An engineer’s view on LogicMonitor

Having been a customer of LogicMonitor for just over a year, I thought it would be useful to share my thoughts on what I like about the product for the use case we have, and how I think it has benefited me in my role.

Summary:

Using LogicMonitor to monitor infrastructure has given some great visibility and diversity in the way in which we can interact with our services deployed, with a huge scope for future development we are looking forward to making this journey with the support of our account team.

The key points are:

Scalable to meet the demands of modern infrastructure deployment, and any size of business.

• Easy to deploy
• Reduced overhead in the support and deployment of the product.
• Dynamic and flexible.
• Customer focused relationship.

Scalability:

Modern infrastructure as we all know is largely moving to a hyper converged model, this presents problems with the scalability of many solutions when it comes to monitoring.

With LogicMonitor there is the concept of Collector Groups and more specifically the auto-balanced group, which quite simply means that once you have set up your net scans, you point them to the collector group of your choice and LogicMonitor distributes the monitoring load to avoid any issues.

When the collectors within the group reach their threshold, you simply add another collector or more and allow the group to rebalance.

What this means is that except for Netflow, SNMP traps, and Syslog you just need to manage the capacity within the groups.

Whilst LogicMonitor was brought in initially for the Network Infrastructure we were quickly able to show the benefits and now our storage and virtualisation infrastructure has been brought on board.

Below is a basic example of collector groups where you have one group in Paris that manages the European sites and the Paris data centre (The blue dashed circle) and another collector group in Singapore to manage Sydney, and the office and data centre in Singapore (Green dashed Circle).

The data is forwarded from the collectors to the SAAS solution via a secure link established from the collector.

Its SAAS:

It varies from organisation to organisation, but often monitoring tools are managed by teams that also run the infrastructure that it is monitoring, and these solutions often do not get maintained, this can expose you to security vulnerabilities, or simply not get the best value out of the product, because the feature you require needs an upgrade (often through a number of versions).

As the LogicMonitor Platform is cloud based the responsibility for maintaining the platform to the latest level is LogicMonitors, and yes you do have to keep the collectors up to date, but even this can be scheduled into a window that meets your operational requirements.

More interestingly consider the situation of a power failure in a data centre or a network issue (Yes they do happen) that isolates your data centre this means your services and applications are not available to your employees and clients, the last thing you want is your clients being the one to tell you that your platform is unavailable.

By having LogicMonitor as a SAAS service if the collectors become unreachable you can generate an alert either directly from the tool itself or utilise one of the many integrations available, we utilise the PagerDuty integration which was simple to implement and well documented on both PagerDuty and LogicMonitor.

Whereas on premise or even cloud hosted solutions within your own instance almost certainly will not be able to alert due to the issue, this will mean your clients will potentially be the first to report the issue.

Many may be concerned about the stability of the platform as it is cloud based, all I can tell you is to date I have not seen an issue with the availability of the platform.

Finally on this subject the cost of maintaining the solution, consider the amount of time it takes to manage an on-premise solution, even with a dedicated tools team to keep it patched and up to date, add onto that the cost of hosting it on your infrastructure. ?With LogicMonitor you simply deploy the controllers into your virtual estate, therefore freeing up your teams to enhance and develop the product offering rather than simply maintain the status quo.

Dynamic:

Personally, I love how dynamic the solution is.?Whilst the out of the box support is extensive, there are going to be elements that are not monitored and depending on the solution it can be as simple as adding the OID to be monitored as a data source or writing a script to extract the information via an API or some other method, many are supported.

I have done both, used the SNMP wizard to extract additional polling such as the reset table from an F5 or the clash count on a Fortinet, to adding some API calls to extract additional information from the Meraki dashboard.

In addition, with the Exchange, if the monitoring you require is not out of the box, it possible that someone else has written something and shared it meaning that it is available for all to be used.

Image Credit: LogicMonitor.

In addition to the monitoring element using the Rest-API we have been able to integrate with our CMDB and provide a richer level of data into the applications and services deployed to our infrastructure so when an alert is issued it is clearer as to what has been potentially impacted.

Take a look at the next steps in my LogicMonitor Journey to see what I am planning to, or am working on to further enhance our use of LogicMonitor.

The relationship:

The account relationship I believe is important in the success of the product, we have been allocated an account manager and a custom success manager to work alongside us and ensure that we are getting the best value out of the product, we have regular contact, and it is about how we are finding the platform, and what we would like to see improve or get help on, and rarely rotates to a sales pitch.

Both our Account Manager and our Customer Success Manager are excellent and passionate about what they do.

Product Support:

Not only do you have in platform support in the form of interactive chat, but you can if it is critical pick up the phone, or simply raise a ticket through the portal, my exposure to the support teams for my queries have always been prompt, knowledgeable and professional.

In addition to the support, you have the forum and training materials online, both of which I have gained the answer to an issue I was having.

My next steps in the Journey:

There are many things I would like to see happen in our Journey with LogicMonitor, but these are the ones we are focusing on.

• Integrating ThousandEyes: Currently ThousandEyes and LogicMonitor will alert if the VIP on the F5 for a service goes down, by integrating ThousandEyes into LogicMonitor we will be able to generate one alert for an entire service after building services within the resources in LogicMonitor.
• Extracting Metrics to support the wider business: Further develop our API integration to extract metrics for us to report on in other platforms.
• Enable automated fault resolution: There are many events within networking that can be resolved automatically, I would like to see how utilising LogicMonitor I can drive this forward and free up our operations team time to deal with those more challenging incidents and problems within the infrastructure.

My recommendations if looking at LogicMonitor

Investment in any monitoring product can be seen as a necessary evil, but they are the nerve centre of your technology, if I was looking at LogicMonitor afresh in a new organisation I would recommend the same again.

1. Do get a demo of the capabilities, even if you are purely cloud based LogicMonitor can support you and help manage your solution.
2. Do have a success criteria for what you want from a product.
3. Do look at more than one product, as much as I like LogicMonitor you should look for the best solution for your business.
4. Do run a proof of value to ensure what you see in the demo is as easy to deploy in your environment, after all every environment is different.
5. Do spend that little bit extra on the deployment professional service engagement, I really did benefit from that extra support during the deployment and enabled us to start seeing the return on investment more quickly, than if we tried to do it ourselves.
6. Do engage with LogicMonitor ongoing, this way you can get the latest information, and continue to extract the best value from the product.
7. Don’t be afraid of utilising a SAAS (Software as a Service) product, it really will help with your total cost of ownership and free up resources to further enhance your product offering.

Want to know more about LogicMonitor:

Simply visit their website and book a demo or ask to talk to someone.?

If you want to ask me a question then please message me and I will try and answer them in relation to this article.

About me:

I am network engineer with over 20 years experience in a number of sectors including finance and managed service provision, currently focussing on automation and monitoring and observability of infrastructure solutions.

Disclaimers:

• This is not a paid for review.
• This is a personal view and do not represent the views of my employer.
• The information contained within this article is aimed at given an insight from my view and allow you to form an opinion and gather information, it should always be your decision as to what product or service best fits your organisation.