Using Dynamic Thresholds to Eliminate Noise and Focus on What’s Important

Triggering alerts is only half of the picture for dynamic thresholds. The other half is using dynamic thresholds as a filter to reduce alerts to only what is immediately relevant.

Why the Modern Enterprise needs an Early Warning System

LogicMonitor's Early Warning System helps modern enterprises get warned before issues occur and help them prevent problems instead of reacting to them.

What is AIOps and How is it Changing IT Operations?

AIOps stands for artificial intelligence for IT operations. AIOps platforms apply machine learning and data science to help solve IT operations problems and increase proficiency.

LogicMonitor’s Q3 All-Star Employee Award Winners

LogicMonitor recognizes its top performers with the “All-Star Award” to internal team members who truly embody LogicMonitor’s core values. See this quarters winners!

LogicMonitor and PagerDuty: Beyond the Basics

Here we will address a couple of best practices and customizations that can take your PagerDuty and LogicMonitor integration to the next level.

Monitoring Azure MariaDB Instances with LogicMonitor

Azure’s MariaDB instances make it easy to run a database in the cloud, and with LogicMonitor’s you can gain even further insight into your environment.

Monitoring AWS FSx with LogicMonitor

Whether you’re using AWS FSx for Windows File Server or Amazon FSx for Lustre, LogicMonitor can automatically discover and monitor your filesystems.

Intern Spotlight: Sabina Friden

Sabina Friden was part of the most recent class of LogicMonitor interns and was able to work on a variety of projects within product marketing. Learn more!

LogicMonitor’s New UI: Alerts Page

LogicMonitor's redesigned alerts page within the updated UI adds filter tables and reduces clicks to streamline workflows and improve efficiency. Learn more!

Streamline Workflows with Dashboard Tokens

LogicMonitor dashboards are powerful tools for monitoring data in a variety of ways. Dashboard tokens allow you to streamline dashboard creation and editing as well as limit human error, especially at scale. Learn more about some of the best ways to optimize your workflow.

LogicMonitor’s Best Practice Approach to Security

LogicMonitor is certified to the ISO 27000 standards for Information Security management. Learn more about how it works and how LogicMonitor became certified.

Intern Spotlight: Michelle Nguyen

Michelle Nguyen was part of the most recent class of LogicMonitor interns and was able to work on a variety of projects, including a new alerting method! Learn more about her internship experience at LogicMonitor.

Introducing LogicMonitor’s New UI

LogicMonitor was able to conduct extensive research on the user experience and found two major improvements to focus on: reducing clicks and making core platform functionalities easier to access. And with that we are excited to introduce LogicMonitor’s improved user interface. The new interface will make completing tasks in LogicMonitor faster by requiring less clicks and making navigation more intuitive.

What Is The True Impact of an IT Outage?

In today’s digital world, IT availability has become our most valuable commodity. However, availability is also difficult to maintain, even for the world’s largest enterprises. A glance at the headlines shows that high-profile outages and brownouts happen all the time. LogicMonitor’s 2019 IT Outage Impact Study digs deep into the impact of downtime for today’s global organizations and shares some best practices for how to avoid these costly occurrences.

How LogicMonitor is Driving the Monitoring of SD-WAN

LogicMonitor can provide metrics to help track the health and performance of your SD-WAN environment as transitions are made in an organization. Find out how!

Have it Your Way – Detailing the New ServiceNow CMDB Release and Auto Balanced Collectors

LogicMonitor is constantly partnering with the ServiceNow team and our customers on creative use cases to enhance the ServiceNow CMDB App. Check out our blog for new feature updates, available to enjoy today!

Tracking HashiCorp Consul with LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor can automatically track the important DataSources (Consul Agent, Consul Server, and Consul Cluster) of your Consul deployment to keep it running healthy. Learn more!

Monitoring HashiCorp Vault with LogicMonitor

Hashicorp Vault is an open-source secret management tool that allows organizations to control passwords and similar confidential information. LogicMonitor can help ensure deployment is running as intended. Learn how!

The Power of Audit Logs

If you’re a LogicMonitor customer, the platform’s Audit Logs may seem like a rudimentary means to track user actions, but they can actually be a powerful tool for troubleshooting and getting historical data within your portal. Learn how Audit Logs give an unparalleled view into the history of any object and user within your portal.

Diversity as a Bottom Line at LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is growing–fast. In the last two years, LogicMonitor has doubled its employee headcount. But even with this rapid growth, we never forget the importance of inclusion and diversity. In fact, these important pillars are at the very forefront and the foundation of our growth. Check out our latest blog post to learn more!

Monitoring AWS MSK with LogicMonitor

Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK) is an AWS service that helps build and run applications built on Apache Kafka. Kafka is a platform designed to handle continuous streams of small records or events generated from a large number of devices and applications but in order to ensure your Kafka environment is running efficiently, it is important to adequately monitor it at both the cluster and broker level. Check out our latest blog post to learn how with LogicMonitor’s AWS MSK monitoring, you can collect, visualize, and alert on data from your cloud Kafka infrastructure alongside the rest of your hybrid infrastructure.

From vSAN to vCenter: Discover Complete Visibility into your VMware Stack with LogicMonitor

The LogicMonitor team is heading to VMworld in San Francisco and is excited to answer questions and show you how new platform features like topology and anomaly detection help you manage your business, avoid issues and help you get the most out of your monitoring platform. Join in the discussion at booth #1833, see you there!

Smoked Salmon and Scrambled Eggs: Why You Need Monitoring

LogicMonitor Senior Sales Engineer, Antony Hawkins, recounts a recent train ride where the simple act of missing breakfast due to being distracted demonstrated the importance of an automated monitoring tool. Check out our latest blog post to learn how Gee Twenty-Five could have benefited from monitoring and gotten breakfast on time.

Tackling the Tech Giant

Transitioning into a new industry or career can be intimidating. Where do you start? At LogicMonitor we value diverse experiences and hire the best people for the job; core values like critical problem solving, initiative, and a desire to learn are what we look for when hiring for a position. LogicMonitor is expanding rapidly and looking for talent to join our team. Check out our latest blog post for tips and employee anecdotes on career growth here at LogicMonitor!

LogicMonitor’s vSphere Integration Improves Time to Value and Ops Efficiency

LogicMonitor’s current monitoring coverage for VMware’s vCenter is best-in-class: from a single device in your portal, you can see every component of your virtual environment and their respective performance metrics: hosts, clusters, virtual machines, resource pools, datastores, virtual switches, networks, snapshots, and more. Check out our latest blog to find out how to extend your visibility into OS and application statistics on vCenter devices and download the DataSources!

An Introduction to Python 3.7 Data Classes

Python is one of the most popular scripting languages today and we love it too. That’s one reason why LogicMonitor can execute any script or programming language supported by your environment. That means can enjoy the latest features of your favorite languages in your favorite monitoring tool (right?). If Python is your vice, give Python 3.7’s Data Classes a try, check out our latest blog to learn more!

Level Up Visibility and Flexibility to Increase (Business) Velocity

LogicMonitor hosted its first-ever user conference in June 2019 where we announced and demonstrated powerful new developments for the LogicMonitor platform. Check out our latest blog to find out more about features we announced including anomaly detection, topology mapping, alert dependencies, and correlations.

A Well Rounded Life

LogicMonitor values their employees and goes beyond basic benefits to ensure its team members are able to live a balanced life. Here are three major programs that LogicMonitor offers to support a well-rounded life for our employees: our Employee Assistance Program, the LM Cares Program, and [email protected] Check out our latest blog to learn more!

An Introduction to Python List Comprehensions

Python list comprehensions offer a concise method of interacting with each element of a list. Our latest blog post aims to introduce List Comprehensions in a friendly way and offer you one more Python feature to add to your scripting toolbox. Check it out to learn more!

Troubleshoot Faster with Anomaly Visualization

LogicMonitor is proud to announce anomaly visualization as an addition to our growing AIOps capabilities! Anomaly visualization compliments LogicMonitor’s existing forecasting functionality and provides another layer of intelligence to better understand resource health. With the ability to quickly identify anomalies, LogicMonitor users will be able to troubleshoot faster and more effectively. Learn more in our latest blog post!

Abstracting Credentials from Python Scripts

Python has rapidly grown into one of the most popular languages for automation. That’s why LogicMonitor supports Python when it comes to managing your LM portal and expanding your monitoring coverage with scripts. During your scripting adventures, you may find yourself wanting to take your work to the next level. LogicMonitor Solutions Engineer, Jeoffri Davis, highlights best practices in our latest blog post. Check it out!

Viewing LogicMonitor Reports Within Dashboards

LogicMonitor allows users to digest data in multiple ways, including visual representations of raw data reports via dashboards. Check out our latest blog to find out how LogicMonitor Sales Engineer, Ian Bloom, is helping his clients get the most out of their LogicMonitor data.

Dynamic Thresholds, the New [old] Buzzword

LogicMonitor Founder and Chief Evangelist, Steve Francis, weighs in on two major topics that customers and prospects have been discussing with us lately: AIOps and Dynamic Thresholds.

LogicMonitor CMDB Integration: Have it Your Way

LogicMonitor's ServiceNow CMDB integration makes it possible to feed your CMDB with the most recent and accurate information about your IT infrastructure — everything from performance data, serial numbers, network infrastructure to topology neighbors can be added quickly and easily. Check out our newest blog post or visit us at ServiceNow's Knowledge Conference (booth #234) to find out more!

