There are a lot of valuable features. The product is probably one of the best-featured products in terms of its usability. It is brilliant. The in-depth graphs are really good for visualization. Remote access to devices through the LogicMonitor portal is really good from an ease-of-use perspective. Also, it is very secure.

LogicMonitor bought a company called Unomaly and integrated their log analytics into the LogicMonitor portal, which has been very good for us. Although we have a very big technical team, our internally facing IT team is quite small so having a product that is very easy to use is really important for us. We don't have loads of people who are experts in every individual product that we have. We have people that need to be skilled across a large number of products. So, the usability is very good for LogicMonitor.

We definitely use the Dashboards feature. We generally construct the dashboards ourselves, so we don't use the template ones that LogicMonitor provides by default, but we do use the Dashboards feature for our own dashboards. The templates are good examples of what you can do with dashboards, but they don't tend to meet a lot of our requirements, so we tend to do them from scratch.

We use the Dashboards feature for some of our service reviews and things for customers. We will present a dashboard to a customer when we do a review with them to show them graphs and stats on their solution. 

We use dynamic thresholds within the AIOps functionality. It is good because there are a lot of times when our customers have things fluctuate. This means that we are not getting alerted for stuff all the time, e.g., every time it just goes slightly over a threshold. So, the dynamic thresholds means that we're just able to react a bit more appropriately rather than just logging issues with customers when they are not really issues.

LogicMonitor has given us visibility into issues that we didn’t even know existed. It picks up on things, like failed power supplies or disks running out of space.

One of the most valuable features is the flexibility it gives for monitoring a particular device. There are a variety of ways we can get data into LogicMonitor.

In addition, it is an open platform that gives us the ability to add third-party application integrations, such as Slack or ServiceNow or Webex Teams.

There are also integrated features that allow for forecasting growth within the environment, not only for standard metrics like CPU and memory, but also for hard drive space utilization. Those are some pretty interesting and exciting features that are included in the platform.

On top of that, LogicMonitor has the ability to map out an environment at the network level.

It also enables us to drop a collector and automatically pick up everything in the target IT environment and map relationships. Obviously, you have to have the ability to reach the device. If there is anything stopping you via firewalls, then you can't get to it. But from a hypothetical standpoint, once a collector is in, we can capture everything very quickly based on an IP scheme. This has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that we can capture everything very rapidly. However, if there is a misconfiguration on the client's network, then there could be the possibility of grabbing devices that are not needed. So there is some TLC that needs to be done when handling these, but it is a very useful aspect of the tool when it comes to onboarding.

In terms of instant visibility into all of the technology we will monitor for customers, it depends on the customer. But anything the customer wants us to monitor is leveraged. Some customers will say they only want to monitor telephony, while some will only want to monitor their network. We get full visibility into whatever the customer wants us to monitor and we get it pretty rapidly. That is very important. Only having certain metrics that other platforms will give you out-of-the-box means you only get a small picture, a thumbnail picture. Whereas with LogicMonitor, you get the entire "eight by 10 picture", out-of-the-box. Rather than some availability metrics, you get everything. You get metrics on temperature, anything related to hardware failure, or up and down status. It's pretty important for being able to provide a valued service to the customer about the overall health and availability of their environment.

We use LogicMonitor's dashboards quite a bit. In fact, we have our own customized dashboards. We use pieces of the templated dashboards and they definitely help in guiding us to places where we can pull certain indicators of how our customer is doing. Overall, we almost always end up having to adjust the dashboards to fit our customer needs, but the templated dashboards are significantly helpful. They tell us the different methodologies that we can use. We then take them and tailor them for the specifics that we need.

It's super-easy to customize the templated dashboards. For example, we have a school district customer with a campus. The template dashboards give us templates for wireless and templates for general networking and a few other things. We pick and choose the different widgets that we want out of those dashboards and we put them on the single dashboard for that particular school. That provides them visibility into all the things that are critical to them without having to go through multiple dashboards. We get rid of the things that they don't care about, things that our next customer may care about. We try to come up with dashboards that are specific to our customers' wants and needs and to give them, as much as possible, a single place to look for something.

LogicMonitor also hits the vast majority of technologies and complex environments when it comes to coverage, including on-prem, hybrid, cloud, et cetera. It does a really good job at covering the most-used technologies.

