LogicMonitor 2024 Review

An infrastructure monitoring tool to rival the best on the market, discussed in comprehensive detail.

LogicMonitor is an established web and application management suite and networking solution that assists those with significant infrastructure assets within the cloud. Unlike most other agentless systems, it was designed as a hybrid Software-as-a-Service or SaaS system. LogicMonitor's interface lives in the cloud, while a lightweight and cutting-edge agent lives on your networks, allowing you to have your cake and eat it too.

This monitoring tool was created for people in charge of managing, maintaining, and troubleshooting networks, servers, data hubs, cloud storage, and various other systems. It provides a dashboard that links to in-depth alert customization, reporting, and other services, allowing them to quickly and efficiently monitor the performance and health of the company's IT infrastructure. By offering automation when it comes to monitoring your systems, LogicMonitor can assist your IT staff with dealing with the different problems they may face in a timely and efficient manner.

Fundamental Features

LogicMonitor strives to broaden the scope of what is possible for businesses by developing the technology that fuels them. The cloud-based infrastructure monitoring and observability platform enables enterprises to turn on a comprehensive view in minutes, then switch their lens to enable endless creativity and innovation.

While there are countless features to list, some of the big hitters are as follows:

• Alert routing,
• the highly configurable dashboard feature,
• firewall monitoring,
• router/switch/VoIP monitoring,
• interactive graphs with 1-year data trend history,
• System log and event monitoring,
• fast deployment,
• high-level security,
• automated data back-ups and recovery options,
• remote sessions,
• the ability to monitor both Windows and Linux machines,
• storage monitoring,
• outstanding support and so much more.

LogicMonitor's ability to simplify the lives of IT administrators is astounding. Not only is the range of customizability extensive, but so is the range of device support and coverage capacity. Prompt and comprehensive tracking solutions demand that the system offers thorough device coverage, and LogicMonitor has just that! This means that your business only requires one solution to manage all of your IT assets— no matter how vast the collection is. It can efficiently monitor your whole infrastructure using a single platform, enabling you to keep tabs on its performance and ensure its services are at the highest possible standard.

Another incredible feature is the ActiveDiscovery tool, which allows automatic identification, setup, and administration of IT processes with built-in practices that can reduce the amount of time and labor spent by a significant amount. Additionally, it has Hybrid Monitoring capabilities that enable system tracking whether the system is on-site, in the cloud, or some sort of hybrid. Its intuitive dashboards, reports, and interactive graphs reflect its innovative, integrated capacity. Its fast alerts, which may be given through phone, email, or even SMS, enable you to react to the concerns discovered more promptly. Use the system's reports and dashboards to track trends and effectively conduct root-cause analyses. While on the surface, time-savers may seem irrelevant, it is worth noting that once you begin to utilize all of these features or systems, it can reduce time spent by a significant portion, allowing you or others to spend that time on other tasks with confidence.

However, the substantial learning curve for adding hosts, hardware, reports, and alarms will be your most formidable challenge. Although the LogicMonitor Dashboard is not the easiest piece of software to use initially, the available support is some of the finest. Even with excellent help from their customer support team, you'll still need to allow yourself (or whomever) plenty of time to become accustomed to the dashboard and its functionality. You will undoubtedly be amazed by what LogicMonitor offers once you are familiar with the tools.

Security

Security is an essential piece to our puzzle and should not be overlooked. The security stance of LogicMonitor is based on a multi-layered approach that offers controls across all parts of the platform, from the planning and execution of the agent to the transmission, storage, and access of customer data down to the operation of its technical infrastructure. The extensive security plan consists of the following elements: Product security, operational security, physical & environmental security, business continuity management, and organizational security.

Product Security
An in-depth analysis reveals that the LogicMonitor platform was built with a wide range of security measures to guarantee the confidentiality and security of its client's data. Regarding data classification and handling, sensitivity levels are assigned to all client device data submitted to LogicMonitor. The hostname and IP address, as well as the health and performance indicator data connected to each resource, are among the data they categorize as customer-sensitive. Resource metadata (including operating system versions, SNMP community strings, API passwords, etc.), LM Logs data, LM Config files, network traffic data, and any personally identifying information about the account holders are all examples of customer-confidential data. Such private information is handled with the highest care. When these items are received, LogicMonitor encrypts them behind AES 256, while encryption keys are produced in memory and are specific to each client.

Additionally, this subsection of security boasts ample depth to network transport protections, end-user authentication, role-based authorization, network allow-lists, collector security, secure alert transmission, audit logging, penetration testing, solutions for personally identifiable information, and shared security responsibilities. The solution only utilizes the minimum personal information gathered to operate its services, and it is never shared with other organizations and is wholly owned and managed by the consumer.

Operational Security
The operational infrastructure on which the LogicMonitor platform functions has been created with high security of utmost importance to offer thorough threat prevention, including platform architecture, network, and operating system security, vulnerability management, and incident management. The multi-tenancy architecture of LogicMonitor, in which each client account is formed as a wholly separate entity, is fundamental to the security of the company's operational infrastructure. The data footprints of each client are successfully isolated since each customer account is logically and/or physically distinct from every other. This guarantees that all other customer accounts would be safe in the event of a potential security breach affecting any one account.