Context is Key: Additive vs. Subtractive Topology

LogicMonitor is proud to announce the addition of dynamic and additive topology mapping! Find out how additive topology can help streamline troubleshooting efforts in our latest blog post!

An Introduction to Dynamic Topology with LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is proud to announce the addition of dynamic topology mapping to its core platform! Users will now be able to add another layer of visibility across their infrastructure. Check out our latest blog post to learn more!

Using Lambda and JIRA to Handle DevOps Tasks

Our latest blog post dives into how LogicMonitor's TechOps team automates DevOps tasks through Lambda and JIRA, ultimately streamlining workflows and saving valuable time. Read on to find out how.

Monitoring Azure VM Backups

LogicMonitor recently rolled out initial monitoring for Azure Backup. Monitoring backup processes and services can help ensure that the right resources are being backed up at the right intervals, which is necessary to enable successful disaster recovery. Find out how we do it in our latest blog post!

Simplify Troubleshooting with AIOps

There is a lot of industry buzz around AIOps and it's effect on IT Operations. Our latest blog post will dive into how to understand the issues that AIOps can solve ultimately resulting in time and money savings.

LogicMonitor Recognized in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics for the First Time

We’re excited to share that Gartner, Inc. has positioned LogicMonitor in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) for the first time in the quadrant’s history. Check out our latest blog post for details!

Getting Started with the LogicMonitor – ServiceNow CMDB Integration

LogicMonitor launched our newest integration with ServiceNow CMDB, read our latest blog to get started.

How to Monitor GKE with LogicMonitor

With LogicMonitor’s new Kubernetes Monitoring, you can get this insight into your GKE environment alongside the rest of your hybrid infrastructure. Read our latest blog post to find out how:

Browser Automation: Using the Gmail API to Retrieve MFA Codes

In a separate article, we introduced the concept of performing synthetic transactions with LogicMonitor to ensure website services are up and running correctly. Our latest blog takes this a step further and incorporates an MFA (Multifactor Authentication) Challenge.  This challenge consists of requesting that an MFA code is sent to a registered email address (Gmail), retrieving the MFA code, and presenting the code to the website to complete the MFA challenge.

How to Monitor Azure VM Scale Sets

With Azure Virtual Machine (VM) Scale Sets you can automatically scale the number of VMs running an application based on the compute resources required. VM Scale Sets make it easier to deploy and manage a large number of Virtual Machines consistently and allow you to use and pay for the minimum resources needed at any given time. Learn how LogicMonitor can help you achieve comprehensive visibility through automated resource discovery in our latest blog post.

How To Monitor Almost Anything: Lifehacking Diabetes

Antony Hawkins, Sr. Sales Engineer at LogicMonitor, leveraged LogicMonitor's extensibility to build a DataSource to monitor his wife’s diabetes. With real-time metrics available via dashboards on LogicMonitor's mobile app sharing collected metrics with healthcare professionals is easier than ever. Check out our latest blog post to find out how he did it!

How to Identify Orphaned EBS Snapshots to Optimize AWS Costs

Are orphaned EBS snapshots costing you money? Find out how to optimize your AWS costs in our recent blog post!

LM Unleashed: 2019 Global Kick-off

Last week, the LogicMonitor executive staff kicked off LM's highly anticipated global kick-off tour. This annual company kick-off event remains a strong tradition here at LogicMonitor, allowing team members to celebrate, collaborate and fuel-up for success in the coming year. Read our latest blog post as we look back on 2018 and learn how you too can be part of the conversation about the industry trends and product roadmap discussed.

Preparing for Browser Automation by Using Web Developer Tools to Identify HTML Elements

In a separate article, we introduced the concept of performing synthetic transactions with LogicMonitor. An obviously crucial step of that process is actually scripting the automation. You can have all the right automation tools installed but how do you get started with the actual script? This blog post will help illustrate some of the preparation needed for developing a browser automation script.

How to Monitor Kubernetes with LogicMonitor

With LogicMonitor’s new Kubernetes Monitoring Integration you can comprehensively monitor your Kubernetes clusters and the containerized applications running within them, alongside your existing hybrid IT infrastructure in a single pane of glass. Find out more in our latest blog post:

Key Metrics for Monitoring Google Cloud App Engine

Google Cloud App Engine is a serverless platform that enables users to develop and deploy applications. Learn how LogicMonitor can help ensure that you have enough visibility into App Engine health and performance to proactively prevent downtime in our latest blog post.

Monitoring Google Cloud Costs: Three Tips for Maximizing your Investment

Whether you are just migrating to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or have well-established workloads running, monitoring spend is essential to maximizing your investment. Monitoring GCP spend can help you better understand how cloud usage impacts costs and when to optimize to meet a budget. Read our latest blog post for three tips for monitoring costs that will help you maximize your GCP investment.

An Introduction to Executing Synthetic Transactions with LogicMonitor

Synthetic transactions facilitate proactive monitoring of online business services such as e-banking and e-commerce. They not only monitor existing services but can be used to simulate and test the quality of future user interactions with services. LogicMonitor includes Website Checks out-of-the-box but did you know that Scripted DataSources can be used to extend website monitoring into synthetic transactions? This is the first in a series of technical articles on extending LogicMonitor’s capabilities via two popular technologies: Python and Selenium.

Running LogicMonitor API Scripts in AWS Lambda

Our Professional Services team loves to find creative ways to automate repetitive tasks. Read how Solutions Engineer, Jeff Woeber, uses AWS Lambda to execute Python scripts with LogicMonitor’s REST API.

How to Monitor CPU and Memory on Ubiquiti Unifi Devices

"Thanks to LogicMonitor, we have the capability to monitor what is important to our business and now confidence in the metrics we are receiving for Ubiquiti devices." Find out how LogicMonitor customer, Retune AB, manages a variety of Ubiquiti devices by running a PowerShell script from their collector.

How to Monitor Kubernetes Without an Agent on Every Node

When it comes to monitoring Kubernetes, LogicMonitor’s agentless approach enables you to comprehensively monitor your cluster and the health and performance of the resources within without requiring an agent on every node. Find out how to bypass the hassle of node-based agents in our most recent blog post.

How to Minimize Troubleshooting Time by Correlating Events with Performance

LogicMonitor’s CloudWatch Events integration enables teams to minimize troubleshooting time by displaying contextual events for your monitored resources alongside performance data. Check out our most recent blog on how CloudWatch Events can help your team understand the cause of resource performance changes, and how LogicMonitor’s Lambda function makes it easier than ever to connect the dots.

How to Monitor Cloud Costs More Effectively using Tags

Cloud spend can get out of control quickly. With LogicMonitor's tagging capabilities you can easily monitor and manage dynamic cloud services, find out how in our latest blog post.

The Road to Hyper-Efficient Alerting

What does AIOps deliver? For LogicMonitor users, it's hyper-efficient alerting, anomaly detection, cost optimization and more. Our founder shares details in our latest blog.

How to Monitor Google Cloud SQL

Need visibility into the performance of Cloud SQL databases? LogicMonitor’s new GCP support enables quick setup and management of databases to prevent downtime. Check out our blog to learn more.

Why hasn’t AI taken off yet in monitoring?

There's a lot of talk about AIOps, but what does it mean for monitoring? Our founder, Steve Francis, makes the case for algorithmic intelligence in part 1 of LogicMonitor's AIOps blog series.

Digital Transformation: Enough Talk, It’s Time for Action. Fuel Your Progress with ServiceNow and LogicMonitor

Teams are updating their IT Operations Management (ITOM) strategies, moving more systems and services to the cloud, and automating tedious manual processes that have historically been the root cause of migraines for many people.

Announcing the LogicMonitor Terraform Provider

Terraform is an open source orchestration tool for provisioning, managing, and versioning cloud infrastructure. Terraform uses a configuration file as a blueprint of the desired infrastructure state, and changes the target environment by updating or creating resources to match the defined state.

Maximize your Azure Cloud ROI

The flexibility and speed that cloud computing provides makes running applications in the cloud appealing. But the pay-for-what-you-use pricing model makes it way too easy to rack up an expensive bill that can come as an unpleasant surprise at the end of the month. Ensuring your team has the ability to monitor spend throughout the month is essential to controlling costs, but can be challenging and time consuming.

Going for the Gold – Monitoring the 2018 Olympic Winter Games

The 2018 games are coming to a close, but it's not too late to get in on the action. We created a one stop shop dashboard for Olympic data (using LogicMonitor, of course).

Meltdown & Spectre: How LogicMonitor Can Help

When a critical security flaw affecting hardware is identified — such as the recently publicized chip vulnerabilities (Meltdown, Spectre) — your cloud provider takes steps to implement the necessary patch(es) to protect its infrastructure.

How to Monitor AWS Direct Connect with LogicMonitor

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated network connection between on-premisess and AWS environments.  Such a connection can be more reliable and increase the uptime of your services because you’re unlikely to be impacted by an ISP’s availability issues, as is the case with traditional, internet-based connections.

Is the Air Quality Safe Now? Monitoring Air Quality on California’s Central Coast

We built a dashboard in LogicMonitor to display the current air conditions as well as provide historical trend data. LogicMonitor’s air quality dashboard displays helpful metrics on current conditions affected by the Thomas fire

Star Wars: Monitoring the Resistance with LogicMonitor

We take two things very seriously here at LogicMonitor: Data and Star Wars.  So you can imagine what happened when we unleashed our best and brightest on the The Star Wars API (SWAPI) and offered uncontested bragging rights to whoever created the best Star Wars Dashboard.

