In today’s digital world, businesses rely heavily on their IT infrastructure and applications to deliver products and services to customers. To ensure that these systems are running optimally, enterprise IT teams and managed service providers (MSPs) need a comprehensive view of their entire IT environment. That’s where unified observability platforms come in.
Unified observability platforms are critical for enterprise IT and MSPs to ensure optimal performance, availability, and reliability of their IT infrastructure and applications.
They provide real-time visibility, centralized monitoring and management, comprehensive analytics, collaboration and communication, and cost savings, all of which are essential for delivering high-quality services to customers and achieving business objectives.
Unified observability platforms provide a single platform for monitoring and managing IT systems. These platforms collect and analyze data from multiple sources, including applications, networks, and infrastructure, and provide real-time visibility into system performance. With a unified observability platform, IT teams and MSPs can monitor their entire IT environment from a centralized location. This makes it easier to identify and diagnose issues, reduce response times, and improve overall system performance. Real-time visibility into system performance also enables teams to proactively detect and address issues before they impact end users.
In addition to providing real-time visibility, unified observability platforms also offer comprehensive analytics capabilities. IT teams and MSPs can use these insights to analyze system data, identify trends, and optimize system performance. These analytics can help teams make informed decisions about how to improve their systems and services. In this article, we will review the LogicMonitor unified observability platform. Hopefully, this will guide you in the process of choosing the right one for your organization.
Overview of LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor is one of the leading SaaS-based unified observability platforms for enterprise IT and managed service providers. It is a comprehensive and scalable platform that provides businesses with the tools they need to monitor, analyze, and optimize their IT infrastructure for maximum performance and efficiency. LogicMonitor provides businesses with end-to-end visibility into their IT infrastructure. It uses automation and machine learning to monitor and analyze performance metrics, logs, traces, and other data from servers, applications, networks, and cloud services, enabling IT teams to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues before they affect end-users.
The platform offers a unified view of all IT resources, providing real-time alerts, performance reports, and predictive analytics to help businesses optimize their infrastructure and improve their overall IT operations. This enables NOC and IT operations teams to proactively prevent outages before they occur.
LogicMonitor key features and capabilities include:
- Infrastructure Monitoring Monitor cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments in a single platform.
- Application Performance Monitoring Monitor and track the availability and performance of applications.
- Log Analysis Analyze logs and surface anomalies to reduce MTTR.
- Server Monitoring Monitor on-premise or cloud servers and alert on applications, hardware, and OS metrics.
- Database Monitoring Monitor database health and performance in real-time.
- Container Monitoring: Monitor Kubernetes pods, nodes, containers, and other components.
- Native Cloud Integration LogicMonitor supports integration with common cloud platforms such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS out of the box.
- Unified observability for infrastructure, logs, and applications within a single platform.
- Employs AIOps and ML features for root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and forecasting.
- Two years of data retention and 24×7 technical support.
The platform also provides customizable dashboards and reporting tools, allowing teams to tailor the platform to their specific needs. LogicMonitor supports a wide range of technologies and platforms, including cloud infrastructure providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as popular on-premises systems like VMware, Cisco, and Microsoft. It also integrates with popular DevOps tools like Slack, PagerDuty, and Jira, enabling teams to collaborate and streamline their workflows.
Installation and Deployment
Being a SaaS-based application, there are no on-premise system requirements other than the usual guided signup process using a web browser, once you’ve paid for access. After the signup process is completed, you’ll be required to install Windows or Linux-based collectors, as the case may be on each network segment that you want to monitor.
To deploy the platform, sign up for a LogicMonitor account on their website. Once you have an account, you can start adding resources to monitor via auto-discovery, manual addition, or CSV import. Next, you need to install collectors on the devices you want to monitor. Collectors are lightweight Java applications or agents that gather data from resources and send it to the LogicMonitor platform. Collectors can be installed on physical or virtual machines, depending on your requirements. After installation, you will need to configure collectors to communicate with the LogicMonitor platform. This involves assigning roles, specifying access credentials, and setting up monitoring parameters.
