Sittercity.com is America’s largest and most trusted online source for child care, pet care, eldercare, housesitting, housekeeping and tutoring. Founded in 2001, Sittercity has a network of more than 2 million caregiver profiles nationwide, and helps families and individuals across America find the perfect in-home care provider quickly, easily and safely.
Why is monitoring important to Sittercity?
If the site is down, registration is down and we’re not taking credit card processing — that’s very costly. And that also impacts customer satisfaction and our reputation.
How were you monitoring your systems prior to LogicMonitor?
We were using an open source tool called Zenoss. It was decent but we didn’t have the visibility we needed into our application. I’d frequently get sent on wild goose chases with people saying there’s something wrong with the site and I’d have to go dig around to see if that really was the case or not.
And how are things different with LogicMonitor?
LogicMonitor is much easier to use. I’ve setup dashboards where our business executives can log into LogicMonitor on their own and verify that we’re taking credit cards, and getting monthly and annual signups. So that’s not something they worry about anymore, and we’re also getting business stats that we’ve never had before.
How has LogicMonitor impacted availability?
I wouldn’t say that LogicMonitor has decreased the amount of outages because those were always rare. But we’re definitely more comfortable knowing exactly what’s going on with our network. Beforehand, it was stable but nobody really knew. Now it’s stable and we know. It’s helped out a lot by providing a quick health check of the network without having to dive into specifics manually.
Aside from performance monitoring, what other ways are you using LogicMonitor?
We have some batch jobs that cover a lot of the site functionality that are not real time, but are still important to monitor. For instance, we have some mail processors that facilitate communication, and a nightly billing job that does the renewals.
To setup monitoring and graphing of those jobs with Zenoss was a two hour job. You had to create custom Python plug-in to do your SQL query and then output in Nagios format what you wanted, and then setup the graph in Zenoss to read the nagios format and graph on it. In LogicMonitor, it took about 10 minutes.
Are there any other major advantages with LogicMonitor?
The fact that it’s a hosted service is big. That we don’t have to worry about keeping up a dedicated monitoring server, and not having to provide access outside of our firewall to that server, and keeping up the Zenoss processes and stuff like that. Those are definitely big reasons to pay for LogicMonitor outside of the functionality, which I find to be much better.
LogicMonitor was catching stuff in our hardware that Zenoss wasn’t. So we’ve moved all of our networking equipment, load balancing, firewalls over to LogicMonitor.
How would you justify the cost of LogicMonitor vs. a free tool like Zenoss?
The cost is offset pretty easily just by the time expense of the maintenance and setup of other tools. From scratch, it would take a system engineer at least a full week to setup. But that’s not even scratching the surface — it’s the actual functionality for me that makes the difference.
On top of the application level monitoring and the batch job monitoring is the whole integration issue. Instead of having to use Cacti for networking equipment, Zenoss for alerting, and Nagios for other stuff, LogicMonitor is able to tie together all of the monitoring needs of our organization into one tool.
Why is that integration important?
It doesn’t matter if a load balancer goes out or if your MySQL instance is thrashing, you’re going to have a unified interface to rely on for all your troubleshooting and alerting. You don’t have to worry about keeping up separate systems simultaneously. You know exactly where to go everytime.
How is LogicMonitor support?
It’s been timely, and never less than full effort and successful resolution. When I’ve had issues, they were addressed in the next scheduled release. I’ve also found the “chat with engineer” feature very helpful. It’s faster than digging through documentation, or getting into a lengthy back and forth email exchange.
