Infrastructure Monitoring and Observability Platform

I work as a consultant providing solutions to customers, and I use cloud native services for monitoring. I primarily recommend CloudWatch, and if the customer has a preference for a third-party tool, I provide solutions for DataDog or other services.

I function as an architect in cloud services, particularly hybrid cloud. I need these tools and services that I always offer to customers. When I design solutions, I provide a monitoring solution and recommend these services.

I have multiple customers to whom I have recommended monitoring tools. I have worked on many projects including McAfee, CarMax, AMC, and American Media Corporation. I have recommended these services across different projects.

I have been using CloudWatch for more than ten years. I primarily recommend CloudWatch because customers do not want to spend additional money on other tools. I would recommend a native service so they can save cost. AWS  is introducing synthetic monitoring for applications, which is crucial for precise monitoring. AWS X-Ray  and Amazon QuickSight  integration makes CloudWatch a centralized monitoring tool.

LogicMonitor  is used for application insights monitoring, collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data from application infrastructure, and identifying errors. It boasts features including real-time alerting, log ingestion, and visualization dashboards. LogicMonitor  offers microservices monitoring and more features in terms of alerting and support compared to CloudWatch, but it is costlier.

CloudWatch's integration is very quick. Since these are all connected internally with the AWS  backbone network, no significant integration is needed. I simply enable CloudWatch across AWS services. This centralized tool also offers logs query through Amazon QuickSight , creating visual alert dashboards.

Technical support is obviously good in LogicMonitor, rating it a ten. CloudWatch's support rates at eight to eight and a half.

LogicMonitor excels in performance monitoring, tracking performance, bolstering security, and real-time alerting. However, LogicMonitor can struggle with high ingestion costs, data retention limitations, delayed alerts, and missing critical security events.

There are several areas for LogicMonitor to improve. Overly sensitive real-time monitoring leads to too many alerts, which could be managed via AI to reduce false positives. Cost optimization by offering discounts to enterprises could help manage pricing concerns. LogicMonitor should become more centralized to handle heterogeneous environments, as plugins sometimes do not work across platforms like F5 firewall. Complexity and steep documentation also need simplification.

LogicMonitor might struggle with delayed detection, as alerts may not be immediate under high infrastructure load. Other weaknesses include ingestion costs, data retention limitations, missing critical security events, real-time analysis gaps, and delayed alerts.

I have been working with this solution for more than seven years.

Technical support is obviously good in LogicMonitor.

I have experience with AWS, DataDog, and CloudWatch. LogicMonitor offers logs monitoring capabilities. Integration-wise, LogicMonitor also has an agent that can be installed on a particular service, and all data gets populated on LogicMonitor. I can see all the documents and everything. I can also integrate with ServiceNow  and other platforms. The choice depends on how the customer is using their infrastructure to monitor.

The main consideration is cost optimization. Some customers want to optimize their cost for their infrastructure, so I would recommend CloudWatch. For other customers who are open to spending additional funds, I would recommend LogicMonitor or DataDog.

LogicMonitor provides application dynamic monitoring and application insights monitoring. It collects, analyzes, and visualizes data from application infrastructure and identifies errors. I can track performance and bolster security with microservices monitoring using LogicMonitor.

LogicMonitor has more features compared to CloudWatch in terms of real-time alerting, log ingestion, alerting, visualization dashboards, and complaint support. However, cost is the only matter of concern. LogicMonitor has more features compared to CloudWatch.

I find a few weaknesses at the moment. Alert fatigue sometimes occurs when there is a peak load on the AWS infrastructure, and LogicMonitor takes some time to alert. High ingestion cost is another concern. Data retention limitations present challenges because sometimes I need to check alerts from six months back, but the data retention is only one week, maximum ten days, or one month. Missing critical security events is an issue where some non-critical logs get flagged as false positives. Real-time analysis is required but sometimes only works in a few services and not in all services. Some security breaches cannot be identified through LogicMonitor because those logs are not captured when something happens to a particular service. For example, if an application has vulnerabilities, the application acts like a legitimate service, but I do not know that. LogicMonitor hardly identifies these things. Even when I collect the logs, I cannot exactly know if the log is the faulty one. I think most service vendors are trying to implement AI models to identify this, but it takes some time to get this done. I think LogicMonitor is also trying to do this.

Delayed detection is a significant issue. Because of high load on the infrastructure, sometimes I will not find the alert immediately. It takes five to ten minutes, and after the impact happens, I get notified five to ten minutes later. This delayed detection is the main issue.