Manage Cost in the Cloud with Precision

With the vast number of AWS services and the various ways for which they are billed, cost monitoring and optimization can be complex.  Ensuring that your team has the utilization, performance, and spend data necessary to drive cost optimization in the cloud is important, and typically requires multiple tools.

10 Years of SaaS-based Monitoring

We recently passed 10 years since the first incorporation of LogicMonitor. Traditionally this is a time to reflect back, distill some lessons learned, prognosticate about the future, and celebrate the milestone.

The Comprehensive Guide to Cloud Services Monitoring

By 2020, 90% of all organizations will have some workloads in the cloud.  The transition is inevitable and – in most cases – already well underway.  Monitoring this transition is the only surefire way for IT leaders to maximize their investments and proactively prevent downtime of critical applications and processes.

Achieving Complete Visibility into Cloud Services

Modern infrastructure has evolved from traditional full stack systems in on-premisess data centers to smaller, layered services that used to make up those full stack systems, allowing for management of supporting infrastructure to be abstracted away. This is the underlying phenomenon of cloud computing.

The New CMO Powerball: Marketing While You Sleep

As marketers, we live in data.  Every move is, or should be, data driven.  And I am sure most of you start your day as I do: checking out your Salesforce dashboards and logging in to Google Analytics.

DevOps: Bridging the Schism with Alerts

What the hell is DevOps anyways? The term DevOps is thrown around a lot. As with any good buzzword, it started as a phrase coined by an industry trendsetter to describe a specific concept.

Announcing LM Cloud™: The total solution for cloud services monitoring!

We’re excited to announce the launch of LM Cloud, SaaS-based performance monitoring for AWS and Azure! LM Cloud provides real-time visibility into the performance of cloud services, enabling IT departments to maximize their investments and proactively prevent downtime of critical applications and processes.

“I can’t believe I’ve never heard of LogicMonitor.”

I used to hear this from prospects and new customers on a regular basis, but our market awareness is growing fast. And people are starting to notice who we are and what we’re doing.

Automating Infrastructure Management with the HashiCorp Suite

Automation is part of the cultural DNA at LogicMonitor. Whether it's automating parts of our job or automating network monitoring so our customers don’t have to think about it, the goal is always evolving. I work in the Technical Operations team (by the way, we’re hiring!) which handles availability of our SaaS-based LogicMonitor application for all customers, including ourselves.

Keeping your Ops teams efficient with LogicMonitor & Atlassian

Monitoring datacenter infrastructure and applications is a team sport. Having the right players on the field is critical to ensuring our customers are wildly successful. Atlassian is one of the key partners for our business and we are excited to support their customers this week at the Atlassian Summit event in San Jose.

Introducing Kubernetes Monitoring by LogicMonitor

Monitoring the dynamic topology of Kubernetes clusters introduces a new challenge for operations folks. In the automated, self-healing of world of Kubernetes how do you keep up with temporary infrastructure, identify what is important, and find out what has changed?

Automate All the Things: Migrating Devices from your CMDB to LogicMonitor

What does LogicMonitor Professional Services do? We guide our customers through a full LogicMonitor deployment while solving some of their most complex integration challenges. We often leverage the LogicMonitor REST API to develop unique solutions to automate customer workflows and tasks.

VMware Monitoring and Beyond – Know Before You Go [to VMworld]!

Back in April, we released our updated suite of VMware monitoring. We’ve had lots of great additions to the LogicMonitor platform recently and really wanted our VMware monitoring to take advantage of these new powerful features.

How to avoid Marketo's outage and the twitter storm

So, if you are in marketing, or know someone in marketing – you probably heard that Marketo had an outage this week, and it was all over the twitter-verse. The issue was that Marketo failed to renew their DNS domain. Which is unfortunate, but entirely understandable. We sympathize. Things happen. People are imperfect, and make mistakes.

More Metrics! Updates to Cisco Monitoring Ahead of Cisco Live 2017

At LogicMonitor, we’re constantly expanding the breadth and depth of our monitoring coverage. As we pack our bags for Cisco Live, we thought now would be a good time to highlight some of the Cisco-specific monitoring we updated this year.

How LM Config Saves Your ECS Jobs—and Your Friendships

At LogicMonitor, we utilize Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) as one of our main Docker orchestration frameworks. It offers flexibility in running containerized applications and is reliable in maintaining service uptime and continuous container deployment.

LM Config™: A Conversation with ANS Group

Back in December, we announced the release of LM Config, LogicMonitor’s dedicated configuration management product! LM Config lets users add device configuration monitoring to the core LogicMonitor platform.

The Right Way to Monitor Linux Memory, Again

Some time ago, our fearless (fearsome?) leader wrote a fine blog about the Right Way to Monitor Linux Virtual Memory. It turns out he was right on the money (Steve’s a smart guy — who knew?). Although his blog focused on monitoring Linux Virtual memory, it turns out there’s some nuance in monitoring Physical memory as well.

VaST Improvement: Get Better Data Visualization

One of the improvements our new proprietary Time Series Database allows for is better visualization of long term data trends – a crucial component of proper enterprise monitoring.

API Management in the Age of DevOps

Having an API that is robust, dependable, and consistent is extremely beneficial, and pretty much a requirement when it comes to enterprise SaaS products. With the rise of DevOps and the move towards continuous delivery, it can be challenging to maintain such an API.

The Three P's of Enterprise Transformation

“The only thing that is constant is change.” – Heraclitus. Heraclitus wrote this around 500 BC, but it could not be more relevant today. In the past ten years, the pace of change has been largely unprecedented. That’s a pretty strong statement, but let’s think about it.

Giving Back: LogicMonitor in the Community

Last May, LogicMonitor accomplished the successful launch of it’s new community outreach program- LogicMonitor Cares. Since the onset of this program, we’ve witnessed some great participation in the handful of events held near our corporate headquarters over the past several months and we couldn’t be more excited!

What is Enterprise Transformation? Or Digital and IT Transformation?

You can’t read a management journal, a CIO newsletter, or the S1 of a software company filing to go public without coming across the terms Enterprise Transformation, Digital Transformation and I.T. Transformation.  But what do they mean?

Actionable Data at Your Fingertips: Year in Review Part IV

Over the course of this Year in Review blog series, we discussed the huge strides LogicMonitor made in storing, automating, extending, and visualizing your data- really everything except the data, itself. 2016 saw a massive expansion in the breadth of our out-of-the-box and customizable monitoring solutions, including forays into previously uncharted Configuration Management territory as well as ramping up our already impressive Services and AWS monitoring. Let’s take a look at the ways LogicMonitor put more actionable data at your fingertips:

CloudWatch: Maximize Value and Minimize Costs

Amazon Web Services are great for quickly enabling agile infrastructure – but this can lead to difficulty with cost control or predictability.  Unfortunately, monitoring of AWS resources can exacerbate this problem of unpredictable costs, as the very act of querying AWS data can be more expensive than the cost of the monitoring service.

What the Hell is a Kibibyte?

In addition to being somewhat penurious, our founder Steve has a well-known penchant for being pedantic.  If he bursts into the development area and starts grilling people, even seasoned engineers are frequently befuddled when first posed the question: “Kilobytes, or kibibytes?”.

Bring Clarity to Your Data: LogicMonitor Year in Review Part III

In the nascent stages of LogicMonitor, our founder created the LogicMonitor Manifesto, which proclaimed among its core tenets that your data matters, we will never deliver false alerts, and it’s better to have no tool than a broken tool. Each one of these ideas is rooted in our broader monitoring worldview: your data should be meaningful and useful. LogicMonitor believes data is useful when it is actionable, when you can draw conclusions about your environment’s current state, and when you can take necessary steps to remediate or innovate.

LogicMonitor Year in Review: Automation and Extensibility

Performance monitoring often has a reputation akin to Sisyphus’ rock: after months (or years) of uphill groveling to jerry-rig a system together, you find that your environment has changed so much that you’re back to square one. Since our inception, LogicMonitor has turned this perception on its head with a product that not only grows alongside your environment, but harnesses the power of your other applications to automate workflows and processes.

LogicMonitor Year in Review: Architecture and Release Processes

This is Part I of a four-part Year in Review blog series. Check out what else the LogicMonitor team was up to in 2016: Automation and Extensibility, Data Visualizations, and Actionable Data. 

2017 Predictions: The Year Enterprises Start Investing in their IT Staff

nterprise transformation will continue apace in 2017, and for good reasons. Businesses need to update existing systems to take advantage of the agility that modern architectures enable – not for the sake of technology itself, but to better align people, process, and technology with business strategy. Agile methodologies allow this transformation to occur much faster than traditional software development and architecture lifecycles, as they enable rapid releases, learning, and iteration.

AWS T2 CPU Credit Balance and Real CPU Workload Explained

AWS releases new products at an astounding rate, making it hard for users to keep up with best practices and use cases for those services. The risk for IT teams is that they will miss out on the release of AWS services that can improve business operations, save them money, and optimize IT performance.