Once collectors are installed and configured, you can start configuring alerts. You can set up alerts based on specific conditions or events and choose the notification methods you want to use. You can also create customizable dashboards and reports to visualize the data you are monitoring.
After setting up alerts, dashboards, and reports, you can start monitoring your IT infrastructure. The platform provides real-time alerts, performance reports, and predictive analytics, allowing you to identify and troubleshoot issues before they affect end-users. Overall, the deployment of LogicMonitor involves adding resources to monitor, installing and configuring collectors, setting up alerts, dashboards, and reports, and finally monitoring and troubleshooting. It is a flexible and scalable platform that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your organization and environment.
Dashboards and Visualizations
LogicMonitor provides customizable dashboards and visualizations to help IT teams gain insights into their infrastructure performance quickly and easily. The platform offers a wide range of pre-built widgets and templates that can be used to create dashboards for different use cases, or you can create custom dashboards from scratch. It is also flexible and scalable, making it easy to create dashboards for different use cases and environments.
Some features of LogicMonitor dashboards and visualizations include:
- Customizable widgets LogicMonitor provides a range of pre-built widgets that display different types of data, such as graphs, tables, heat maps, and more. You can customize the widgets to show the specific data you want to monitor, such as network bandwidth, CPU usage, or application response times.
- Drag-and-drop interface The platform has a user-friendly interface that allows you to drag and drop widgets onto the dashboard canvas and resize them as needed.
- Interactive charts LogicMonitor provides interactive charts that allow you to zoom in and out, highlight data points, and change the time range to view data at different intervals.
- Template library The platform has a template library that provides pre-built dashboards for different use cases, such as AWS monitoring, VMware monitoring, or network monitoring.
- Customization options You can customize your dashboards by adding logos, changing the color scheme, and selecting different layout options.
- Mobile support LogicMonitor dashboards are responsive and can be accessed on any device, including mobile devices.
Alerts, Reporting, and Integration
LogicMonitor offers several features for alerts, reporting, and integration that help IT teams manage their infrastructure more efficiently. LogicMonitor uses various application components such as data sources, Event Sources, LM Logs, Websites, and Collectors to trigger the alerts. Alerts are real-time notifications that can be triggered based on specific conditions or events, such as disk usage or network latency. Text messages, emails, and voice calls are the primary means of delivering alerts in LogicMonitor. You can also deliver alerts via integration with third-party chat tools, ticketing systems, and other services you may utilize internally. You can also configure a Collector to pull triggered alerts from LogicMonitor and deliver them via SNMP traps, Syslog messages, or custom scripts. Overall, LogicMonitor alerting capabilities seem okay and fit for purpose.
Reporting is another essential feature of LogicMonitor that enables IT teams to generate reports on infrastructure performance and availability. Custom reports can be created, scheduled to be generated at specific intervals, and exported in various formats. LogicMonitor has built-in reports that you can use to review key information for alert data, monitored data, resource configurations data (such as device, cloud resource, and website), and user data including user accounts and roles. LogicMonitor provides eighteen report types that can be customized to meet your particular business needs. The report’s output format can be HTML, CSV, and PDF.
LogicMonitor also provides integration with third-party tools, including cloud platforms, ITSM systems, and other monitoring and management tools. These integrations can automate workflows, share data across systems, and streamline IT operations. LogicMonitor provides out-of-the-box integration with third-party applications such as Autotask, PagerDuty, ConnectWise, Slack, ServiceNow, and others. Custom integration can also be achieved via the in-built REST API functionality. However, the API functionality is more geared toward automation than custom data collection and integration. If you’re looking to collect custom data, you can always leverage the scripting portion of the application.
Event management is another important feature of LogicMonitor that enables IT teams to track and manage events across their entire infrastructure. This feature allows IT teams to monitor and manage incidents, such as service outages or security breaches.
Overall, LogicMonitor’s alerts, reporting, integration, and event management features make it easier for IT teams to monitor and manage their infrastructure more efficiently. The platform’s flexibility and scalability make it suitable for organizations of all sizes and industries.