Real-time monitoring is required, and that means overly sensitive alerts with too many false positives. If LogicMonitor can use AI or other methods, they can remove those duplicates and maintain the actual alerts. They can identify false positives prior and prevent them by nullifying those things. Cost is another area where LogicMonitor can provide discounts to enterprise companies using most of their infrastructure to reduce their license cost. Complexity should be addressed because if a customer has multiple heterogeneous environments, LogicMonitor should be centralized to get all the data and do the log monitoring. Sometimes some plugins and agents do not work on few services. For example, on F5 firewalls and on-premises firewall physical servers where I want to get some logs, those do not get logged on LogicMonitor. A lack of context and understanding of the tool is also an issue. The documentation should be more clear and simple in simple language. When I first see the documentation, it is pages upon pages, and it is very difficult to understand everything until I gain some control of that tool. The documentation should be reduced so people can easily use that tool. Instead of going very complex, straightforward guidance should be required. My overall rating for this product is nine out of ten.

My main use case for LogicMonitor  is to have visibility on the servers in our network, various networks, and cloud resources.

I use LogicMonitor  to look at various logs, and I have used the logs that I have obtained from LogicMonitor to pinpoint issues and fix them.

The dashboards are really very helpful and they can be customized, which helps us.

I think agentless monitoring and the dashboards are my favorite features. With agentless monitoring, there is no need to install software on every device, and that cuts down time because we have a lot of devices. The dashboards are customizable, so various teams and roles can use those dashboards in a way that suits their needs.

When I see things in real time, I am able to get to them faster. When there is any kind of issue on any of our various servers, because we have many servers in our environment, seeing things in real time is very helpful.

It has had a solid impact and has helped us to resolve issues faster with everything in real time and the alerts. Some noticeable changes could be how our dashboards look and how we are able to see things in real time.

LogicMonitor has a very steep learning curve. The user interface sometimes can feel unintuitive. The mobile app has some limitations.

The only challenges we have are sometimes the setup, which can take some work to avoid too much noise. When we need support, they have been helpful.

I have been using LogicMonitor for three years.

LogicMonitor customer support is good. I advise getting a demo and working with the customer support because I think LogicMonitor works well.

I am not sure what we used before, as it might have been before my time. I do know that we switched because whatever we were using before was not functioning in a positive way.

There was DataDog that we looked at, and I thought LogicMonitor was better.

The pricing was a bit high. The setup was pretty fair.

I have seen a positive return on investment. I cannot give specific metrics, but it has definitely saved time for my team.

I gave LogicMonitor an overall review rating of 8.

I am an internal system administrator using LogicMonitor . Most of what we do with LogicMonitor  involves on-premises hardware such as servers, network equipment, firewalls, and storage devices.

We do not utilize the Dynamic Service Insights feature for real-time visibility. We only use plain monitoring and do not use cloud monitoring such as Office 365  because it is too expensive. We exclusively use network monitoring equipment and server monitoring.

LogicMonitor is deployed on-premises in our organization. We have agents on-premises for servers at our customer sites, and they report back to our LogicMonitor instance.

I have not used LogicMonitor's AIOps  for diagnosing root causes and orchestrating remedies.

The most valuable features of LogicMonitor are the company's knowledge about monitoring devices and their expertise in what to monitor. They excel at telling you what is performing well and what is performing poorly. LogicMonitor provides thresholds with explanations of what they mean, whereas a lot of monitoring software captures thresholds and data without knowing exactly what those metrics mean. If needed, you can get help with solving the problem causing the threshold to be triggered. LogicMonitor knows when something is going wrong. For example, when a disk threshold exceeds 90%, you receive a warning. However, that is straightforward, and many software solutions do that.

When you encounter Active Directory thresholds for concurrent connections or open connections, those are more difficult to set correctly. The main reason I appreciate LogicMonitor is that we do not have to set those thresholds ourselves. LogicMonitor does that for us.

LogicMonitor has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to implement it for 1,200 clients or 1,200 endpoints within three months, which went very well. The software has enabled us to operate with one fewer full-time employee because it works exceptionally well and does exactly what we need it to do. Our deployment process was reduced from one day to embed a customer in our settings and workflow to just one hour with LogicMonitor. That is a significant improvement in speed. Additionally, because LogicMonitor is cloud-based software, we do not have to perform any maintenance on the platform itself. All maintenance is automated by LogicMonitor, which saves us considerable time.

LogicMonitor affects our team's mean time to resolve incidents because we perform a lot of troubleshooting with it, particularly performance troubleshooting and configuration management, and those capabilities help us reduce the time to resolve problems significantly. For example, when a switch goes down, we have the latest configuration of the switch available in LogicMonitor.