Enhancing Security with Two-Factor Authentication

If you poll IT operations folks on what keeps them up at night, I’m willing to bet that security would make it to the top of the list. Security is a hot topic these days. It’s difficult to open any publication and not see an article about a major hack (such as Yahoo's recent 1 billion user account hack) or some other security issue. The complex IT world that we live in makes maintaining security practices even more difficult.

Announcing LM Config™: Configuration Management from LogicMonitor is Here

LogicMonitor is excited to announce the release of LM Config! LM Config lets users add device configuration monitoring and management to the existing LogicMonitor platform. Configuration management has been increasingly recognized as a major challenge facing the modern technology organization, particularly as network architectures become more distributed.

Is this Application Down or is it Just Me?

As cloud service providers become increasingly ubiquitous and integral parts of companies’ systems, we at LogicMonitor wanted to alleviate some of the aggravation associated with spotty service availability. To do this, we began offering Internal Service Checks in order to quickly identify performance issues in companies’ applications and websites.

Orchestrate Your Monitoring With LogicMonitor and Ansible

Back in January, we announced the release of our LogicMonitor Community Ansible Module. Today, we're proud to announce that with the recent release of Ansible version 2.2, the LogicMonitor module will be included in all official distributions of Ansible! To celebrate and help get everyone up to speed, this blog is going to share some use cases and examples for using the module.

Custom Application Monitoring for Go

Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. When managing proprietary applications, there is no suite of utilities available – you will likely have to implement your own solutions. Custom solutions, however, still require monitoring. This blog will demonstrate how TechOps at LogicMonitor has implemented custom monitoring for some of our internal tools.

Create and Close Tickets in Jira (or Any Other Tool) in Response to Alerts

While LogicMonitor has a robust built-in alert delivery, escalation, and reporting system, you may be using other tools in parallel to access and store IT information. We've talked before about integrating LogicMonitor and Jira – including how to monitor tickets created in Jira with LogicMonitor, and how to use Jira queries to trigger and escalate alerts in LogicMonitor.

Using LogicMonitor’s Puppet 4 Module and Monitoring Puppet Health

Many of our customers use Puppet to manage the provisioning and configuration of their infrastructure. We know that our users additionally rely on monitoring to help prevent outages.

Too Many Alerts? Run Your Enterprise Like the U.S. Navy Nuclear Program

We've noted before that one of the problems that we frequently run into with enterprises' monitoring practices is that they have too many alerts triggering.

LogicMonitor Goes for Gold at the Rio Olympics

Well, LogicMonitor has you covered. We recently used LogicMonitor to monitor the Summer Olympics in Rio. We used LogicModules to pull in live Rio Olympics results, and LogicMonitor’s powerful dashboard widgets to display the results.

Optimizing MSP Monitoring Strategy for Cloud Migration

Gartner says that by 2020, 72% of companies will be leveraging the cloud. With this increased cloud usage and migration just 4 years away, companies increasingly require that their widespread IT services are always up and running properly.

Monitoring the AWS Service Health Dashboard

Most people think of Datasources as the bread and butter of LogicMonitor’s monitoring capabilities. Datasources are the most commonly used LogicModule because they are appropriate for monitoring numerical data; they provide a trend of the data over time (which can provide invaluable context when troubleshooting) and are compatible with most monitoring protocols.

Announcing $130M Investment and Partnership with Providence Equity

Hello LogicMonitor Community, Today we are thrilled to share with you that we have accepted a $130 million investment from Providence Strategic Growth, the growth affiliate of global private equity firm Providence Equity Partners. After careful planning and consideration, we are proud to announce this news and begin moving forward with this next phase of LogicMonitor's growth.

All This Aggregation Ain't Satisfactioning Me

We're announcing something that our developers have been working on for a long time – the use of our own proprietary Time Series Database (TSDB) to store our customers' time series data. Why should you care?

BBQing Made Easy with LogicMonitor – Announcing the Tappecue Datasource!

This is the first year that we’ve participated in the Pick’n In Grant Park BBQ Competition whose proceeds go towards the preserving the historic Grant Park in Atlanta. This year’s competition brought together 15 professional BBQ teams, competing to see who could bring together the best comprehensive BBQ meal including chicken, ribs, and pork.

Introducing Alert Forecasting

LogicMonitor has always been committed to providing the most comprehensive insight into your datacenter. Our array of executive dashboards track performance metrics with up to two years of history,  as well as provide at-a-glance views of your infrastructure’s present status. Now, LogicMonitor can also predict the state of your infrastructure for up to three months with alert forecasting.

5 Steps to Help You Migrate to AWS

Looking to migrate your LogicMonitor IT infrastructure from an on-premises data center into Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Having your infrastructure in the cloud can be a game changer for your business, but the migration process into AWS can be risky if you don’t have full visibility into the performance of your platform during migration.

Monitoring Big Data Part 2: AWS’s Elasticsearch Service

One of AWS’s key goals with their services is to shield the user from the many inner complexities that make up the specific offering (networking, nodes, operating systems) and provide the user with an endpoint that can be used to interface with their application.

Photoelectric Effect for Applications

The photoelectric effect is the observation that many metals emit electrons when light shines upon them. While not a law of physics, large applications tend to behave like metals when observed and exposed to light. Tiny particles, frequently referred to as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) components or Micro Services, are emitted from monolithic software as a response to observation. 

Guide to Monitoring Custom Metrics on AWS EC2 Instances

What is the process for monitoring custom metrics on your AWS EC2 (Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute) Linux instances? The easy way is to use a LogicMonitor collector to monitor your Linux servers, which will provide much more detail and metrics than AWS monitoring provides.

Federate Your CMDB With LogicMonitor

Simply put, ITIL is a comprehensive framework for how to run an IT organization. It is a collection of best practices that help organizations align IT services with business needs.

Keeping Your Team in the Loop with our New Slack Integration

We are excited to continue releasing integrations with leading software tools that further simplify and automate the monitoring workflow for our customers. Another one of our newest integrations that is included in our v.71 release is with one of the hippest instant messaging services in the industry, Slack.

LogicMonitor Integrates With PagerDuty to Automate Incident Workflow

As part of our v.71 release, we announced that LogicMonitor integrates with PagerDuty. Our PagerDuty integration completely automates incident workflow between LogicMonitor and PagerDuty, helping to reduce incident response time and keeping engineers informed throughout the incident lifecycle.

2016 Updates from LogicMonitor UK

LogicMonitor made some large investments late last year in its European expansion so that we can better serve our current customers in the UK/EU market. From launching our UK data center, to opening our new office in the heart of London, we’ve been rather busy!

Outsource Your Email – But Keep Your Boss Happy

I’m painfully aware that end-users expect that the “Send” button works just like a dial tone: 24x7x365 with not a moment of downtime. And when your executives are expecting a email from an important business partner, they expect it to arrive in their inbox moments after it’s been sent.

Fortune Telling: The Art of Preventative Maintenance

The LogicMonitor Operations team has an ongoing, internal competition for who can hand off on-call with the fewest active alerts. This makes it possible for each on-call engineer to give attention both to any alerts that require immediate attention, along with any warnings that indicate that things are heading in the alerting direction.

5 Secrets to Managing Technical Teams

Managing technical teams is more art than science. If you don't believe me, try to measure productivity of individual software engineers within an agile process!

Monitoring Big Data: Elasticsearch

If your technology involves collecting a lot of data, you might be using Elasticsearch. If you are, you will need to monitor your Elasticsearch cluster. Almost everything configurable with Elasticsearch can be managed through its extensive API.

The Release of LogicMonitor Community Ansible Modules

Our LogicMonitor Ansible release includes a module for managing various LogicMonitor objects, such as collectors, devices, and device groups. The release also includes a facts module that’s designed to gather information about LogicMonitor objects for further use by Ansible playbooks.

LogicMonitor Thing Explainer

Device Utilization of PCIe and SATA SSDs

At LogicMonitor, we store almost 100 billion metrics a day – more than a million per second.  Some of our storage engines consequently have to deal with a lot of disk IO, so we have a heavy reliance on SSDs.

Our SOC Audit Journey and 5 Things We Learned Along the Way

In late 2014, LogicMonitor took on a massive project – a SOC 2 Type 1 audit of the LogicMonitor SaaS Platform.  As VP of Finance for LogicMonitor, I drive our legal affairs and strategic initiatives on many areas, including risk and compliance.

First Annual LogicMonitor Hackathon

A couple weeks ago we had a company Hackathon where employees hacked, or attempted to hack, various objects that expose data (think smart lights, drones, a Tesla, etc.) and integrate the data into LogicMonitor. Because LogicMonitor is a very customizable monitoring platform, you can write a custom datasource to monitor and alert on just about anything that reports data. The highlights below summarize some of the projects.

Monitoring HL7 feeds with LogicMonitor

Recently a customer contacted us at support for help setting up alert thresholds on a custom datasource they had written. Upon inspecting the datasource in the customer's LogicMonitor portal, I realized they were monitoring an HL7 feed, which I found intriguing.

Love Your Work, Love Your Life

Culture is a set of beliefs and values that guide social norms. Establishing a company culture is no easy feat. At fast-growth tech companies like LogicMonitor, a distinct culture is incredibly important to driving success.

Identifying Unused AWS Resources to Control Costs

AWS is great, for reasons everyone knows.  The ability to spin up instances and services immediately, just when you need them, can make your organization more agile and responsive.

