AppFolio (www.appfolio.com), which creates complete, web-based, SaaS solutions for multiple vertical markets, was formed in 2007 in Santa Barbara, CA, by a team of technology leaders with proven backgrounds in creating revolutionary software that businesses love to use. Not long after, its founders were impressed enough with LogicMonitor’s hosted monitoring solution to sign up while it was still in beta. Of course, there were selfish, practical reasons too: “By using LogicMonitor, we avoided having to develop a solution ourselves, we haven’t had to invest a lot of engineering time, and we’ve actually been able to avoid hiring someone.”
And that savings is huge. Walker estimates that, for each year AppFolio has used LogicMonitor, he’s been able to defer the cost of a full-time SysAdmin hire, estimated at $120,000 a year.
It’s not just money that LogicMonitor saves, though: as an automated solution built by technology veterans who’ve spent years managing large data centers, it’s built to save companies hours of work—and a significant amount of headaches. “With LogicMonitor, we didn’t even have to know what to monitor—it discovered what to monitor on our devices and put production monitoring in place for us,” said Walker. “LogicMonitor has saved us a number of times by alerting us to potential issues with hardware and software that it auto-discovered. It is unlikely that we would have identified all of the same monitoring criteria that LogicMonitor did. Without LogicMonitor, some of these potential issues could have gone undetected by us until they caused failures.”
AppFolio uses LogicMonitor to monitor all parts of its infrastructure, including web servers, switches, and back-end databases, as well as to manage the alerting mechanism for on-call ops personnel.
And LogicMonitor has come in handy in triage situations, as well. “There was a point when we were having some pretty serious performance issues,” said Walker, “and we used LogicMonitor extensively to track them down. We were able to create custom graphs specific to the situation, and, more importantly, we were able to address the issues before they affected our customers.
Additionally, Walker added, AppFolio has just released a payment function, making the “reliability and security that LogicMonitor offers even more important to us now.”