It is easy to set up and monitor an entire facility. This is crucial because we have around 80 facilities that require monitoring. LifePoint is a hub-and-spoke environment, so it is essential to understand all of the WAN interfaces.

LogicMonitor added AI technology to help understand what's normal and that has helped quite a bit, so that's the feature I found most valuable in the product.

The product is also doing quite well with identifying devices and customizing a particular Cisco version or model number. LogicMonitor continues to be active in updating what is available to be monitored, and it's been very good with keeping those things current, so that's another valuable feature of the product.

LogicMonitor is good for getting a full view of your topologies. They have LiveMaps, which give you a visual representation of your infrastructure. They also have a great notification system. If something goes wrong, you'll be automatically notified. LogicMonitor also integrates with ServiceNow, so you can easily get alerts in those systems.

Another thing I like about LogicMonitor is their dependency metrics. This means that if one device goes down, you won't get alerts for other devices that depend on it. This helps you to quickly identify and resolve problems.

Overall, I think LogicMonitor has a lot of great features. However, I do have some concerns about the deployment process. It's not as straightforward as it could be. Additionally, some of the workflow automation features require scripting knowledge, which can be a barrier for some users.

There are a multitude of features that we use. Obviously, with the core foundational features, which are monitoring, we use different sorts of data sources to monitor. For example, SNMP would be an example of syslog monitoring. Primarily, that is used for network devices in our use case. When we monitor network devices for our customers, it is all performed with the compute being within the LogicMonitor platform and architecture. The list goes on. 

There are a multitude of different vendors, products, and hardware that it can perform monitoring on. It is not limited to that either. There is actually a vast range of different services that can be monitored, e.g., cloud services and services that use APIs. It is quite customizable and flexible in terms of monitoring capabilities. In addition to what is out-of-the-box, there are also capabilities to configure custom monitoring which can use many different data sources. From that perspective, it is quite broad in its scope of monitoring. 

In terms of the services that we like to use, there is the built-in AIOps, which is quite a good service. It analyzes metrics of data over time and can identify anomalies based on AIs, sort of an intelligence in the back-end. This is a really good service. Some of the services can add on components to the platform, like cloud monitoring, so you can monitor your cloud environments, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

There are quite a vast amount of different features that you can use within the platform. Some of them are additional costs and some of them come out-of-the-box. Another example of something, which has recently been included in the core component, would be a service called LM Config. Essentially, this service allows us to collect network devices, run configuration files, and take backups of our customers' infrastructure centrally from one system. Rather than needing individual systems at every customer site, because this is a cloud delivered sort of architecture, we can take backups of our customers' infrastructure through the platform, which is a really great convenience and sort of efficient way of doing so. This is actually an automated process, so you can schedule it to occur as frequently as you would like.

LogicMonitor enables us to modernize legacy tooling and consolidate monitoring tools in our customers' stacks. It has a nice user interface. It is very straightforward in terms of usability and utility. 

A single pane of glass is always preferred over distributed monitoring or other management platforms. In the past, you would need to have multiple different technologies performing different functions. For example, backups would usually be under another tool. Therefore, LogicMonitor was a great tool for us when we found that it had integrated backups using LM Config. That has reduced the time of being able to provide value to a customer. Being a single pane of glass, a lot of your metrics and alerts can all be grabbed from the tool. For a managed service provider, like us, it creates a lot more efficiencies within our operations. Our users only need to learn one tool, as opposed to learning multiple tools.

We believe that the dashboards are one of the most powerful functionalities within the LogicMonitor platform, as they are quite close to real-time, dynamic, and update quite frequently. Also, they give you a glimpse into the environment without having to run reports, etc. So, the dashboards are definitely a very powerful way of obtaining information and insights from any environment quickly. There are obviously environments where custom dashboards are required. However, a lot of time, the default dashboards provide enough information to get you going and give you that visibility instantly. Monitoring is overtime, but the earlier that you onboard and get the monitoring going, the faster the dashboard starts to populate with data. In that instance, you will be able to see data as it happens through the network or systems that you are monitoring.

Its templated dashboards are quite comprehensive out-of-the-box. For a lot of users out there, the out-of-the-box dashboards and monitoring will suffice. They are definitely comprehensive. Obviously, every environment is different, so you will need to tweak it where suitable. Overall, it's a pretty straightforward onboarding process. Assuming that you have all the right information required, if you want to monitor certain systems, then you may need passwords and configuration setup. Assuming that all these things are complete, then the onboarding process is pretty straightforward and streamlined.