Design Dynamics of Delightful Dashboards

Depending on how you use them and who sees them, Dashboards could be the most vital aspect of a monitoring application. To understand their importance, consider the following situations:

Monitoring SumoLogic Usage for Faster Issue Resolution

On the LogicMonitor Technical Operations team, we love our logs. We know that logs are more than just “those files you need to delete to clear a disk space alert.” Logs provide patterns of normal behavior, and therefore make it easier to identify anomalies or changes in these patterns.

New eBook: The Comprehensive Guide to WMI

WMI stands for Windows Management Instrumentation. Knowing your way around WMI can help you improve the monitoring of your systems, and help you automate many common systems administration tasks.

Best Practices for Application Troubleshooting

It’s natural for IT Ops teams to rely heavily on alert notifications when they are troubleshooting performance issues. It’s so common that we dedicated our most recent Advanced User webcast to the topic.

The Age of the Customer: Why Fast Moving MSP's Are Moving to the Cloud

When I finished school in 1994 my first job was at Fujitsu, the large Japanese tech conglomerate. In my stint as a product manager and later in international marketing I was exposed to Fujitsu’s channel business.

How We Get Deeper Metrics From Palo Alto Networks

We’ve recently put in a big chunk of work to update our Palo Alto monitoring suite. Palo Alto exposes very little data by SNMP, so creating these particular LogicModules was a bit more work than usual. To get the best data we now plug in to their API to get the real meaty performance metrics.

Why We Added a Certification Program- Yes They Still Matter

The LogicMonitor Certified Professional (LMCP) exam is the first level of an eventual three-level certification program. The LMCP study guide and exam will test your knowledge of Linux and Windows, networks and databases, monitoring protocols, and of course – LogicMonitor administration.

Yeah, We’re Different.

In his bestselling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that it takes 10 thousand hours of practice, ample opportunity to participate and some luck to become a game-changing expert in any professional pursuit (just ask Bill Gates). Here at LM we are roughly 420,000 dedicated people hours into our SaaS-based infrastructure performance monitoring platform business. If hours are the measure of expertise then we should be pretty damn good by now!

Best Practices for Monitoring an AWS Hosted Website

Because the LogicMonitor collector is within your network, it has access to the “behind the scenes” infrastructure components that your website is running on.

5 Tips for Creating SNMP Datasources in LogicMonitor

If you’re a LogicMonitor customer, you already know that our platform can automate the setup of monitoring for hundreds of common devices with pre-configured datasources.

How To Have Better Monitoring Than A Nuclear Weapons Facility

Sometimes, the hardest things are not technical. They're a result of the politics of working in large organizations, with different groups with different responsibilities.

Integrating Jira and LogicMonitor

The Technical Operations team at LogicMonitor is charged with keeping LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based application running at all times, day or night, and has someone on-call 24/7.

Zuora + LogicMonitor = The Winning Recipe for LogicMonitor’s Finance Team

Hear about how we’re bringing accuracy and efficiency to our accounting operations using two leading technologies: Zuora and LogicMonitor.

Advanced Product Training: Optimizing Alerting

We are very excited to announce that this month we kicked off our LogicMonitor 201 advanced product training series. This series is for customers who are already familiar with LogicMonitor basics and provides an in-depth training webinar on a different advanced LogicMonitor topic each month.

Top Three Issues in Enterprise Transformation

LogicMonitor Chief Product Officer and Founder Steve Francis has defined his top three issues that need to be addressed in order to make a technology change not only possible, but wildly successful.

New eBook: The Comprehensive Guide to SNMP

Any technical education in monitoring would be incomplete without a thorough understanding of SNMP. SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol.

NetFlow: Harder than you think (but worth it)

Since we rolled out our traffic flow enhancements recently, we've seen wide adoption – but also a surprising amount of support cases regarding Netflow/Jflow/etc. We're going to look at some of the odd cases that have come in.

For MSPs & CSPs: 3 Ways to Monetize Monitoring

Here at LogicMonitor we have many different types of service providers as customers and many of which have given us great insight into the business and have taught us how they successfully sell monitoring. Below are some specific techniques that service providers can utilize to monetize monitoring through out the entire customer life cycle.

The New Devices Page: Getting Beta All the Time

The page-formerly-known-as-Hosts (now Devices) came out a few weeks ago in beta (aka Alpha).  Thank you so much to everyone who bravely waded in, tried it out, and gave us an incredible amount of feedback.  Even as you read this, top men and women are working on the experience to make it faster and better than either the old Hosts page or this current version of the beta Devices page.

Optimizing the Cloud-Based Environment

Cloud-based environments are hardly new to IT, but there are plenty of nuances to the technology that can cause issues for IT. As simple cloud connections evolve into more complex hybrid clouds, it becomes increasingly important to get ahead of the optimization process.

Bandwidth Hogs and Traffic Spikes: Using LogicMonitor’s Network Traffic Flow Analysis

If you’re an avid reader of our release notes and press releases (if not, you should check them out), you already know that we just released a big upgrade to our Network Traffic Flow Analysis (formerly known as Netflow) with a beta release of the new LogicMonitor UI.

Our Puppet integration in under 1 minute [VIDEO]

Do you use Puppet? Hear from Alanna Brown of PuppetLabs about the power of integrating LogicMonitor with Puppet.

2015 Predictions: How Applications will or will not Meet the Cloud in 2015

The New Year is a time for resolutions and the enterprise is making some of its own. Beginning with leaving behind the memories of growing pains in cloud computing and coming into a higher, or maybe deeper, level of transformation.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of going from MSP to CSP

Recently at IT Nation I led a panel discussion on the “good, bad and ugly” associated with the trend and experiences of MSPs transitioning to CSPs. This article captures the main takeaways from the panel session. Should MSP owners and operators re-invent their businesses as CSPs and what are the key considerations in doing so?

AWS Monitoring the right way

At the recent Amazon re:Invent show, LogicMonitor demonstrated its new AWS integration and monitoring. (We also announced another set of free tools – JMX Command Line Tools – but more on that later.) "Why", you may be asking, "is this interesting? Doesn't Amazon provide monitoring itself via CloudWatch? And in any case, aren't there many 'cloud centric' companies that do this?" Good questions.

How to Survive the Robot Apocalypse

If your biggest end-of-the-world fear is of the zombie apocalypse, you clearly haven't been paying attention to what is happening in technology. 

What you didn't know about LogicMonitor's new Alerts UI

The beta version of the new Alerts UI has been available to LogicMonitor users for a few months now.  If you haven’t tried it yet, you should (keep reading to find out how).  But even those who’ve tried the sexier new UI may not have noticed all the sweet new features we’ve introduced along with it. 

More Linux Memory: Free memory that is not free, nor cache!

A customer contacted our support recently, wondering why his Linux servers showed high memory utilization.  We've talked a fair bit about monitoring Linux memory,  and what it means. But this case was a little different.

Your partial failures may be complete failures to your customers.

Can LogicMonitor, a developer of datacenter server monitoring, where we monitor everything in all sorts of ways, have an undetected customer affecting issue?  Yes. We just had an issue that was reported by some trial customers, before our techops team was aware of it. Even worse, after techops thought they had addressed the issue, the customers were still affected. How?

4 Massive Mistakes Companies Make Handling Outages

No one likes to talk about outages. They’re horrible to experience as an employee and they take a heavy toll in customer confidence and future revenue. But they do happen. Even publicly traded tech powerhouses, such as eBay and Microsoft, who have more technical resources than you’ll ever have, fall prey to outages. And when they do, they are closed for business, much to the chagrin of their shareholders and executive teams.

Cedexis Empowers DevOps With Automation Technologies

Deploying their technology strictly in a cloud environment, Cedexis’ TechOps team follows a simple rule: “Never touch hardware.” Cedexis manages its dynamic host deployments globally across a range of managed hosting and cloud providers. To ensure uniformity across datacenters, Cedexis configures new machines identically via configuration automation tools in order to prepare each with a “blueprint” to take the Cedexis code.

August 2014: LogicMonitor’s Favorites from Around the Web

Too busy to keep up with what’s happening on the Web? Never fear. Starting this month, LogicMonitor will begin posting our favorite tech articles, blog posts, ebooks, videos, podcasts, cat pictures and more every month.

Why You're Monitoring Solaris Virtual Memory Wrong

In parts I and II, we've talked about what virtual memory is, and how to monitor virtual memory on Linux. Why is Solaris any different? Two reasons: (1) it virtualizes the swap space, and includes unused parts of physical memory as swap space, and (2) it maintains the distinction between paging and swapping.

Alerts around the Campfire

As we've often preached – too many alerts are just as bad as missing alerts. You don't want your team to become inured to alerts, so they don't take action on those indicating outages.

Keys to Monitoring Solid State Drives (SSDs)

In recent years, Solid-State Drives or SSDs have become a standard part of data center architecture. They handle more simultaneous read/write operations than traditional disks and use a fraction of the power.

The Right Way to Monitor Virtual Memory on Linux

Now I'll talk about how to monitor virtual memory, on Linux (where it's easy) and, next time, on Solaris (where most people and systems do it incorrectly.)

What is virtual memory, anyway?

I was going to write about the differences between monitoring virtual memory on Linux and Solaris, but figured it would be beneficial to start with some fundamentals about what virtual memory is, and the differences between Solaris and Linux.

What does Heartbleed say about SaaS?

