Founded in 1992, CSI Electric builds data centers and does large electrical, datacomm work for government, schools, education, as well as the private sector.
What monitoring challenges were you having prior to LogicMonitor?
As soon as we virtualized everything, monitoring all our servers, networking gear, and SANs spread out across multiple sites became impossible.
We didn’t have the resources or skill-set in house to deal with it. I’m a geek, and we love to build our own stuff, but certain products make sense to have offsite and let someone else manage — this is the perfect example. LogicMonitor is one of the best SaaS products that we’ve invested in, and is being done better than we could ever imagine doing ourselves.
What gear are you monitoring with LogicMonitor?
We use LogicMonitor to monitor the health and status on everything that’s critical from our key vendors: NetApp, SonicWALL, Citrix, Cisco, Riverbed, HP, Microsoft, and VMWare.
What kind of intelligence are you getting from LogicMonitor?
LogicMonitor helps us understand utilization on our NetApp filers. We were never sure what our IOPS were for particular LUNs. Are we hammering these things, or are we healthy? Are we looking at equipment that’s going to last a few more years, or are we coming down to a 12 to 18 month cycle we’re going to have to look at upgrading? The only other way we could get this data is from NetApp, but that takes a day or two. This is instantaneous. I control the data, and can manipulate how many days or months we look back to see our utilization.
With the WAN interfaces on our routers and firewalls, all the data passing through is now presented to us in a way that we can clearly decide how to scale. We always knew we needed more bandwidth, but we weren’t sure when. Now I can present a historical graph to management and say, “Look, we need to upgrade this circuit because we’re at 90% during the entire business day.” So it’s more of an exacting process because of the data that LogicMonitor displays.
The vSphere API you have is very nice. It’s giving us more data than I could ever need, and makes us more interested in finding out trends in areas that we hadn’t even considered that will make us that much better in the future.
Has LogicMonitor made your infrastructure more reliable?
We have a great infrastructure with great vendors and great products. But the thing that comes with them being great is they just work, and we can focus on making sure our users are happy. The problem is when things start to fall off the rail, they tend to start small. Prior to LogicMonitor, we weren’t able to catch those little things and our Exchange would crash, for example. Put a value on the whole organization not having email for an hour — that’s a lot of money at risk.
How would you quantify the savings that LogicMonitor provides?
I have no way to measure time lost or time saved, but I could literally hire someone to do what LogicMonitor is doing and have them spend 8 hours a day checking and tweaking and babysitting a monitoring system.
Are there any other ways LogicMonitor is providing value?
This tool enables me to make more accurate decisions on hardware and software acquisitions. For us that means saving money because it prevents us from overbuying out of fear of not having enough. We now know our utilization where before we had no idea.