One of LogicMonitor's benefits and strongest elements is that it is very extensible. It allows you to configure a lot of customizations, which are sometimes limited in other platforms. However, we found in our experience with LogicMonitor that it is quite extensible. The functionality is quite comprehensive in terms of customization. You can get very detailed into what you would like to monitor, whether it is using an out-of-the-box data source or a custom data source. You can then create custom dashboard elements so you can exhibit that data in a dashboard.

There have been some new features that have been released recently in the last few months, one of them being LM Logs. This feature uses syslog and SNMP to correlate data. So, if there is an alarm that is identified on a device, the LM Logs component will actually correlate the received log messages from the device and give the resource, or whoever is trying to remediate, insight. Instead of having to log into the device and check the logs manually, the LM Logs feature provides all that within the platform. This definitely decreases the amount of time it takes to resolve, as some of the steps that you would normally do are actually provided within the platform. So, we would definitely like to explore more of the product's feature sets.

We use the solution's AIOps functionality. We have made quite good use of it. It is something that we use daily. In terms of being able to predict anomalies or alert on anomalies within the environment, those prompt us to perform additional investigation. I would assess AIOps as being highly-effective for helping to detect warning signs that precede issues. Some of the monitoring that is provided out-of-the-box provides visibility, even in terms of metrics that you would not normally monitor or may not even know that could be monitored. From that perspective, having a broader scope of monitoring out-of-the-box gives you insight. In terms of AIOps, if we receive alarms where there have been multiple anomalies occurring within a certain time period, then that would prompt us to proactively investigate an issue prior to it actually occurring. From the visibility perspective of having monitoring out-of-the-box, it has been highly-effective and quite insightful.

LogicMonitor improved on-premises infrastructure monitoring in several ways. One key feature was dynamic resource allocation, although we didn't utilize it much in our system. The main functionalities we benefited from were email alerts, network mapping, and dashboards. 

Configuring multiple thresholds, including dynamic thresholds, helped identify potential problems early before they caused application downtime. The system prioritized alerts based on learned patterns. The reporting feature in LogicMonitor was quite useful. It allowed for generating reports on various aspects, and you could even schedule them to be sent via email.

The plugins are easy to integrate, and LogicMonitor provides these add-ons for vendors like VMware. It becomes very easy to integrate them and take the data sources. One does not need to configure everything individually. It automatically detects all the resources by their type and starts monitoring them almost immediately.

Its historical reporting: I can go into my production F5s and look at the CPU, memory transactions, application transactions, and bandwidth utilization. Then, I can use all of the graphing metrics. I can have a dashboard for my production environment and all of my critical elements where I can graph utilization over time and use it for capacity planning. It's a single pane of glass for everything about your environment health.

We build our own dashboards, creating dashboards for our various environments. It is all written in HTML5, so it's super easy to drag and drop, move things around, expand, and change dates. It's awesome. We can get as detailed as we want or roll up to a manager/director level. I like its ease of use.

I don't do much with reporting because the dashboards are good enough that they tell the story. I haven't actually clicked on the reports tab in quite a while, so we're probably under utilizing that. If you just go into a dashboard, and say, "Show me my F5 health for the last six months," the dashboard is good enough for that.

I have custom data sources for various things. With data sources, you can go down the rabbit hole real quick because they're very powerful. You can go to the LM Exchange, grab data sources, pull them down and put them into your installation, and then you can tweak them. The idea of a data source is that it matches. For example, if I have a collection of Cisco devices along with a collection of F5 and Palo Alto. There's a generic match criteria which says, "Is a Cisco. Is an F5. Is a Palo Alto." However, it also has all these other match conditions. Therefore, you can build Redex filters or match on 10 Gigabit Ethernet, but not 1 Gigabit Ethernet. You can get super deep in the weeds, and it can get complicated pretty quick, but their support is fantastic. 

The solution provide us with granular alert-tuning for devices. E.g., I can use it for application website checks, where I can set up an automated check from a bunch of different test facilities. So if I want check my application, I can ping it from five locations. I can tune the data source so that if the millisecond response time is ever greater than 500 milliseconds, it lets me know. I also can tune it so it won't alert me on one fail, but alert me on three fails. For any data source that you're collecting for, you can set thresholds for notice, warning, critical, and what to do if it fails one, two, or three times. You can just go crazy tuning it.