As previously noted, LogicMonitor was fortunate that none of its infrastructure or services were vulnerable to the Heartbleed vulnerability.  But the fact that many sites with excellent security were affected may lead some to question the wisdom of putting business information in the hands of a SaaS provider, no matter how secure, given that the services will necessarily be provided over the Internet.

Duplicate Alert Suppression (hooray!)

At LogicMonitor, our monitoring philosophy is to provide customers with actionable intelligence. Great examples of actionable intelligence are the alerts we send you about performance issues in your IT infrastructure.

You think you got geek cred? See if you remember these…

Apparently some LogicMonitor people (and it wasn't just the guys) decided to strut their geek cred in one of our internal chat rooms this afternoon.  The names have been removed to protect the geeky.

Tracking Down Failed TCP Connections and RST Packets

While LogicMonitor is great at identifying issues that need attention, sometimes figuring out what exactly the solution is can be a bit harder, especially for network issues.

Why name resolution for ping may disagree with DNS

Most people know their hosts via DNS names (e.g. server1.lax.company.com) rather than IP addresses (192.168.3.45), and so enter them into their monitoring systems as DNS names.

How The High-Tech Cow applies to your IT department

While walking our dogs, I often catch up on podcasts. On Planet Money episode number 352 – The High-Tech Cow, they lay out 4 rules for the success of a business in this constantly changing economy.  These rules are:

Observations from Gartner Datacenter conference

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde – there is only one thing worse than having no monitoring. And that is having monitoring. Or at least that can be the case when you have too many monitoring systems.

The dangers of dead code in infrastructure and monitoring

It is relatively well understood in development that dead code (code that is no longer in use, due to refactoring, or changes in features or algorithms) should be removed from the code base.

LogicMonitor is proud to be new sponsor of Santa Barbara&'s Passport Program

During the week of December 9th, 2013, the Passport to Santa Barbara will be distributed to 18,500 K-6 public school students in Santa Barbara County. The Passport program provides a passport booklet to children in grades K-6 who, with one adult, are given free admission to Santa Barbara Educator's Roundtable (SBERT) member institutions, where children participate in specially-designed educational activities found outside of the classroom within the community and receive a stamp in their Passport.

Why relying on SNMP traps is a bad idea

One question we sometimes get is why LogicMonitor relies so little on SNMP traps. When we are writing the monitoring for a new device, we look at the traps in the MIB for the device to see the things the vendor thinks are important to notify about – but we will try to determine the state of the device by polling for those things, not relying on the traps. "Why not rely on traps?" you may ask. Good question.

Why performance monitoring is a key addition to the MSP toolset

At IT Nation this week I am reminded that customers are a company's best salespeople (no offense, Sales teams).

Twilio and LogicMonitor: Better Together!

LogicMonitor is excited to announce that you can now monitor your Twilio voice and messaging traffic using LogicMonitor – with all the automation and ease of use that LogicMonitor brings to the rest of your infrastructure.

Saving a file when you forgot to open it as root

OK, this is not really related to monitoring, but Brandon Metcalf, one of our diligent TechOps superstars, posted this on our internal blog, and  I thought it was super handy, so I thought I'd share…

Discovery Filters (or how to manage edge switches effectively across your enterprise)

When I started LogicMonitor, I knew nothing about Product Management. (Yes, yes…  but I know more than I used to.) I made all sorts of mistakes, thinking I was the target customer. (Surprise! I wasn't). I added powerful features, that were hard to use, but I thought they were essential and people will Read the Fine Manual. (Surprise! Many don't.)

Monitoring NTP. And why it matters…

Recently a customer got in touch, querying why LogicMonitor had started generating NTP alerts on parts of his estate, when his NTP setup had been configured and working correctly for some time previously.

The Finance view on SaaS growth and Zuora's Subscribed conference

I had the fun & privilege to sit on a panel moderated by Zuora's CFO, Tyler Sloat.  I enjoy this continuous exposure to the Zuora Exec team, their thinking, customers and ecosystem.

Predicting how Linux disk performance scales with load

Last week I was traveling to and from our Austin office – which means a fair amount of time for reading. Amongst other books, I read "The Principles of Product Development Flow", Reinertsen, Donald G. The most interesting part of this book (to me) was the chapters on queueing theory.

6 Important ideas to manage your host groups

Last week we posted about best practice monitoring for MSP/CSPs (cloud service providers). This week's entry is a back-to-basics best practice about "managing host groups" — important for MSP/CSPs wanting performance monitoring to fit their preferred way of managing their business.

Seven Best practices for MSP monitoring

Here at LogicMonitor we serve hundreds of managed service providers with our cloud-based performance monitoring platform. "MSPs" range from true blue service providers, to Cisco VARs, to Cloud Providers and System Integrators.

Monitoring our employees' happiness.

5 reasons I love working at LM… 1. The title/position you have does not nearly reflect the million different things you end up working on. In 12 months I’ve done everything from employee onboarding, coordinating company events, organizing trade show logistics, moving an entire office to a new building, and becoming an excel wiz to create financial/business performance reports.

The New Yorker guide to DevOps and Sales Management

This weekend I was catching up on some New Yorker issues, when an article by one of my favorite New Yorker authors, Atul Gawande, struck me as illuminating so much about tech companies and DevOps.

The support engineer's favorite feature: custom, flexible graphs

LogicMonitor is a great tool, and everyday as I chat with different clients, everyone has a different use case; certain clients may use monthly reports to keep track of trends while others stay on top of database status, or create a view that allows one to finely tune their application's performance.

1 Billion metrics monitored a day!

Looking for some Friday fun, we decided to run a quick analysis of the number of metrics we monitor (geeky!) We found that we are monitoring 1 billion metrics a day from 13 million streams of data! That’s about 11,600 metrics per second that we're analyzing, sorting and presenting to our customers.  Data galore.

Lean Monitoring

This week I've been off visiting customers in Atlanta – which means a lot of time on planes and in airports (especially today, when my flight was cancelled so I have a 6 hour delay…) So that means a lot of reading.  One book I read on this trip was UX for Lean Startups, by Laura Klein.

The difference between derive and counter datapoints

Both counters and derives are used to convert samples of raw data into a rate per second.  If data is sampled at time 1 with value A, and time 2 with value B, both will store a datapoint whose value is (B – A) / (time 2 – time 1).

A new best practice in dealing with alerts.

Eleanor Roosevelt is reputed to have said "Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself." In that spirit, we're sharing a mistake we made so that you may learn.

Why you need monitoring even when you've had no outages

As sometimes happens, a tech guy at a company tried LogicMonitor, loved it, and then met some resistance from management. In this case, the pushback was "We haven't had any outages. Why do we need monitoring?"

Extend net-snmp: How to teach an old SNMPd new tricks

One of our long time customers, Appfolio, who makes great SaaS property management software, asked how they could use LogicMonitor to monitor the size of some files across their fleet of Linux servers.

Host name schemes: what's in a name really does matter

Last night, our server monitoring sent me a text alert about the CPU load of a server in our infrastructure I had never seen before. (I'm not normally on the NOC escalation – but of the usual NOC team, one guy is taking advantage of our unlimited vacation policy to recharge in Europe, and two others were travelling en route to Boston to speak at AnsibleFest.)  So I got woken up; saw the errant CPU; checked the server briefly via LogicMonitor on my phone; replied to the text with "SDT 6" to put this alert into Scheduled Downtime for 6 hours, and went back to sleep with the CPU still running over 90%.

My NetApp is not the problem! A tale of how monitoring the entire stack makes it easier to save the day.

Have you ever been the guy in charge of storage and the dev guy and database guy come over to your desk waaaaay too early in the morning before you’ve had your caffeine and start telling you that the storage is too slow and you need to do something about it? I have. In my opinion it’s even worse when the Virtualization guy comes over and makes similar accusations, but that’s another story.

Silly things developers do when instrumenting their code

Developers are sometimes too helpful when they instrument their systems.  For example, when asked to add a metric that will report the response time of a request – there are several ways that it can be done.

If a software release improves performance, and no one is there to measure it – do I still get a raise?

One thing we frequently say is that you need to be monitoring all sorts of metrics when you do software releases, so you can tell if things degrade, and thus head off performance issues.

What the heck is CPU load on a Linux machine and why do I care?

Seriously, I said that to myself.  In all reality I had a basic understanding of the concept of CPU load on a Linux server, but there were a few things I learned recently and I figured I’d share with the world.

A Tale of Two Metrics: Windows CPU or vCenter VM CPU

A not uncommon question from our customers, or even from our own support people, is "Why does monitoring a Windows system running on VMware report different CPU data than monitoring the virtual machine from the ESXi host? The ESX monitoring must be wrong!"

Simple ways to be confident in automated server and application deployments.

Sample SAT question: xUnit is to Continuous Integration as what is to automated server deployments? We've been going through lots of growth here at LogicMonitor. Part of growth means firing up new servers to deal with more customers, but we also have been adding a variety of new services: proxies that allow our customers to route around Internet issues that BGP doesn't catch; servers that test performance and reachability of customers sites from various locations, and so on.

Cisco's Meraki purchase indicates value of Cloud Managed approach to AP configuration and monitoring

‘Meraki’ may not be the best known name in networking, but their technology is going to touch you soon if it hasn’t already.  Meraki was just acquired by Cisco in November for a cool $1.2 billion to incorporate into their new Cloud Networking Group.

