Sciencelogic Review for 2024 and the Best Alternatives

ScienceLogic is a leading provider of IT operations management and AIOPs solutions. Their software empowers intelligent and automated IT operations for large businesses and enterprises.

The ScienceLogic SL1 platform ingests all sorts of data from any environment, makes it visible in one place, provides actionable insights through AI/ML, and allows automation and synchronization capabilities.

In this ScienceLogic review, we’ll go into full detail about ScienceLogic, how the ScienceLogic SL1 works and how to use the GUI. In the last section, we’ll provide the top eight alternatives.

What is ScienceLogic

ScienceLogic is an IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Artificial Intelligent for IT Operations (AIOps) software provider. The company has headquarters in Reston V.A, US, and branch offices in Australia, the UK, Singapore, and Taiwan. Their software empowers intelligent and automated IT operations and improves complex distributed IT services management.

Their context-infused AIOps and IT infrastructure monitoring ScienceLogic SL1 platform can be deployed across clouds and distributed architectures. It provides you with a single platform with immediate insights into what’s actually happening across your infrastructure and applications.

ScienceLogic’s architecture follows three key steps:

Visibility It automatically discovers, collects, and shows the data in one place.
Context It applies AI/ML to give you actionable insights.
Action It integrates into your IT ecosystem to automate responsive and proactive measures in real-time and at scale.

CRN has awarded ScienceLogic as one of the 20 coolest cloud monitoring and management companies of 2021. ScienceLogic has also been labeled a leader in the Forrester Wave Q2 2019 in “Intelligent Application and Service Monitoring.” In addition, it was also awarded by Forrester Wave for 2020 as a leader in Artificial Intelligence for IT operations. Check ScienceLogic company profile to know more about their awards.

Product Details

Deployment On-premise, Cloud, or hybrid, via an agent or agentless technologies.
User Interface Web-based Graphical User Interface.
Customer type From medium business to enterprise, global system integrators, Managed Service Providers, government, and the public sector.
Customer Support Phone, online ticketing system, comprehensive documentation, knowledgebase, and training.
Use Cases Automated ITSM workflows to accelerate incident response, automated troubleshooting, and remediation, and hybrid cloud monitoring.
Pricing ScienceLogic offers four different plans, Base, Standard, Advanced, and Premium. Request the price.
Free Trial You can request a demo.

ScienceLogic Pros and Cons

Pros:

The UI is easy to use
Amazing device discovery and agents/agentless technology
Special licensing options for nonprofits and educational institutions
Ingest data from many different sources
Fantastic built-in automation tools
Dashboards to build your custom views

Cons:

The support needs improvement
Built-in reporting can be complicated
Scaling environments can become pricey
The reporting tool could be enhanced
Can’t push configuration and commands

How ScienceLogic works

Discovery and Data Collection

Discovery ScienceLogic uses a patented discovery technique to find assets in your IT environment. With this, you can have more visibility across all systems running on your premises or cloud.
Data Collection ScienceLogic SL1 uses agent or agentless data collection techniques. The SL1 agent is software that you can install on the target monitored device, interface, or other components. It collects data and reports it back periodically to the SL1 platform. Agent technology is one of the most efficient ways to collect more granular data from the monitored device.
The ScienceLogic SL1 platform can also leverage the IT infrastructure’s existing monitoring and management capabilities through agentless technology, such as SNMP or remote shell access via SSH. The combination of agent and agentless monitoring capabilities allows ScienceLogic to keep track of cloud-based or on-premise assets.

Visualize, Contextualize, and Act

The ScienceLogic SL1 is a multi-layered technology platform that allows you to discover all components across hybrid cloud environments, apply AI/ML to contextualize data and gain visibility, and finally act via automation systems. First, ScienceLogic SL1 takes the collected data across multiple data sources and aggregates, cleans, and normalizes it. Then, it implements its ML-driven behavioral correlation to accelerate root-cause analysis. And, finally, it provides automation and synchronization solutions.

