the device independently and do your own review. 

Another example of reducing mean time to repair is the ability to connect to the device directly from the platform. Being a cloud platform, you can perform this connection wherever you are. So, if you are working from home, you don't need to VPN into an office, then connect to some on-premises equipment. Being cloud delivered, you can configure SSO for authentication to authorize against your domain. This makes the authentication and login processes quite easy, especially now during this time of COVID as a lot of people are working from home. It has the flexibility to connect wherever you are as well as the ability to connect to a device within the platform.

We use LogicMonitor for our alerting and integrate it with PagerDuty for on-call paging. That is key to operational uptime. We live and die by the number of SEV-1, SEV-2, SEV-3, outages, and uptime. It is absolutely critical that LogicMonitor alerts PagerDuty, which alerts the on-call. We are reducing the impact of incidents using the tool by alerting for incidents that we can respond to.

The solution gives us the ability to charge a competitive price for a premium product. The cost of LogicMonitor is built into our service offering. From our point of view, it's a cost component for delivering our service.

I think that we have seen ROI. We moved to LogicMonitor because of the types of devices that we are monitoring. It’s better for us now with the efficiencies that we're getting from the platform. It's definitely benefiting us. It's more than just having a tool. It's something we can use day in, day out, giving us good insights to what is happening.

It has saved time because you have the information that you need in one place. In turn, the productivity is better because of it.

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

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

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

We are able to provide help with a lot of last moment troubleshooting. If a customer says that they have a problem, we ask them when did they have it last. We can go back in time, and we can look at the logs and say that it was this server that was doing something, which makes troubleshooting easier. 

We have bought Unomaly functionality, and we can search across all event logs from our customers. We can search with a name, or we can search for the last 12 hours. It gives us every event of every server and its time. It is a very fast way to look at a log file. It even has some intelligence in it, but that's a different story.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I believe we have seen return on our investment because we are receiving alerts and dashboards for specific time frames, so whenever there is a problem with some part of the infrastructure, we're able to provide the customer with valid information on what's happening and what was happening. It allows us to document things whenever root cause analysis is required for an issue.