‘Is it Down for Just Me?’ LogicMonitor May Have the Answer

As businesses continue to make the shift to cloud-based solutions across their application architecture, obtaining operational performance information is crucial to success. Enterprises require visibility into how the various parts of their organization combine to form a cohesive whole. That’s where LogicMonitor steps in, offering a way for companies to not only monitor their underlying infrastructure but view the entire digital forest rather than just a single line of trees.

The company offers a single service that can monitor both the newest containers and the oldest legacy applications.

“The tools coming out just doing container monitoring are missing 99 percent of the picture. A container doesn’t run by itself. We have 40 years of applications that aren’t going away,” said LogicMonitor founder and chief product officer Steve Francis.

LogicMonitor offers a service can eliminate the need to juggle multiple products to get an overview of the system. LogicMonitor’s customers range from those still experimenting with containers and moving to cloud-based solutions such as AWS or Azure — to those with large in-house data centers, running legacy applications.

Initially, the company began out of a need to consolidate tool sprawl as opposed to offerings available for those limited to on-premise solutions, noted Annie Dunham, Director of Product Management at LogicMonitor. Centralizing these tools, rather than having individual components for virtualization, network storage, or container health, can save time as well as money.

“Having this information all in one place mean there’s less finger-pointing when something goes wrong. There’s none of this, ‘Well, all of my segments are working,’” said LogicMonitor CEO Kevin McGibben.

LogicMonitor paints a unique picture for DevOps and IT Ops teams, allowing users to monitor not only their applications running on Amazon AWS but on-premise and via other cloud-based providers as well.

It allows for users to monitor their web services from multiple locations, agnostic to the physical hardware an enterprise may be using.

“You could be running PDP 11’s or old Solaris systems — We can still provide a picture,” Francis said.

LogicMonitor is powered by Tomcat running Java running on Amazon Web Services. Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS) handles the messaging among components. This setup dovetails with AWS monitoring, which pulls information through AWS’ CloudWatch.

LogicMonitor Riverbed Steelhead WAN Device Monitoring

For those working in Docker, LogicMonitor monitors instances from the Docker point-of-view with its container service. JMX metrics are also easily available, with container orchestration integration on the way in a future update.

If a user has static containers, or only wishes to tell if their containers are up or down they are able to do this now within LogicMonitor.

Hot on the heels of adding more functionality to the service, LogicMonitor is opening a new testing location in Australia next week.

Avoiding ‘Is it Down for Just Me?’

When an enterprise’s website is down, money is lost.  LogicMonitor offers external function checking in addition to website ping monitoring, data/trace routes, and more. Whether a business is a media-based company, publishing, or e-commerce, landing pages and shopping cart pages must be functional.

“Nobody wants to go to a website or an online shopping cart and get an error. They’ll think, ‘Oh, great — They can’t even make sure their site works,” said Francis.

LogicMonitor uses its own technology in-house. When checking landing page uptime, the company noticed outages on marketing systems that were supposed to receive 100 percent uptime. Catching this resulted in not only time saved, but customer retention and costs recovered before significant customer losses could occur.

Feature image via Pixabay