Automate and Synchronize

ScienceLogic allows you to run multi-directional integrations to automate responsive and proactive actions at a cloud scale. It provides an extensive library of more than 500 pre-built integrations. Available integrations range from Microsoft Windows Server, Juniper, NetApp, ServiceNow, Oracle, Dynatrace, VMware, AWS, Cisco, Docker, and many more.

ScienceLogic allows you to:

Use ScienceLogic APIs, workflows, and streams to connect your IT ecosystem and transform data.
Automate ITSM and IT workflows fast and easily.
Update your Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
If you want to add a customized integration, you can also leverage ScienceLogic’s flexible SDK.

The ScienceLogic User Interface

The ScienceLogic GUI is self-intuitive, clean, and easy to navigate through. In addition, it can be customized and restricted so that only certain users can access certain features such as reporting, dashboards, or ML.

You’ll find the main navigation menu (which can be expanded with the menu icon). This menu includes Dashboards, Events, Devices, Business Services, Machine Learning, Applications, Maps, Manage, Tickets, Reports, Registry, System, Preferences, and Misc. Under each menu, you also find a sub-menu with more options.

Settings and advanced menu

The ScienceLogic SL1 platform also allows you to change the UI template from the pre-defined sample. In addition, you can also customize your theme. For example, you can upload and change the company logo, choose a lighter or darker UI, or modify the colors of the bars.

In the bottom left corner, you’ll find the Advanced Menu. This menu shows you an exhaustive list of all the items you can see in the UI.

The Events Page

As shown in the screenshot below, it displays all events categorized in different severity levels, from Critical, Major, Minor, Notice, ad Healthy. It also shows additional helpful information such as the event’s name, message, age, ticket ID, whether it has been acknowledged, and more.

The Devices Page

The Devices page shows a table view of all the devices, including name, IP address, category, class, organization, state, hostname, or ID. All the columns are adjustable, and alphanumerical values can sort their items. The Devices page also comes with search and filter capabilities so that you can look for specific devices using a search value.

If you want to look closer at the metrics of each specific device, you can open the drop-down menu at the far left in the Events window. This will open a quick graphic, tools such as ping, traceroute, port scan, and the records or logs of the specific device.

If you want to know even more about the device, open the Device Investigator window by clicking on the device. This page provides more information such as CPU utilization, latency, memory, events, logs, maps, etc.

ScienceLogic SL1 Dashboards

The Dashboard page displays graphical reports that are known as widgets. These reports show charts, tables, and text from the data collected. Dashboards can be private or public so that you can restrict access to specific dashboards based on login credentials.

To access your dashboards, click on the first icon in the left-hand vertical navigation bar.

Once you click on a specific dashboard, it will display the widgets, showing all necessary information. In addition, dashboards allow you to zoom in on devices when you want to get more context, insights, or monitoring.

ScienceLogic Alternatives

Organizations looking to keep up with their complex and distributed architectures turn to big data solutions that provide logs monitoring, AIOps, and observability capabilities. Solutions like ScienceLogic, based on AIOps, use big data, ML, and other modern analytics to improve IT operations with actionable insights.

Below are the top eight alternatives to ScienceLogic that provide any or all of those extensive data capabilities. These products can collect data from multiple sources, use real-time analytics, and provide outputs like automation or reporting.

1. Datadog

Datadog is an observability and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform designed for cloud-based applications. It performs data analytics to monitor servers, databases, tools, and third-party services. It also allows Machine Learning-based monitoring. With Datadog’s Webhooks integration and monitoring APIs, teams can create automated AIOps workflows.

Pros:

Offers numerous real user monitors via templates and widgets
Can monitor both internally and externally giving network admins a holistic view of network performance and accessibility
Changes made to the network are reflected in near real-time
Allows businesses to scale their monitoring efforts reliably through flexible pricing options

Cons:

Would like to see a longer trial period for testing

Try a 14-days free trial.

2. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an all-in-one software-intelligence monitoring, automation, AIOps, business analytics, and cloud-observability platform. It simplifies complex and distributed cloud-based deployments with advanced and intelligent tools from a single platform.