I do not think there are areas of LogicMonitor that could be improved or enhanced other than the price. We do not have a lot of contact with LogicMonitor because the software usually works as it should.

I have been working with LogicMonitor since 2017.

LogicMonitor has not been down in the years we have used it. It has consistently remained operational. I cannot remember the last time LogicMonitor sent me an email about an error or when I visited the website and encountered an error.

LogicMonitor is very much scalable, stable, and reliable.

I sometimes communicate with LogicMonitor's technical support. For example, a few years ago, we wanted to monitor a specific firewall and have its configuration displayed in LogicMonitor. This capability was not included in the default packages, so I asked whether LogicMonitor could provide that functionality. Within one day, I received a script, and LogicMonitor was able to provide the firewall configuration in LogicMonitor on the same day I submitted the request.

Based on my experience with LogicMonitor's support, I would rate them nine out of ten, with ten being the best support, primarily because of the price.

I participated in the initial setup of LogicMonitor.

The initial setup process of LogicMonitor involved testing several software options. We tested LogicMonitor, Kaseya Traverse , and another option that I do not recall at this moment. LogicMonitor was the solution we selected. We had a connection between our CEO and LogicMonitor for pricing discussions, and after they completed the pricing process, we performed some pre-configuration on the customer side to make LogicMonitor implementation easier. After that, we spent about one month with three people converting everything from the monitoring software we were using previously, which was Zenos, similar to Zabbix . We completed the conversion to LogicMonitor within that one month. We then spent one month troubleshooting the events that were generated, and we used the final month for cleaning up all remaining elements. We made a complete transition to LogicMonitor within three months without any interruption to monitoring.

The challenges I faced in gaining complete visibility across my infrastructure involve combining on-premises devices such as laptops, on-premises users who sometimes transition to another device, mobile devices, or work from home or from another location, and gathering all alerts and then consolidating them into a single usable alert to solve real-time issues with account hacks and other security concerns. However, that has nothing to do with LogicMonitor.

Dynamic Service Insights does not affect my understanding and management of digital services in my organization.

I would rate this product nine out of ten overall.

LogicMonitor is used to monitor all security network appliances and system appliances, including servers, Linux systems, networks, appliances, firewalls, routers, and switches. It also monitors cloud infrastructure, including VNet, cloud services, and cloud connectivity solutions such as Azure ExpressRoute, and extends down into individual configurations such as BGP sessions and IPsec tunnels. This monitoring capability serves multiple sectors through a managed service provider model, providing services to finance, real estate, and other industries.

The LogicMonitor alert UI is valuable because it correlates alerts, preventing unnecessary panic by allowing me to review the alert dashboard instead of logging into each individual device or relying on unreliable monitoring tools. LogicMonitor is very reliable compared to many other monitoring tools I have used. Each individual BGP session, IPsec tunnel, and interface is captured accurately, and the logs are highly reliable.

The impact of LogicMonitor on management of service health and business risks is significant. In my previous company, after implementing LogicMonitor, most issues were resolved within one hour without requiring senior engineer intervention, as junior engineers could resolve issues by reviewing the alert information and understanding what occurred.

The remediation functionality could be improved. Given the power of the tool, implementing a one-click option to change configurations via SSH or API access to appliances would be beneficial. The remediation component could also include automation capabilities.

I have been working with LogicMonitor for one and a half years.

Before LogicMonitor, I used a different tool for log search, though I cannot recall the name. The main differences between previous tools I used, such as SolarWinds, and LogicMonitor are that previous tools do not display everything in one dashboard. They typically show a number of devices and alerts, and to see alert details, I had to click through to see more information. LogicMonitor displays everything in one comprehensive dashboard, which prevents me from forgetting what I see when navigating away from a link.

I researched the pricing of LogicMonitor, and it costs around ten dollars per device per month, which is somewhat expensive compared to other products. Some monitoring tools such as Zabbix are free resources but not as powerful as LogicMonitor. For small businesses that want to utilize LogicMonitor and are just starting out with limited customers, a pricing model targeted to this segment would be beneficial, perhaps at three or two dollars per device per month.

LogicMonitor has advanced AI and AIOps capabilities for diagnosing root causes that I have not yet utilized. LogicMonitor has positively impacted my team's MTTR for incidents. When one switch goes down, multiple alerts trigger not only from that switch but also from peer switches. Suddenly, a hundred alerts may appear, but the issue can be narrowed down by identifying the down device instead of processing all the noise. One switch showing as red means I can ignore the other alerts coming from other switches, which is very helpful as the entire team can see this information in one dashboard. I rate this product a ten out of ten.