In this first edition of our Customer Spotlight series, we are joined by James Kahn and Ben Gittins of Idea 11. Idea 11 is an award-winning, full-stack AWS IT company that specializes in digital transformations, cloud infrastructure, software development and managed services. James and Ben discuss why LogicMonitor was the tool of choice to monitor their customer’s cloud environments, and how LogicMonitor’s extensive feature set enables them to provide the best service possible to their customers.
When evaluating an infrastructure and monitoring vendor, what were you actively looking for?
(Ben) I think a lot of it came down to having the right combination of lots of different features. AWS-centricity was largely important. Also, having the AWS integration component be native to it rather than sort of tacked on was a huge factor. I think there is something that is unique in the way that LogicMonitor approaches its integration with AWS. So, that was certainly a big deciding factor. But it also provided a lot of other value around things – for example: making on-call management centralized or in the same application. Not having to use the separate systems as we had previously was another bonus as well.
And then what business challenges were you looking to solve with LogicMonitor? You mentioned needing to be AWS-focused natively – what else?
(James) We are a managed services provider, so, we deliver this service out to our customers. Our monitoring is basically our first line of defense with maintaining our customers’ environments and we want to make sure we are keeping them online. So we needed good monitoring that we could leverage to provide a fantastic service to our customers. And we wanted to be able to scale that monitoring without manual labor.
Looking back, what was it that ultimately led Idea 11 to select LogicMonitor?
(Ben) It eliminated a lot of the undifferentiated, heavy lifting for us. Also the flexibility that we obtained means that we can basically turn around and go, “Yes, we can just do it.” That’s a big part of it. The winning factor is that it is a tool that does not obstruct us in what we do on a day to day basis. It actually helps us.
Why is LogicMonitor the provider you want to monitor your cloud environment?
(James) Honestly, the differentiating factor with LogicMonitor is the extensiveness of the feature set for us. We need to be able to monitor all sorts of edge cases from all sorts of different vendors. From network devices through to serverless stuff in AWS, as well as classic VM or EC2 instances. LogicMonitor allows us to use a single tool to monitor everything we need to and we can even extend it ourselves if LogicMonitor does not support a certain feature.
What would you say has been the biggest benefit for you with LogicMonitor?
(Ben) For me, being able to automate and monitor everything. Usually you end up with a trade-off where if you go down the path of being promised something that is all completely from scratch, then you end up having to build everything from the ground up. I think LogicMonitor sits right in that sweet spot of it is highly automatable and also highly powerful out of the box. We do not need to build anything, so that is where it has been most powerful. Ultimately, LogicMonitor allows us to provide a premium level of service to our customers so that we can hit SLAs and scale our business without reinventing our monitoring every year.