We found the solution monitors most devices out-of-the-box, such as, F5, Cisco, Palo Alto, ESX, Pure Storage, Windows database connectors, ActiveBatch. and Rubrik.

LogicMonitor helps us prevent potential downtime. It's pretty good. It generates low-level warnings that aren't necessarily preemptive but can still alert us to issues we should investigate. These warnings allow us to correlate data and identify areas where we should take action, even if the issues aren't critical.

The most useful feature we've found in LogicMonitor is its ability to deploy templates automatically. It's quite smart in this regard. When we add a device, it detects the type of device and deploys the appropriate template for it.  

The tool's alerting system has been pretty good for us. We receive SMS alerts if we're not in front of our screens, which has improved our response time to potential issues. The escalation chains feature has been particularly useful in this regard. Overall, it's easy to use and simplifies our alerting process.

The tool is highly integratable. 

One of the features I consider most valuable is the flexibility it gives us to configure the solution to do what we need to do and what our customers are asking us for.

We use the solution’s templated integrations to get instant visibility into all the technology we monitor. That's an integral part of the solution, in that we don't want to be writing code and having to develop new connectors to talk to new appliances. There's a strong community, along with information provided by LogicMonitor, to keep the tools up to date for talking to all those different network devices. There's a massive library of all the potential devices that we might find in a network, information that is sitting there and ready for us to use should we come across a customer that has something that we've never seen before. The likelihood is that there is already a template built for it that we can leverage.

We started out using the solution's templated dashboards, but we have built a number of customized dashboards as well. The templated dashboards are a good starting point. In terms of customizing dashboards, there is a steep learning curve, but once over that hurdle and you understand the way the dashboards work, how to extract the information and display it, and what's possible, it becomes very easy. The concept of developing a dashboard template for ourselves, then cloning it for every single customer, and only having to change one piece of information, is a godsend. That's one of the strengths. We can develop a template that fits every customer and just change the information that is presented. The templated dashboards save us time getting up and running with visibility into our customers' environments and help our customers because we present some of those dashboards to them.

Its monitoring features and the support on offer are pretty good.

It offers one centralized view of everything.

The initial setup is very simple. 

It is stable and reliable. 

The product can scale. 

LogicModules are great. Creating these is super easy and fun. Allowing users to make their own modules allows monitoring to be covered from all angles. We can make a script, for example, and go get metrics that may not be there out of the box.

The dashboard is helpful for showing off all that data you collect and impressing customers. Dashboards are a real good selling point as showcasing the data you collect all in one place makes troubleshooting and keeping an eye on things way easier that a giant alert list. Having them on a slideshow is super neat too.

The most valuable feature is the visualization of the data that it is collecting. I have used many products in the past and they tend to roll up the data. So, if you're looking at data over long periods of time, they start averaging the data, which can skew the figures that you're looking at. With LogicMonitor, they have the raw data there for two years, if you are an enterprise customer. If you are looking at that long duration of data, you're seeing exactly what happened during that time.

I have probably two types of favorite dashboards:

1. Dashboards that give a general overview of our whole environment and a complete sort of NOC-level view that can be drilled into if there isn't an alert.
2. I like the dashboards that can be very granular into a particular service or piece of equipment. For example, if you were looking at a dashboard just related to Citrix, you can have a huge amount of detail on one page. Taking all the metrics into visual graphs, pie charts and big number widgets which makes it a lot easier than having to work your way around the devices that you are monitoring to bring the data that you're interested in altogether.

We are quite a large networking company. One of the features that we like with LogicMonitor that they have out-of-the-box is NetFlow, which is a great tool to help troubleshoot something. This has improved how we can provide a service to our customers.

The anomaly detection is a very good tool because you can compare the statistics that you're looking at against a week or month ago to see if it's something that's truly out to the norm or not. The visualizations that I get are very powerful. These capabilities enable us to be more proactive in resolving issues and preventing problems. If you are managing a customer's network as you should be, you should be looking at these tools and visualizations on a general day-to-day basis to understand what is happening with the customer's network. It's very useful to use these tools to learn about what's going on and know what the norm is for those networks. Then, you can get to a point where you're tuning your alerting to be a bit more in tune with what the actual norm is for that customer.