Three service centers that are fanned out geographically operate the agent. Modern firewall systems that use intelligent packet inspection, traffic classification, filtering, malware identification, and blocking safeguard every operational footprint. Long before reaching application servers, traffic is routed through delivery controllers that offer further security. Production servers for LogicMonitor utilize non-virtualized Linux and are hardened by defense-grade guidelines. In addition, each application server is equipped with intrusion detection software that analyzes the production network for system vulnerabilities. Ongoing vulnerability scans are performed utilizing commercial products from both an “internal” and “external” viewpoint. This outside-in methodology guarantees that any possible vulnerabilities are detected; once this vulnerability has been identified, it is promptly evaluated for risk and then prioritized for remediation. Following remediation, incidents are subjected to postmortem investigations as required to identify the root cause of single events and trends spanning numerous events over time, and to establish new tactics to help avoid similar incidents from occurring once more.

Organizational Security
Alongside client-side security measures, LogicMonitor also ensures that they take ample precautions and deliberate measures to ensure their organizational security in order to guarantee clients' security. One way in which they do this is with their personnel security– not only are personnel required to conduct themselves by the company's policies on confidentiality, corporate ethics, and professional standards but they are also required to abide by a confidentiality agreement. Additionally, all personnel partake in mandatory security training to maintain the company baseline security standards; further training is required of those who may be in another role.

LogicMonitor’s organizational security can be explored even further with the inclusion of access control, which dictates strict guidelines for all personnel regarding authentication controls, authorization controls, accounting, and undergoing third-party audit and compliance programs. All of these components within their multi-layered security methodology indicate that LogicMonitor is committed to keeping customer data safe and secure.

With all of this in mind, it is easy to see that LogicMonitor takes the safety and security of its customer’s data seriously. This enables the consumer to utilize the agent with confidence that they are protected.

Scalability & Integrations

As we are all aware, modern infrastructure is increasingly evolving toward a hyper-converged approach, which presents a problem with the scalability of many monitoring systems. In this vein, LogicMonitor does not disappoint; its scale can be as wide or as narrow as you want it to be. The agent introduces the concept of “Collector Groups” and the option for auto-balancing these groups. This means that once your net scans are established, you can associate them with the collector group of your choice, and the agent will distribute the monitoring load to avert any complications.

Collectors within a group reach its threshold? This can be remedied by creating one or more additional collectors, allowing the group to rebalance once more. In most cases, this means that you simply need to manage the capacity within the groups. In addition to the possibility of having thousands of endpoints with no issue (if you desire this), LogicMonitor also provides very robust role-based access control and authentication components.

Regarding integrations, LogicMonitor has a sizable monitoring integration catalog that enables immediate connection with the hardware, technologies, and services that your company depends on. With a listed catalog of more than 2,000 integration options, from network, server, and storage-related selections to databases, applications, and cloud platforms, you are sure to find just what you might be looking for. This is exceptionally great news if you have an extensive collection of services, devices, hosts, and networks to monitor.

Alerts & Reporting

While alerts are pretty robust in LogicMonitor, they may not stack up as strongly compared to other agentless systems. The agent allows the ability to send alerts through phone, email, and SMS; you can even execute web-based services, such as using an HTTP request if your service is publicly available. Despite this, there does not seem to be a feature that allows you to execute behind-the-firewall action directly. In the event of a problem, this functionality would allow the application of immediate remedies and access to systems in a roundabout manner. That said, the alerting abilities are more than acceptable despite the presently smaller range of action types.

It is rather simple to convert your alerting and monitoring data into a readable format. LogicMonitor includes sixteen report kinds that can be tailored to your specific business requirements. All the most common export formats are available, including CSV, PDF, and HTML. Of course, reports can be run on demand or scheduled and emailed. While it is not an obvious benefit, having a SaaS environment means you won't have to mess with a personal SMTP server. This can be a considerable benefit for individuals who dislike fiddling with mail server settings. While the LogicMonitor API is more geared toward automation than custom data collection, it does not imply that this is impossible. It's worth noting that LogicMonitor's supported device database is massive and expands every week, so any lacking features may not be far from integration.

Trials & Pricing

Pricing for LogicMonitor varies according to the needs of each organization, and you must contact the vendor for a customized quote. It does, however, offer two general editions of the platform: Pro and Enterprise. The cloud-based architecture of the platform is completely accessible with the Pro edition; this package supports up to 199 devices. The Enterprise edition now provides additional AI-based capabilities such as root cause analysis, dynamic thresholds, forecasting, and more. This package works with over 200 devices.

LogicMonitor does not publicly display its pricing options, meaning you will need to directly communicate with the sales staff to arrange for a personalized price quote based on your exact business demands. Because the solution uses a SaaS business model, you can be sure that your costs will flexibly adjust based on your exact platform demands, which is perfect for businesses where the scale of your monitoring needs can fluctuate.

The solution does come equipped with a full 14-day free trial. This is the perfect opportunity to test out the features in a separate portion of your live business environment. However, it would have been appreciated for the trial to be a full 30-day trial, as is typically the case for several similar products.

Conclusion

Any investment in monitoring products may be regarded as a necessary evil, yet they serve as the nerve center of your network. Overall, LogicMonitor is a fantastic tool. Given its SaaS distribution approach, it is well positioned for those that need to monitor a large amount of geographically dispersed infrastructure, and all of your sites have internet access.

Not only would you receive an expansive, ever-growing agent that enables you a top-down “glass pane” view of all the important parts required for your business, but the product support offered by LogicMonitor is exceptional in every way. You receive platform support in the form of interactive chat, and you can also pick up the phone or simply raise a ticket through the portal.  User-reported interactions with the support staff portray an image of promptness, competence, and professionalism. In addition to the support above, there is an online forum and a wealth of training resources that may address any questions you may have.