I had evaluated LogicMonitor at a previous company, which was a much bigger company. It was a company where it was a lot harder to make purchasing decisions. When I moved companies, I had already seen LogicMonitor and how good it was, so I didn't look at anything else. I just knew we wanted to use LogicMonitor.

If people are comparing something based on price alone, I would still say, "Do a trial. Look at some of the extra features that LogicMonitor provides," because we have found that it does more for us than just monitoring. We use it as our remote access solution to things as well, which means that we were able to get rid of another product that we were paying for in favor of LogicMonitor. So, we have consolidated two requirements into one. Even though LogicMonitor might be more expensive than another solution, we have saved overall.

We looked at three or four others, but that was several years ago. We chose LogicMonitor because of the simplicity of deployment and the time to get up and running. It's simple, but it's still as complicated as it needs to be to do all of the things that we need it to do.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using LogicMonitor is that other products are inferior. Also, compared to what we knew with the legacy monitoring tools, LogicMonitor has done a great job. There are definitely better ways of doing things than the traditional monitoring tools did. If a new customer has SolarWinds or OpManager or some other on-premises tool, sometimes they're afraid of the cloud tools. What we'll say is that the amount of things that it can do far outpaces the legacy tools.

We did look at different options before choosing LogicMonitor, but I'd rather not say which ones.

I evaluated multiple different solutions. Some of the solutions that we looked at were NinjaRMM, Auvik monitoring, and Kaseya. There were multiple different platforms that I personally trialed. Not that they didn't have good offerings, it is just that the LogicMonitor platform was comprehensive in its feature set. We found, with LogicMonitor, that most of the features we desired were actually consolidated into a single platform. This made it really easy to onboard and offboard as well as apply new features or monitoring to our userbase.

We are very selective about the vendors that we use, in terms of our products that we provide.

We did evaluate it, and we saw pros and content. Looking at the cost structure, everything, and business requirements, this was the best fit for us.

As I told you, this bigger company has acquired us. The other departments use that product, and the cost structure is not as high as LogicMonitor. But I am researching it. I still need more information. But with my initial research, I found a gap in how Icinga takes care of necessary components of our infrastructure, especially IBM web infrastructure, and how LogicMonitor incorporates that versus how Icinga does it. I still need profound information, but the preliminary research shows a LogicMonitor is better.

The organization I came from had a huge SolarWinds deployment. We also used Nagios, Cacti, and OpenNMS, which is an open source NMS platform. Unfortunately, I've had to do some work with Cisco Prime as well, which used to be called Cisco Works. I installed Cisco Prime for a handful of clients in a past life.

• Pros of LogicMonitor: Ease of installation and use. 
• Cons. Tuning data sources can be a bit labor intensive. However, once you get it set up, it's pretty straightforward. 

Having worked with OpenNMS, Cisco Prime, and SolarWinds, just the cost and complexity of those solutions is ridiculous. I would never advocate going back to that black hole.

We evaluated six solutions at the time. We then narrowed it down to a short-list of three, and we ended up buying two systems. We still operate two systems today because there are a couple of things that LogicMonitor doesn't do that the other systems do extraordinarily well. That's the way we've chosen to run our business. The specific lack in LogicMonitor is the real-time, live network map. It has basic functionality, but it's nothing like the competitive offers from SolarWinds or Auvik.

Other tools may have been evaluated; however, that process was handled before I arrived at the company. 

I believe they evaluated two or three other tools, but I was not part of that process.

We reviewed other solutions. One of the key reasons for going for it was the knowledge of the things that they put in the product. The other products we reviewed give you a lot of things for monitoring, but when something is happening, they don't give you the information about if it is good or bad. 

For the test management software for server environments, we have used a product called Kaseya, which is not a big company. They have Kaseya Traverse that's a very intelligent program for monitoring. It is the next best thing for me to look at. It is a real competitive program for Kaseya Traverse.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.