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.

In Part II of our Year in Review series, we will examine the huge strides we’ve made to become the industry leader in automation and extensibility.

Automated Monitoring

Data may be king at LogicMonitor, but we love automation just as much. The sheer number of components and services that support one’s infrastructure and applications is staggering: hundreds or thousands of devices containing millions of potential metrics. Adding this many devices to LogicMonitor on an ad hoc basis would be a mind-numbing feat. Fortunately, LogicMonitor does this work for you with Netscan!

Netscan periodically searches your environment for new devices based on IP range, AWS tags, or a custom script. This minimizes the hassle of manually adding or removing devices each time your infrastructure changes—which, for many organizations, can be by the hour. Realizing the power that comes with NetScan, we used 2016 to revamp it with far-reaching functionality. Some of these improvements include:

• • Filtering to include or exclude devices based on device properties, i.e. creating a filter by which Windows servers with ‘prod’ in the name are always added into monitoring via your Production Servers group, or auto excluding any laptop IPs. This feature has all but eliminated the need to comb through discovered devices to ensure you want them to be monitored!
  • Auto-applying credentials to all devices discovered by a Netscan Policy to ensure they are properly added/monitored.
  • The ability to dictate whether devices are named based on IP, system DNS, system name, or text (ie. you using tokens to name a device pod01-##IP##)
  • Discovering AWS EC2 devices based on tags, and automatically storing and updating AWS tags as properties.

Since IT environments are in constant flux, we highly recommend setting up Netscan Policies. A regularly scheduled scan will ensure that you never experience a gap in performance monitoring as new devices are added. Whether it is a single office router or an entire server rack, Netscan has you covered.

Extensibility and Compatibility

While monitoring may be the center of our  world at LogicMonitor, we recognize that enterprises use a sophisticated array of IT management solutions. We believe no application should live in isolation, so we build LogicMonitor to work with the rest of your systems:

• We have published Ansible modules that allow you to automate your monitoring processes. These are exceptionally useful for managing which Collectors and devices are monitored, scheduling downtime, retrieving device information for Ansible playbooks, as well as myriad other configurations.

• For those handling Ops orchestration with Puppet, we released a new Puppet-certified module that is fully compatible with Puppet 4 and utilizes our REST API. This module lets you harmonize the two applications, allowing Puppet to manage the provisioning and configuration of your LogicMonitor account. Now, Puppet can be your single source of truth for device and property information.

• Speaking of our REST API, we have fully deployed V1 which offers added authentication measures, a more consistent syntax, and a far greater range of functionality than our now-deprecated RPC API. With such a dynamic resource, you can build your own integrations, from Chef to Autotask CMDB updates, with ease.
  

Bidirectional Workflow Integrations

Finally, as in the workplace, so in performance monitoring: communication is key. In this spirit, we created several two-way integrations to ensure your workflow or ticketing system has an up-to-date view of your latest metrics from LogicMonitor. Among the new additions to our growing roster of workflow integrations are: ServiceNow, ConnectWise, AutoTask, PagerDuty, as well as custom HTTP integrations. All of these are built directly into our platform in order to support the storage of their external ticket IDs, update tickets in external systems based on alert status, and acknowledge escalations initiated from other applications.

Do not fret if your workflow tool isn’t listed. The LogicMonitor platform is designed to be highly configurable and extensible, so there are boundless integrations that can be developed. In fact, in a previous blog post, we covered our own custom Jira integration in depth. With a little thought, these custom integrations can be extended to cut a few steps (and hopefully a few man hours) from your daily workflows.

By focusing on automation and extensibility, we want the LogicMonitor platform to promote the usefulness of your other applications (and vice versa), not just live alongside them, and scale to fit your growing business. As always, we love to hear from our customers about how they have benefitted from our product’s developments. We are also continuously looking for new ways to be helpful, so be sure to let us know if you are dying to see a new integration or form of automation.