Pros:

Highly visual and customizable dashboards, excellent for enterprise NOCs
Operates in the cloud, allowing it to be platform-independent
Leverages AI to provide baseline analysis and detect user behavior anomalies

Cons:

Designed specifically for large networks, smaller organizations may find the product overwhelming

3. Splunk

Splunk is a data platform commonly used for monitoring, searching, analyzing, and visualizing machine-generated data in real-time and at scale. The Splunk platform integrates vital big data tools, including observability, event analytics and management, APM, AIOps, logs for observability, infrastructure monitoring, digital experience monitoring, and more.

Pros:

Uses excellent visuals to display collected data and insights
Supports a multitude of environments for data collection
Uses machine learning to identify new data sources and monitor behavior
Caters to enterprises with excellent support and a wide range of integrations

Cons:

Many features and services cater to large enterprise networks

Get free trial access to the Splunk Cloud for 14 days.

4. New Relic One

NewRelic One is a robust observability platform. It provides full-stack data analysis for all your software’s metrics logs and events. New Relic One also offers additional capabilities, including applied intelligence (AIOps), advanced alerting, APM, telemetry data management, and more.

Pros:

Certified for Microsoft Azure monitoring
Uses anamoly detection to highlight abnormal behavior in your Azure environment
Uses simple but intuitive admin dashboards

Cons:

Better suited for small to medium-sized Azure networks

5. Broadcom AIOps solution

Broadcom is a semiconductor company that creates wireless and broadband communication products and software. Broadcom enterprise software solutions target product planning, DevOps, and IT Operations Management.

Pros:

Can automated tasks across multiple operating systems – Linux, Windows, macOS, etc
Great for diverse environments – BYOD setups
Can support over 100k agents – great for enterprise use

Cons:

Would like to see more workflow visualization options
Not the best fit for smaller organizations

Broadcom provides a great AIOps solution with full-stack observability when it comes to IT operations.

6. Cisco AppDynamics

Cisco’s AppDynamics is full-stack observability, IT infrastructure monitoring, and APM platform. This product has been awarded as a Leader in Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for APM tools. The software can monitor the entire stack, from business, user, application, infrastructure, network, and security.

Pros:

Tailored for large-scale enterprise use
Designed for full-stack monitoring, great if you plan to monitor other environments outside of Google Cloud
Uses AI for enhanced intelligent monitoring

Cons:

Can have a steep learning curve, could use more tutorials

Get a 15-day SaaS trial.

7. LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is a cloud-based, fully automated infrastructure, network, server monitoring solution, and observability platform. It is designed for enterprise IT and managed service providers. In addition, LogicMonitor provides an AIOps platform that delivers AI and ML to give context, alerts, identify patterns and predictions, and enable automation.

Pros:

Monitors application performance via the cloud
Can monitor assets in hybrid cloud environments
The dashboard can be customized and saved, great for different NOC teams or individual users
Better suited for enterprises and MSPs

Cons:

The trial is only 14 days, would like to see a longer testing period

8. Zenoss

Zenoss is a SaaS-based intelligent IT operations management platform. It provides application and service monitoring and a robust AIOps solution. Zenoss can monitor the full-stack, including cloud, on-premise, hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

Pros:

Open-source, completely free tool with two paid options
Uses network discovery to automatically pull in new devices that enter the network
Can support multi-site networks encompassing both LAN and WAN
A wide range of Cisco ACI plugins offered by the Zenoss community

Cons:

Support is only for paid tiers
Dashboard interface needs improvement, specifically the nested menu options on the home screen

Final Verdict

This review evaluated ScienceLogic’s flagship product, the SL1, which is the singular AIOps and infrastructure monitoring platform. IT operations teams can leverage ScienceLogic SL1 to get actionable insights. As a result, they can predict, detect, and resolve IT problems faster, with valuable insights.

You can’t try their product for free, but you can request a demo. You can also test ScienceLogic’s alternatives, as shown in this review if you look for something with different capabilities.