Licensing and Price Plans
LogicMonitor offers various licensing and price plans to meet the needs of different customers. It offers two price plans: The Pro plan and the Enterprise plan. The Pro plan supports up to 1999 devices and provides full access to automated, SaaS-based monitoring for unified coverage of cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. This includes over 2000 built-in monitoring integrations, technical support, automated configuration with Active Discovery, intelligent alerting, customizable dashboards, and more.
The Enterprise plan supports 2000 devices and more and provides everything in the Pro plan plus AIOps features for automated anomaly detection. The Enterprise Package is ideal for large organizations that are committed to keeping mean time to resolution (MTTR) as low as possible, as it provides an early warning system for NOC teams to prevent issues before they occur and streamline troubleshooting efforts when an issue does occur.
All of LogicMonitor’s pricing plans are flexible and scalable, allowing customers to choose the plan that best suits their needs. The pricing is transparent and does not include any hidden fees or charges. LogicMonitor does not disclose pricing details on its website. But a free 14-day trial version is available on request to enable you to determine if the software is right for you before committing to a subscription.
Concluding Remarks
LogicMonitor is an excellent tool for experienced network operations center (NOC) engineers, as long as they can be patient enough to master the tool.
LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based model makes it ideal for large organizations with geographically dispersed and interconnected devices that don’t want to burden themselves with any resource-intensive on-premise monitoring solution. Organizations that don’t have dedicated IT personnel to keep tabs on the infrastructure at a granular level will find this tool appealing.
The Best LogicMonitor Alternatives
If you figured out that LogicMonitor is not the right observability solution for your business, check out the following possible alternatives:
- SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (FREE TRIAL) NPM is a powerful network monitoring tool that can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise. It helps organizations detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues. The tool is best suited for medium to large-scale enterprises. A 30-day free trial and fully functional is available on request.
- Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL) This cloud platform provides an application performance monitor and other units for supporting systems. Features in the package include distributed tracing, code profiling, and cloud server and service tracking. The bundle provides full-stack observability for on-premises systems and there is a version available for managed service providers. Get a 30-day free trial.
- Nagios An IT infrastructure monitoring and management software. The product comes in two editions: the agent-based free and open-source edition known as Nagios Core; and the agentless commercial edition known as Nagios XI, which is targeted at large networks and enterprises.
- PRTG Network Monitor A mature and well-known network monitoring tool from Paessler AG. PRTG is agentless—which means you do not need to install any agent on the target devices and application, instead, it uses network protocols such as SNMP and others to carry out its monitoring functions. A free 30-day trial with full access to all the features is available for download.
- Checkmk One of the leading tools for IT infrastructure and application monitoring. It uses an agentless and agent-based approach to monitor the health of IT infrastructures such as networks, servers, applications, storage, cloud infrastructure, IoT devices, and even business processes. The Free Standard Edition contains all the features of the Standard Edition, and it’s unlimited for the first 30 days.
- Icinga A popular enterprise-grade open-source tool for IT infrastructure and application monitoring. It checks the availability of your network resources, notifies you of outages, and generates performance data for reporting.
- Observium A powerful auto-discovering network monitoring platform that provides real-time network and infrastructure monitoring. Observium is designed to run on Linux but can also monitor Windows and also supports other platforms such as Cisco, Juniper, FreeBSD, Citrix Netscaler, NetApp, and many more.
- NetXMS An enterprise-grade multi-platform open-source network management and monitoring tool. NetXMS runs natively on both Windows and Linux/Unix-based operating systems and can be used to monitor your entire IT infrastructure, including servers and applications. NetXMS is available for download free of charge.
- OpenNMS An open-source network management and monitoring tool developed and managed by the OpenNMS Group and a community of developers. The product is 100% free with no licensing requirements. OpenNMS is freely available for download via Sourceforge.
- Pandora FMS An all-in-one network monitoring tool. It uses an agentless and agent-based approach to monitor the health of IT infrastructures such as networks, servers, applications, databases, and much more. Pandora FMS supports both on-premise and cloud deployment options. Pandora FMS Community edition and a 30-day free trial of the Enterprise edition are available for download.
- Datadog An agent-based on-premises and cloud infrastructure monitoring service for cloud applications, servers, databases, tools, and services. Datadog was named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring. A free 14-day trial with full access to all the features is available for download.