Is an RMM tool the only thing MSPs need for monitoring?

If you’re an MSP providing IT services for desktop environments where basic up/down server monitoring will do, an RMM tool is more than adequate. But for MSPs offering fixed-fee monthly service packages, or cloud services, important advantages can be gained by complementing an RMM tool with an advanced performance monitoring solution.

5 ways for MSPs to build stickier client relationships

Until very recently I was your client: the VP of Marketing for a business consulting firm where I doubled as the in-house IT. It was my job to bring on MSPs who could solve the bigger problems within our infrastructure.

SaaS Data Center Monitoring now a Citizen of the ConnectWise IT Nation

On my flight out to the ConnectWise IT Nation event, I thumbed through the Wall Street Journal old school style and ran across an ad for the WSJ Wine Store claiming you can save $100 on a special Thanksgiving pinot.

Monitoring as SaaS Advantage #46 – always at best practices

One of the great things about being a customer of a SaaS delivered monitoring service like LogicMonitor is that they can get best practices in monitoring of all sorts of technologies without having to have an expert in that technology on staff. A recent example when LogicMonitor updated some of the CPU datapoints used for VMware monitoring.

Building Your Own Network Monitoring Solution? Why Not Change Your Own Oil, Too?

My grandpa loved cars. He worked on them with a level of passion most people reserve for things like expensive red wines and members of the opposite sex. He didn’t believe in outsourcing the care and maintenance of his wheels.

Discovering write latency problems with ESX datastores

Our digs here at LogicMonitor are cozy. Being adjacent to sales, I get to hear our sales engineers work with new customers, and it’s not uncommon that a new customer gets a rude awakening when they first install LogicMonitor. Immediately, LogicMonitor starts showing warnings and alerts.  ”Can this be right or is this a monitoring error?!”,  they ask. Delicately, our engineer will respond, “I don’t think that’s a monitoring error. It looks like you have a problem there.”

Will Hyper-V be Microsoft’s Xbox of the Enterprise Virtualization Space?

While most may not see Microsoft as a ‘disruptive innovator’ anymore, they seem to be claiming exactly that role in the enterprise hypervisor space, just as they did in gaming with the Xbox. As noted in "VMware, the bell tolls for thee, and Microsoft is ringing it", Hyper-V appears to be becoming a legitimate competitor to VMware's dominant ESXi product.

What's with the different SNMP versions? v1, v2c, v3?

We use snmp a lot, and know it well. However, not everyone of our customers has spent years working with OIDs in ASN.1, MIBs, Access types, and so on – and nor should they. (As we like to say, "Your monitoring solution should make your life easier, not harder.") So one question we often get is the difference between the different SNMP versions.

Cisco switch temperature problems solved by newbie

As the new hire here at LogicMonitor brought in to support the operations of the organization, I had two immediate tasks: Learn how LogicMonitor's SaaS-based monitoring works to monitor our customer's servers, and at the same time, learn our own infrastructure.

In (Dev)Ops, a release is only as good as its worst effect

You released new code with all sorts of new features and improvements. Yay! Now, after the obvious things like "Does it actually work in production", this is also the time to assess: did it impact my infrastructure performance (and thus my scalability, and thus my scaling costs) in any way.

LogicMonitor and RightScale Integration

The cloud, as seen by the end user, is a wondrous tool full of seamless functionality and performance limited only by their internet connection. The truth is, the "water particles" which make up these clouds are machines.  And machines fail. Through the use of cloud providers like Amazon's EC2, Rackspace and others, we get to add a layer of abstraction between the machines and ourselves and share in the wonder of end users.

Alerts – making good datacenters better

A company started a trial yesterday, added a bunch of windows hosts, and immediately got warnings triggered that their hosts were "receiving 42 datagrams per second destined to non-listening ports…Check if all services are up and running."

Our Philosophy on Monitoring

Your m onitoring solution should make your life easier, not harder. Monitoring should not have to be a full time job. Data collection, alerting, trending and reporting should all be integrated.

When Lightning Strikes Your Cloud, Good Monitoring Means Great Disaster Recovery

Kablooee!  That was the sound I (and many others) heard coming from one of Amazon Web Services (aka, the "cloud") availability zones in Northern Virginia on June 30th

The most important monitoring report that you are not using

Even with a great monitoring system, it can be hard sometimes to keep the noise down. (Indeed, the more powerful the monitoring, the more difficult this can be, as more data is collected and tested, automatically.) And keeping noise down in monitoring is vital, as you do not want staff to start ignoring alerts – which they will if there are too many meaningless alerts.

How To Make an Engineer Smarter

It’s 6 AM.  Bob, an entry-level IT engineer walks into a cold, dark, lonely building – flips on the lights, fires up the coffee pot, and boots up.  Depending on what he’s about to see on his computer screen, he knows the fate of the free world could rest in his soft, trembling, sun-starved hands.

What, Free Cisco?! (The real value of service)

In the modern world of consumerism, there are so many choices, noises and deals, it’s sometimes hard to calculate the real value of the products and services we purchase. At LogicMonitor, we try to make it obvious. I don't like to call our solution a "product" because for some reason it makes me think of, "Sorry pal, you purchased this as is. I can't help you." That’s not how we roll.

Measuring performance improvements in CentOS 6.2

Recently, we updated some servers from CentOS 5.6 to CentOS 6.2.  Of course, we carefully monitored the performance of the hosts, so we can make a comparison about the performance. The one big change we applied with the application of Cent OS 6 was switching from ext3 to ext4 (although as yet without TRIM enabled.)

What I didn't find at DevOps Days…

Sometimes the truth hurts.  Well the truth is what we didn’t find at DevOps Days was a throng of adoring fans waiting to throw their undergarments at us. Come to think of it, that would be kind of gross anyway, especially with the DevOps crowd…no disrespect.

Not all monitoring sucks

There's some interesting discussion around "Monitoring Sucks", and has been for a while. (Go check the twitter hashtag #monitoringsucks).  This is not a new opinion – the fact that I thought monitoring sucks is why I started LogicMonitor.

The value of IPMI monitoring

Amongst its many monitoring methods, LogicMonitor supports IPMI.  Many people aren't aware of IPMI, and don't think  it's necessary. And while I'm certainly an advocate of avoiding unnecessary complexity in a data center, sometimes it is good to wear both a belt and suspenders.

Visualizing NetApp disk performance and latency

If you have decent NetApp monitoring, you should of course be monitoring the thing that matters  – and (for most applications) that is the latency of requests on a volume (or LUN.)

Avoiding a network outage with Cisco monitoring

Last night our ops team (of which I am a member) got paged about the CPU load on a Cisco 3560 switch in a new datacenter, late at night.  My initial reaction was "We don't need this alert escalated to pagers or phones- 3560's switch and route in hardware, so CPU load doesn't matter."  Once I'd woken up a bit more, the corollary – that there is no possible way that this switch should be at a CPU level to trigger an error alert – occurred to me.

Agile Monitoring Support

We recently had a customer come into trial looking around for a new monitoring solution.  This is always good for us.  We love the takeaway.  (Customers defecting from other monitoring systems to us.) As in most takeaway situations this customer had specific needs.  Now there are the obvious ones in which LogicMonitor easily fits the bill such as alerting, dashboards, performance monitoring, etc

Metrics for DevOps

At LogicMonitor we take turns learning from each other in informal sessions.  One week it may be  developers talking about MySql and NoSQL; or marketing guys talk about lead generation and Adwords, etc.  This time we'd arrived on the topic of programming languages, and how there is a trade off: between code speed and efficiency when using assembler or C at the expense of programmer efficiency; compared with much better programmer productivity at the expense of code efficiency when using languages with higher levels of abstraction, like Ruby on Rails or Python/Django.

How to minimize the impacts of the next Amazon reboot… or of your own datacenter failure

So as everyone knows, Amazon rebooted virtually all EC2 instances in December.  They emailed people to notify them, but not everyone read the emails, leading to Amazon performing the reboots on their own schedule, with the customers unaware. For some SaaS companies, this resulted in many hours of downtime. For others, there was a short impact. What was the difference?

Eating our own Tomcat Monitoring dogfood

We received some alerts tonight that one Tomcat server was using about 95% of its configured thread maximum. The Tomcat process on http-443  on prod4 now has 96.2 % of the max configured threads in the busy state. These were SMS alerts, as that was close enough to exhausting the available threads to warrant waking someone up if needed.

Right sizing infrastructure for VMWare migrations

I was invited to talk to an MSP peer group the other week, and during the presentation, one of the group members who was a LogicMonitor customer described a way they use LogicMonitor to solve a previously hard-to-solve VMWare operational issue.

Use LogicMonitor, save the world.

My wife was reading the science journal of UCSB (where she did her Masters degree) and pointed out an article referring to the fact that "a typical server consumes as much energy in a year as an SUV". She then asked how many servers we have….

Monitoring the right things

I've talked about this before, but I just read an article about why application performance monitoring is so screwed up, and coincidentally had just talked about it in a lecture I gave to a graduate class at UCSB on scalable computing, so figured it's worth a mention.

Powershell, snap ins and 32 bit apps

A more technical article today. In adding some more Exchange Monitoring we ran into some issues, and solutions, that may help others.  Some things in recent Exchange versions can only be monitored by Powershell. (Perfmon, WMI, Powershell, all needed for different versions of Exchange…. I wish they'd make up their mind…)

Netapp Monitoring – too much of a good thing?

