Jeff Behl is the data center manager for Estalea, which handles the infrastructure for several web-based companies that comprise hundreds of employees, multiple data centers and branch offices—everything from a small, remote UK office router to core storage systems and databases. Behl has fifteen years of experience running data centers under his belt—and, at Estalea, found himself relying on a combination of various open-source solutions (including Nagios, Remstats, and Cacti) for his monitoring needs. But eventually, he could no longer ignore the amount of time he was spending “making the open source stuff work.”
“You can either sit around and deal with lots of different things that excel in different areas, or you can use LogicMonitor, which works across the board,” he said. “Yeah, you can do whatever you want with the open source tools, but the thing is how much you have to do to make the open source stuff work—it takes so much time, and that’s what it really comes down to, is the time.”
Nagios, Behl said, was great—but it didn’t have graphing, so he had to use another tool (Cacti) for that, which required more time spent on configuration. The two didn’t alert in the same way, and there was still no way to get trending information. Additionally, any new releases required lots of updating. And more time.
Of course, in implementing LogicMonitor, Behl didn’t want all that time he’d spent customizing his patchwork solution to be for naught. And it wasn’t. “LogicMonitor’s team will integrate your existing monitoring system for you. They analyzed my current monitoring solution, and configured LogicMonitor’s settings to make sure it was customized to my specific needs,” he said.
The flipside of that customization is another benefit of LogicMonitor’s solution—the automation: it was built as a turn-key solution, so that data center managers like Behl don’t have to spend their time configuring it. “The default checks for everything from NetApp to MySQL are all based on experience in the field. Their developers have experience building solutions in the data centers of companies that all went from small to huge and are either SaaS or web-based, where downtime is measured in dollars. They know what they’re talking about!”
That experience brings another advantage: LogicMonitor’s developers will tell you what’s important to be monitored when implementing a new piece of hardware. “Figuring out how to monitor a new device, knowing what’s important to be monitored—they do all that, and import the changes to all their clients. And that’s a huge time savings for me, every single time,” Behl says.
Just what kind of time savings are we talking about? Behl estimates at least a full day for every new device, a couple of hours for every new MySQL instance, plus the ongoing time spent on upgrades, updates, and changes, or looking for new features. “LogicMonitor’s Professional Services Group will fix most issues and customize for new devices really fast,” he says.