The solution has consolidated the monitoring tools we need into one. A reason why we moved to LogicMonitor would be the additional features that are provided, like NetFlow. We would use a separate solution for that and configuration management as well. Just to have those additional items built into the product has been a really good part of the product.

Tuning is one of the main components. We like to make sure that only the right alerts are escalated, and that alerts are being sent to the right members, as opposed to every alert being broadcast to everybody. The main thing is the escalation chains. We feel that is a very good thing, rather than sending all the information to everybody at each level. Having the ability to make those sorts of changes doesn't require you to do too much, out-of-the-box. You just need to create the basic entities, like who are the different people, who are the contacts, or email groups, and cover the data source and events which should be alerted.

Another feature from the technical aspect, the back-end, is the ability to allow individual users or customers to have their own APIs. They're able to make changes using the plugins covered by LogicMonitor. That is a very powerful feature that is more attractive to our techno-savvy customers.

In terms of basic functionality, from a normal user's perspective, the escalation chains and the tuning part that are embedded in LogicMonitor are the two most important things.

Among my favorite dashboards are the alert dashboards. Being a prod-ops team, we took the out-of-the-box alerts dashboard given by LogicMonitor and we have kept on tweaking it by adding more columns and more data points. The alert dashboard is something which is very key for us as a team. In general, it gives us more in-depth information about uptime, the SLAs, etc. LogicMonitor has done a good job of providing very user-friendly dashboards, out-of-the-box. There are so many things that we are still learning about it, how we can use it better, but the alerts dashboard is my favorite.

The reporting is something which I have explored, to send me an email every day with how many alerts, in particular how many critical alerts, there were. It's a good starting point. The reporting can be sent in both HTML and Excel and is accessible on the dashboard after you log in. These two things are very good. This is the first feature I looked at once we went live, because I want to know things on a day-to-day basis and a weekly basis. I activated the email feature because I want it to send daily, weekly, and monthly reports of my alert dashboard data.

We use LogicMonitor's ability to customize data sources and it's a must, because ours is a very heterogeneous, complex environment. Changing data sources is important for at least some of the deployments. For other organizations, it may not really be required to change the default data sources provided by LogicMonitor. But here, it was important to change them. That's where the capabilities of the embedded APIs really helped us. I'm not part of the team that makes those changes, but I worked actively with the teams that did, and I always got very positive feedback from them on how they would get the right answers from LogicMonitor. They had to make a lot of changes to the data sources, for each customer, and it worked out well.

One thing that's very valuable for us is the technical knowledge of the people who work with LogicMonitor. We looked at several products before we decided to use LogicMonitor, and one of the key decision-making points was the knowledge of the things that they put in the product. It provides real intelligence regarding the numbers that you see on the product, which makes it easy for us technical people to troubleshoot. Other products don't provide you with such information. You see a value going up, but you don't know what it means. LogicMonitor provides such information. For instance, if a value goes up, it says that it is probably because your disk area was too low. 

The other thing that's very well done is the implementation of the product. When you are buying the product, you get a product manager from them who leads you towards the end result.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There are at least two most valuable features for us. I really appreciate the reporting function because it allows me to create dashboards that will be emailed to me during the morning so that I have a complete overview of my client's health, within a specific time frame.

One of the dashboards I use a lot is the storage dashboard. We migrated recently from one storage to another, and it allows me to keep everything in focus: How much space am I using, how much is being compressed, how much is being deduplicated? It also provides predictive functionality: How long will it take to fill this disk? That helps us to make decisions on whether we need to buy more space or we need to move or rearrange something within our storage infrastructure. I like that dashboard very much.

The other valuable feature is the alerts. We receive alerts by email and SMS with escalation schemes, so if we notice that an issue is not addressed in a specific amount of time, it will escalate to the next person in the chain. We can rest assured that specific problems are resolved within a specific time frame. Because we receive the alerts by email and SMS, whether I am at my computer or not, I will still receive the messages through SMS on my phone. That is a really cool feature.

In terms of the overall reporting of LogicMonitor, at first it was a little bit confusing. But once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy to add the widgets and arrange the information that you need or to filter it. It's pretty easy to use.