One way LogicMonitor is different from other NetApp monitoring systems (other than being hosted monitoring, and being able to monitor the complete array of systems found in a datacenter – from AC units, through virtualization, OS's to applications like MongoDB) is that we default to "monitoring" on".

Is Linux disk utilization on your monitoring dashboard?

Recently we rolled out a new release of LogicMonitor. Among the many improvements and fixes that users saw, there were also some backend changes to the Linux systems that store monitoring data. The rollout went smooth, no alerts were triggered – but it was pretty easy to see that something had changed:

The best network monitoring is not on your network

There was a good article on techtarget this week about the hesitancy of IT pros to adopt SaaS. The main gist of the article was that SaaS is coming, even into the IT space. Which we here at LogicMonitor heartily agree with. We've seen much greater acceptance to SaaS as a delivery mechanism for a monitoring service over the last few years.

Linux Monitoring, Net SNMP and terabyte file systems

A customer contacted us this week and said "Hey, one of my filesystems that was being monitored by LogicMonitor disappeared after I grew it."  Turns out the filesystem in question was now a bit over 2 terabytes. Some poking around showed that the file system was being filtered out of discovery, as net-snmp was reporting a size for the file system (via 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.5, hrStorageSize) of -1982127408. Yes, that's a negative value.

MySQL Monitoring – Don't fire the DBA just yet

Some people (sometimes even us) have been known to refer to LogicMonitor as a "sysadmin in a box".  This is not quite true – and not just because we're a SaaS service, so there is no box.  But while LogicMonitor can certainly let you put off hiring a sysadmin, or let your sysadmin manage vastly more systems than other monitoring systems, by automating the monitoring and providing pre-defined best practices alerts – someone still has to interpret those alerts, and figure out the best way to deal with them.

Network Monitoring .. Not all automation is good

LogicMonitor is, as far as I know, the most automated network monitoring system out there.  But there is one area we don't provide much in the way of automation, that we are often asked about – automated scripts in response to alerts.  There are few reasons why not, which flow from our experience running critical production datacenters:

Troubleshooting server performance and application monitoring – a real example.

We got a question internally about why one of our demo servers was slow, and how to use LogicMonitor to help identify the issue.  The person asking comes from a VoIP, networking and Windows background, not Linux, so his questions reflect that of the less-experienced sys admin (in this case). I thought it interesting that he documented his thought processes, and I'll intersperse my interpretation of the same data, and some thoughts on why LogicMonitor alerts as it does…

MySQL monitoring, SSDs and failover

As those customers that are (normally) housed out of our Boston datacenter know, we had to exercise a failover from East Coast to West Coast datacenter. (Why? Short version – a subcontractor of the colocation provider moved the wrong rack of servers.)

EqualLogic monitoring, Lefthand monitoring, and more

Just mentioning it here as many people seem not read release notes. 🙂 LogicMonitor now supports comprehensive Dell EqualLogic monitoring, HP Lefthand monitoring (or P4000 monitoring, if you prefer), and Microsoft Cluster monitoring.

LogicMonitor and MSP Monitoring

At LogicMonitor, we know datacenter monitoring.  We know it because we've lived it – I've been that guy responsible for making sure that a 24 x 7 x 365 web service was up.  Most of our technical staff also came from a SaaS and web ops background (with lots of work in corporate IT worlds, too).

How not to do Cisco, VMware and NetApp monitoring

Under the Imagine Virtually Anything alliance, Cisco, NetApp and VMWare have teamed up to deliver a shared virtualized server/network/storage infrastructure that can securely host multiple "tenants."  This seems like A Good Thing, for all the usual reasons virtualization is good (lower costs, improved energy/space efficiency, faster deployments, etc).

Preventative SQL Server Monitoring

No matter the kind of database – Oracle, SQL server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc – there are distinct kinds of monitoring for the DBA.  There is the monitoring done to make sure everything is healthy and performing well, that allows you to plan for growth, allocate resources, and be assured things are working as they should.

Memcached for the Masses

Assuming you're not Facebook, you probably don't have large development teams to tweak how your application interacts with memcached, you may still want to deploy it to help your site's scalability. But if you practice safe operations, you will never put anything into production without monitoring.  Particularly nothing that production depends on.

Monitoring NetApp MultiStore

One of the many great things about working at LogicMonitor is that we get to use our product to solve business needs. Personally, I like having someone asks us "I need to monitor X", and be able to deliver custom monitors for X, within a few hours.

Linux Monitoring is dead.

By which I mean that, unless you are a kernel developer or some other individual with esoteric purposes, having Linux up and running is not the point of your servers.  Your servers are there to DO something, whether that's to serve web pages, answer database requests, or provide the best hosted monitoring service.

3 Simple steps to Apache Monitoring

If you're reading this, you know you should be monitoring your Apache web servers. (You want to know if they are approaching limits of configured server workers; you want to know how many requests you are serving; you want to ensure availability, etc).  Fortunately, enabling Apache monitoring is quite simple.

Is your network monitoring software deadly?

So maybe the consequences of an outage in your infrastructure will not be as calamitous as the BP oil spill in the Gulf, but the effect on your enterprise may feel like it.  Which is why we could all use B.P. as a case study in how not to treat your monitoring.

Processes for Data Center Monitoring

Even with the best datacenter monitoring system in place, whether an implementation succeeds depends largely on the processes adopted around monitoring.

LogicMonitor's Hierarchy of data center Monitoring

So we sometimes get asked about our tagline, Monitoring that Matters. Doesn't all monitoring matter?  Well, yes it does.  But to badly paraphrase George Orwell, all monitoring matters, but some monitorings are more mattering than others.

Are free monitoring tools like Nagios really free?

IT people by nature are supposed to be gurus. They’re supposed to be able to build things from scratch. This expectation certainly applies to data center monitoring, where a common practice is to rely on open source monitoring tools such as Nagios.

Is SaaS Security the best solution for your business?

Having worked in SaaS companies for a long time (going back to when they were called ASPs), I've heard a lot of companies not adopt SaaS solutions due to "security concerns".  This attitude has generated a quite a few blog posts recently, so thought I'd add my 2 cents.

How Application monitoring saves you money

We here at LogicMonitor use our own service to monitor the various parts of our infrastructure, and doing so demonstrates the financial value that LogicMonitor brings.

Complexity doesn't belong in your datacenter

When designing infrastructure architecture, there is usually a choice between complexity and fault tolerance.  It's not just an inverse relationship, however. It's a curve. You want the minimal complexity possible to achieve your availability goals. And you may even want to reduce your availability goals to reduce your complexity (which will end up increasing your availability.)

Automation of Datacenter Monitoring

Denise Dubie wrote a recent piece in CIO magazine about "5 Must-have IT Management Technologies for 2010", in which she identifies one of the must-haves as IT process automation. She quotes Jim Frey, research director at EMA: "On the monitoring side, automation will be able to keep up with the pace of virtual environments and recognize when changes happen in ways a human operator simply could not."

The many faces of JMX monitoring

We like monitoring. We like Java. Not to slight other languages – we like Ruby, perl, php, .NET and other platforms, too, and like to monitor them, also.

Active/Active or N+1?

If your infrastructure has to be up at all times (or as much as possible), how to best achieve that?  In an Active/Active configuration, where all parts of the infrastructure are used all the time, or in an N+1 configuration, where there are idle resources waiting to take over in the event of a failure?

When an OID is not an OID

It's still surprising to me that hardware and software manufacturers do not seem to value any kind of consistency in their management interfaces.  Or maybe it's intentional, to complicate monitoring and management of their systems to encourage the purchase of the vendors own monitoring systems

Simple ways to start addressing DataCenter power needs

Anyone that run's IT infrastructure is aware that power consumption is one of the biggest costs in datacenter provisioning and ongoing expenses.  If they are not, they will soon become aware, as energy costs are predicted to increase in the future, and are the fastest rising cost in the datacenter.

Why CPU load should not (usually) be a critical alert.

One question that often arises in monitoring is how to define alert levels and escalations, and what level to set various alerts at – Critical, Error or Warning.

Top I.T./Datacenter Monitoring Mistakes, Part 4 in a series.

This is often a corollary to the first point, not relying on manual processes.  The number of monitoring systems you have in place should approach 1.  You do not want one system to monitor windows servers; another for linux, another for MySQL, another for storage.

Top I.T./Datacenter Monitoring Mistakes, Part 3 in a series.

Alert overload This is one of the most dangerous conditions.  If you have too many noisy alerts, that go off too frequently, people will tune them out – then when you get real, service impacting alerts, they will be tuned out, too.  I've seen critical production service outage alerts be put into scheduled downtime for 8 hours, as the admin assumed it was "another false alert". How to prevent this?

Top I.T./Datacenter Monitoring Mistakes, Part 2 in a series.

Even with good monitoring practices in place, outages will occur.  Best practices dictate that the issue not be considered resolved until monitoring is in place to detect the root cause, or provide earlier warning.

Top I.T./Datacenter Monitoring Mistakes, Part 1 in a series.

Everyone knows they need monitoring to ensure their site uptime and keep their business humming.  Yet many sites still suffer from outages that are first reported by their customers.  Here at LogicMonitor, we have lots of experience with monitoring systems of all kinds, and these are some of the most common mistakes we have seen, and how to address them – so that you can know about issues before they affect your business: