Federal agencies need observability that doesn’t create new compliance problems. Today, that’s possible.

LogicMonitor Envision is now FedRAMP Moderate Authorized with a formal Authorization to Operate (ATO). That means unified, AI-powered visibility across your hybrid infrastructure—on-prem, AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, and edge—without starting your security review from scratch.

For agencies using the FedRAMP Marketplace, our security package is available as an authorized service for reuse, supporting your own ATO process. This milestone reflects a rigorous, standardized review of our security and risk management practices, verified against federal requirements.

Why This Matters Now: Meeting Today’s Federal IT Challenges

Government IT teams are under pressure from every direction. Systems are more complex, policy demands are tighter, and the risk of downtime or compromise keeps growing. Modernization helps, but it’s about upgrading infrastructure and gaining visibility into everything that supports secure, reliable government services. If you can’t see it, you can’t protect it or prove it’s working as intended.

The Reality: Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Complexity Is the New Normal

Infrastructure doesn’t live in one place anymore. It spans on-prem data centers, AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, and edge deployments. More surfaces create more blind spots. Legacy tools weren’t built for this; they slow down response and turn minor missteps into complex problems. Modern observability closes those gaps with a single, service-aware view of metrics, logs, traces, and events, so you spot issues sooner and fix them faster.

The Mandate: Alignment with Federal Priorities

Federal guidance like OMB M-22-09 and NIST SP 800-207 raises the bar on verification. Agencies are expected to enforce Zero Trust in production, continuously monitor controls, and stay audit-ready. That demands shared context. When security, operations, and compliance teams share the same telemetry and timelines, they can validate policies, correlate incidents, and demonstrate control effectiveness. Modern observability doesn’t just watch systems. It proves Zero Trust works as designed.

The Shift: FedRAMP Is Modernizing Too

FedRAMP is moving toward faster, more consistent authorizations with a bigger focus on continuous monitoring, real-time reporting, and vulnerability management. Programs like FedRAMP 20x are changing how ATOs are granted and how they’re sustained. The old one-time assessment model is over. Agencies now need platforms that support ongoing oversight, rapid remediation, and reusable ATO workflows. Observability should make continuous ATO easier, not harder.

What FedRAMP Authorization Means for Federal Agencies

Using a platform that’s already FedRAMP Moderate Authorized means less risk, faster approvals, and more time focused on mission delivery instead of paperwork.

• Trust, standardized. FedRAMP is the federal standard for cloud security, based on NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5. Moderate-level authorization covers systems handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and requires continuous monitoring, monthly reporting, and hundreds of controls. LogicMonitor runs its platform to this standard every day.

• Reuse accelerates your timeline. Once a platform is FedRAMP Authorized, any agency can request and reuse its security package to issue its own ATO. Less time on paperwork, fewer custom reviews, faster approvals.

• Alignment with policy momentum. FedRAMP’s 20x initiative and guidance like OMB M-24-15 are accelerating authorization for cloud tools, especially at the Moderate level. Choosing a platform that’s already aligned helps you move faster and stay ahead of changing requirements.

Why LogicMonitor for Federal IT

While mandates and modernization drive the urgency, the platform you choose defines your pace. LM Envision gives federal teams what they actually need: a security-first foundation, full hybrid IT visibility, and built-in platform intelligence—all tailored to the outcomes that matter most to you.

For CIOs and CISOs

Leaders like CIOs and CISOs need confidence in compliance, control, and outcomes.

Security posture you can defend

LM Envision is FedRAMP Moderate Authorized with an active ATO, validating its security controls, operational processes, and continuous monitoring. Controls align to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5. Agencies don’t have to start from scratch—LogicMonitor’s posture is already proven, which helps accelerate authorizations and reduce risk upfront.

The platform comes with reusable security documentation packages that reduce duplication across teams and speed up ATOs. It’s fully deployable in GovCloud, with built-in support for role-based access control (RBAC) and audit trails that create defensible compliance baselines.

Unified visibility across your entire estate

Your security and compliance posture extends consistently across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments—including AWS GovCloud and Azure Government. This eliminates gaps that typically emerge when managing separate tools for different environments. Shared accountability is built into the platform’s RBAC model, so teams can collaborate without compromising security boundaries.

Intelligence that reduces risk before it escalates

Risk visibility comes from the platform’s built-in intelligence. Dynamic Thresholds adapt to seasonality and workload patterns, reducing false positives that create alert fatigue. Anomaly Detection learns normal behavior across key signals, flagging unusual activity—whether performance degradation or potential security anomalies—before it becomes an incident.

Forecasting and prediction capabilities project capacity and performance trends. You can prevent saturation and plan changes with confidence while maintaining continuous monitoring readiness.

Governance that connects to mission outcomes

Executive dashboards connect infrastructure health to governance, cost, and mission outcomes. ConMon-ready evidence collection makes reporting lighter and audits faster. The result: less time proving compliance, more time delivering mission value.

For IT Operations Teams

ITOps teams want less noise, faster resolution, and fewer tickets bouncing around.

One view, zero blind spots

LM Envision provides a single view across on-prem, cloud, and edge—including AWS GovCloud and Azure Government. No more juggling multiple monitoring tools.

The platform automatically correlates metrics, logs, and events, providing teams with instant context during incidents. You don’t need to switch tools or piece things together. By unifying visibility, LM Envision reduces overhead and closes gaps that slow down response.

Intelligent noise reduction

Platform intelligence dramatically cuts alert noise. Event Correlation and Dependent Alert Mapping group related alerts and highlight the originating fault. On-call sees what matters first instead of drowning in symptom alerts.

Dynamic Thresholds adapt to seasonality and workload patterns, reducing false positives and alert flapping that waste time. Anomaly Detection learns normal behavior across key signals, catching issues that static thresholds would miss.

Smarter triage, faster resolution

Triage gets easier with context-rich incident timelines and topology-aware impact views that show how issues cascade across dependencies. Service-level views connect resource health to services and SLOs, improving handoffs between teams. Everyone gets a shared understanding of what’s actually broken.

Automation that closes the loop

Built-in automation hooks trigger runbooks and tickets via integrations and APIs to remediate common issues quickly. Tickets stop pinballing between teams.

The platform’s RBAC and audit trails give operations teams the access they need without security friction. GovCloud deployment ensures sensitive workloads stay in the right environment.

For Mission Owners

For supporting citizen-facing services, reliability matters more than firefighting. Proactive prevention is everything.

Full visibility from edge to cloud

LM Envision provides unified visibility across the full path of citizen-facing services—whether they run on-prem, in AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, or at the edge. Automatic correlation of metrics, logs, and events means you see the full picture in real time. No gaps, no delays.

Early warning before users notice

Anomaly detection learns what normal looks like for your services, flagging unusual activity before it becomes user-facing downtime. Seasonality-aware Dynamic Thresholds adapt to known patterns like end-of-month traffic spikes or business-hour loads. You get alerted on real problems, not expected variance.

Forecasting and prediction capabilities project capacity and performance trends. Stay ahead of growth and prevent service degradation before it impacts users.

Service health at a glance

Service-level dashboards show real-time health, usage, and performance against SLOs. Mission-critical visibility, instantly accessible.

Real-time correlation links performance dips to underlying changes, events, and dependencies. When something goes wrong, you understand why immediately.

Fast recovery, fewer repeats

Fast root-cause tools—including service maps, resource explorer, and historical comparisons—shorten downtime and help avoid repeat incidents.

The platform’s FedRAMP Moderate Authorization and GovCloud deployment give mission owners confidence that security and compliance aren’t roadblocks to reliability. They’re built in from the start, so you can focus on service delivery rather than audit prep.

Wrapping Up

Federal IT doesn’t have time for tools that slow down modernization or create new compliance gaps. LM Envision delivers FedRAMP-Moderate authorization, full hybrid coverage, and real-time intelligence in one platform—built for the environments you run today and the security standards you’re accountable to tomorrow.

Whitepaper

A Government IT Leader’s Guide to Automation, Observability, and Zero Trust

Government IT is at a breaking point. Aging infrastructure, fragmented visibility, rising cyber threats, and tight budgets are pushing public sector teams to the edge.

Our new whitepaper, A Government IT Leader’s Guide to Automation, Observability, and Zero Trust, is designed for public sector IT leaders ready to move from reactive firefighting to proactive resilience. Inside, you’ll discover how forward-thinking agencies are:

• Overcoming legacy complexity with hybrid observability powered by AI
• Unifying security and compliance through Zero Trust architectures and FedRAMP-ready platforms
• Reducing downtime and operational risk with intelligent automation (agentic AIOps)
• Delivering secure, uninterrupted digital services that maintain public trust

As a government IT leader, you’ll gain:

• A clear view of what’s holding public sector IT back—and how to break through
• Practical strategies to achieve real-time visibility across hybrid environments
• Insights on integrating automation to speed incident response and reduce alert fatigue
• Guidance on implementing Zero Trust while balancing legacy systems and compliance requirements

HYBRID OBSERVABILITY WORKSHOP

Public Sector IT Operations Assessment

Our Public Sector experts will create a custom IT Operations Business Value Assessment that:

• Defines your unique objectives and key business challenges
• Identifies key evaluation metrics
• Creates detailed test cases that mimic real-world scenarios
• Ensures compatibility with existing systems and data integrity
• Implements LogicMonitor in a live, but controlled, environment to track performance in real-time
• Creates detailed documentation for review by senior management

Organisations should prioritise security against cyber threats due to increasing reliance on digital technology. This is where Australia’s Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP), an initiative designed to enhance cyber security best practices, emerges.

IRAP, an initiative of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), aids Australian government agencies in system evaluations for top data security standards. LogicMonitor is pleased to start the IRAP assessment to enhance customer trust and security, aiming for the highest compliance and reinforcing its status as a trusted hybrid observability solution.

The IRAP assessment process

The IRAP assessment is a structured evaluation that LogicMonitor will undertake to enhance security and meet Australian government standards. It includes engaging accredited IRAP assessors to review and validate IT security against government criteria. These assessors will evaluate LogicMonitor’s security, examining data handling processes, cyber security infrastructure integrity, and compliance with policies and protocols. This aims to identify vulnerabilities and ensure effective security practices.

The IRAP assessment will take several months, during which LogicMonitor will ensure organisational excellence and transparency. As part of the process, the LogicMonitor team will  work closely with assessors and adjust security as needed for a successful outcome, reflecting our commitment to security and excellence.

Understanding the need for IRAP assessment

Companies in Australia often undergo IRAP assessments to secure IT systems and protect sensitive data, a vital practice for many reasons:

1. Regulatory compliance: The Australian government mandates IRAP for businesses dealing with government data to ensure compliance with national security policies for public sector engagements.
2. Robust cybersecurity measures: The IRAP framework evaluates and strengthens a business’s cyber security to reduce risks and boost resilience against cyber threats.
3. Demonstrating commitment to data security and privacy: Aligning with IRAP standards demonstrates a strong commitment to data security, enhancing customer and partner trust in the digital ecosystem.

The benefits for customers

The IRAP assessment boosts customer data security by analysing and enhancing security controls across the technology stack to meet rigorous standards. This process addresses vulnerabilities and strengthens controls, creating a fortified environment that protects customer data against evolving cyber threats.

The protection of customer data comes first in this era of digitalisation. With the shift to cloud-based platforms and data-driven decision-making, the need for strong security measures like IRAP is evident. IRAP ensures the secure management of sensitive information, crucial for maintaining confidentiality and operational integrity.

LogicMonitor’s commitment to security and compliance

Navigating the complex regulatory landscape in Australia is crucial for businesses that are serious about long-term sustainability and growth. LogicMonitor meets the required legal and ethical standards and enhances its organisational resilience by adhering to these stringent compliance standards.

This commitment to security and compliance also serves as a key differentiator in the hybrid observability space. LogicMonitor stands out as a forward-thinking leader, prioritising comprehensive security measures. Our comprehensive, multi-layered security strategy is built into all aspects of our cloud-centric products and operations. 

Learn more about how LogicMonitor approaches cyber security.

LogicMonitor: Your partner for secure observability

The initiation of the IRAP assessment underscores LogicMonitor’s dedication to top-tier data security, enhancing client trust. This strategic move strengthens our security posture, reinforces customer confidence, and positions LogicMonitor as a leader in hybrid observability, catering to demands for security, privacy, and operational resiliency.
We invite you to stay updated on our progress via the LogicMonitor press page and across our social channels. For more information on our IRAP assessment or collaboration opportunities, please contact the LogicMonitor team.

In the Netherlands, safe and affordable housing is a big deal. Housing cooperatives work hard to provide homes for millions of people, and they rely on companies like NEH to keep their technology running smoothly.

NEH makes sure the systems behind these housing cooperatives are always working. They provide critical IT support to over 80 different organizations, impacting the lives of countless individuals and families.

But NEH had a problem: their old tech setup was messy and hard to use. They were juggling up to 6 different tools that didn’t work well together, making it tough to spot problems before they became big headaches.  On top of that, new cybersecurity rules from the European Union called the NIS2 Directive, meant NEH needed even stronger protection for their systems to prevent hackers and keep sensitive information safe.

Finding a Simpler, Safer Solution

NEH knew they needed a better way to manage their technology. They needed one tool that could do it all, give them a clear picture of what was happening, and keep everything secure. That’s where LogicMonitor came in.

Here’s how LogicMonitor helped:

• Simplified Everything: LogicMonitor replaced four of NEH’s old tools, combining everything into one easy-to-use platform. No more jumping between different systems.
• Crystal-Clear Visibility: LogicMonitor gave NEH a crystal-clear view of its entire technology setup, making it easier to spot and fix problems before they impacted housing cooperatives.
• Boosted Security: LogicMonitor helped NEH find and fix hidden security risks, ensuring their systems were protected and met the strict standards of the NIS2 Directive.
• Stronger Relationships, Smoother Operations: LogicMonitor doesn’t just improve technology; it improves relationships. By eliminating those time-sinking tasks and providing proactive alerts (like flagging expiring SSL certificates or credentials before they cause issues), NEH’s team can focus on what matters most: their customers. This proactive approach means fewer disruptions, faster solutions, and stronger partnerships with the housing cooperatives they serve.

A solid foundation for future growth 

LogicMonitor provides NEH with the peace of mind and technological edge to confidently face the future. As the need for affordable housing continues to grow, NEH stands ready to support their housing cooperative partners, knowing their technology can scale and adapt to meet the challenges ahead.

More than just “keeping the lights on”

County of Henrico’s IT team, like many other government IT teams, is responsible for keeping the lights on. But as many IT teams know, it’s rarely as easy as flipping a switch. 

County of Henrico is a large region in central Virginia with roughly 350,000 residents. Henrico IT is comprised of IT Managers Rosario Gambardella, who oversees the System Administration and Infrastructure Group, Robert Aungst, who oversees the Network Infrastructure teams, and Reggie Grubbs, who oversees the previous teams as well as the Database group. Together, they are responsible for maintaining and monitoring the county’s entire IT infrastructure, in addition to offering infrastructure as a service for the county’s libraries and supporting emergency services (the 911 center, police department, and fire department). 

The team manages more than 760 devices with various SaaS services, 40+ in house applications, two data center sites, a disaster recovery site with physical and virtual servers, Cisco and Meraki switches, routers, firewalls, and more. For most IT teams, including Henrico IT, the most important metric to track when monitoring this many devices is uptime. 

Because County of Henrico supports the 911 center, police department, and fire department – services that could be life or death if their systems are down – maintaining consistent uptime is critical. The team monitors all network gear at fire stations, as well as supporting and monitoring the CAD (computer assistance dispatch) systems that the emergency response and 911 center heavily rely on. Unplanned downtime results in not only the inability to provide necessary services, but also potential capital losses, security vulnerabilities, and unhappy customers and users. 

To successfully support the county’s infrastructure and offerings, including crucial emergency services, the team needed 100% visibility across their IT environment. The goal was to effectively predict any issue before they reached a critical status.

Gaining that visibility, however, was not always as easy as dialing 911. 

Lost in the noise

A typical day for Aungst and his team starts with a 9am meeting. He checks in with his team, checks on their preliminary operational status, and creates a game plan for the day based on tuned alerts that require immediate attention. 

With their previous monitoring solution, SolarWinds, that 9am meeting wasn’t as smooth as it sounds. Building an action plan by looking at alerts was nearly impossible when Aungst and team were sifting through 5,000 alerts daily. In fact, Aungst’s inbox was inundated with 25,000 alerts per week due to the lack of flexibility and customization offered by SolarWinds. 

“It was noisy, not reliable, [and] alerts weren’t actionable,” said Grubbs. Even when SolarWinds’ support team came on-site to help tune the platform to deliver what County of Henrico needed, “it still wasn’t satisfactory.” 

On top of struggling to surface the most critical alerts in these massive alert storms, Henrico IT struggled with high overhead from having to run what Grubbs refers to as “beefy” servers on-premise to host their monitoring platform. They also struggled to delegate monitoring to their business units, which include infrastructure, database administration, applications, and development groups. The business owners of these units ensure that the infrastructure their applications run on is operating correctly and efficiently, while also ensuring public-facing web services stay online and accessible. With around 40% of their applications developed in-house, partnering with their application and development teams for monitoring efforts is essential. 

The county’s IT teams, particularly the team Gambardella oversees, needed to provide high-level monitoring insights to their business owners that would be most beneficial and actionable for the respective business units. With the alert structure from SolarWinds, providing actionable information was too difficult and often reactive. It only came with alert noise that constantly overwhelmed the teams and impacted overall operational efficiency. 

Monitoring gaps and their impact 

The team installed a cellular backup network for the fire stations they support to ensure minimal downtime with a dual link and multiple pathway approach. Previously, SolarWinds lacked the nuanced, granular view that would indicate when only one system or pathway went down. Instead, the team was only alerted when an entire router went down.  

Being unable to detect when only one pathway went down meant the team had no insight into when a fire station defaults to a cellular network instead of a wired one. This monitoring gap can quickly turn costly, as running on a cellular network is significantly more expensive than remaining on a wired network. After a particularly high cellular bill came in unexpectedly, the team realized they didn’t have the enhanced visibility or granular alerting required to cover this massive monitoring gap. 

In order to obtain the required visibility to do their job effectively, it was time for Henrico IT to search for a new monitoring platform, preferably one with better visibility, tuned alerts, easy-to-use API, customization capabilities, and actionable insights. Cost savings would be a cherry on top. 

Enter LogicMonitor 

After highly publicized industry security concerns with their previous monitoring solution, Grubbs was ready to search for a new monitoring platform that worked for him and his teams. 

“It really boils down to [this]: can we get it to perform the way we want it to and can we trust the alerts that we get now versus before. I mean that’s worth the price of admission right there,” said Grubbs. 

LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based, agentless solution, ease of use, intelligent alerting, and customization capabilities matched County of Henrico’s needs. 

Aungst and team have seen an estimated 90% reduction in alert noise, with about three or four  alerts per day, a huge drop in daily alerts from the 5,000 they experienced previously. 

“For me, it’s no extraneous alerts. That’s the biggest thing, getting the alerts down to only stuff that’s actionable is fantastic. You can’t ask for anything better than that,” Aungst said. “In addition to that, the various DataSources like the EIGRP neighbors? You know that’s just something SolarWinds didn’t do.” 

With LogicMonitor’s ability to monitor EIGRP neighbors and IGRP for their fire stations with dual links, the team can avoid any shocking cellular bills as the EIGRP neighbors only go down when the station is on the cellular network. 

“This gives us a clue that we need to troubleshoot the primary Comcast network instead, which is a wired network. The quicker we can get them back on the wired network, the less money they spend on cellular, so that’s a cost savings, too,” Aungst said. 

The decrease in alert storms meant more proactive and predictive monitoring. With the ability to tune alerts for key information within their unique environment, Aungst explained that his team has seen four or five instances in the past couple of months in which they proactively prevented outages by replacing SFPs or rebooting equipment before disaster threatened to strike. 

Without information fatigue clouding the business units, cross collaboration and operational efficiency have also been major wins for Henrico IT. The business units now have actionable alerts and no longer have to be the first ones to report any issues or outages to the IT Managers because they’re already on top of it. 

“We’ve already gotten alerts that a particular link is down because an SFP was bad and they’ve lost half their bandwidth, for example. We create those tickets and act on it rather than the end users having to report it to us. It’s way more proactive and makes us look a whole lot better and that we know what we’re doing,” Aungst said. 

Automation station

LogicMonitor’s automation and customization capabilities also stood out to the Henrico IT team during their search, and they’ve proved to be extremely beneficial. 

With LogicMonitor, Henrico IT replaced two existing monitoring tools: SolarWinds and MRTG. Previously, the team used MRTG for interface statistics, but that was a lengthy, manual process that required them to individually set up every interface, which LogicMonitor does by default. 

County of Henrico’s libraries particularly love the visibility into their network uplinks to see how much bandwidth they’re using at any given time, while the IT team enjoys time for other tasks without the manual configuration required to set up those views. 

LogicMonitor’s API also provided key customization capabilities, including a user-friendly way for Aungst to create his own Python script working off of LogicMonitor documentation. He can also now automate monitoring individual switch ports instead of clicking through each one to get his desired view. Since each stack contains eight switches and each switch contains 48 ports, this saves Aungst a lot of time. 

Gambardella also had various application teams reach out, looking to integrate certain functionality from their applications – 40+ of them built in-house – with LogicMonitor. 

“I’m not a code guy, so it’s easy to give them an API token to lay in their code and see whatever they need to. It’s all very straightforward,” Gambardella said. 

The customization of LogicMonitor’s DataSources was a huge win for Henrico IT’s teams, giving them the ability to bend the platform to their will. The team can now tweak any existing DataSources to see exactly what they want to see. They can also make those adjustments in a very user-friendly way, without waiting on a lengthy support process to implement their desired changes. 

“It’s very nimble. I’ve had scenarios where particular DataSources weren’t included on a certain resource or something right off the bat, and I’ve been able to add that data for monitoring with ease to get the additional information I’m looking for,” Gambardella said. 

Increasing operational efficiency and productivity

The IT Infrastructure Managers at County of Henrico have seen major improvements across multiple workflows with proactive alerting, allowing the team to get ahead of any major issues before a potential outage. They’ve also been able to delegate more monitoring directly to their business units, who were previously inundated with storms of unactionable alerts. Now that their business owners trust the alerting structure and capabilities with LogicMonitor, there has been an increase in requests for more monitoring, insights, and alerts for their respective areas of the business, increasing overall operational efficiency within the organization. 

“That’s new to us. When we had SolarWinds, there wasn’t anyone really reaching out,” explained Grubbs. “Now that they know we have the capability with LogicMonitor and that it’s reliable and not just a lot of noise, I think they’re more receptive to getting those alerts directly.” 

“It’s been a force multiplier as far as mission operations go. Not only do the system administrators or network administrators have oversight, but for the business units that we’ve delegated monitoring and reporting to, it’s spread the net basically,” Gambardella explained. 

Henrico IT has also experienced an improved device onboarding process for new locations, whether that’s a new fire station coming online or a new county events center. The team already has everything they need tuned for fire stations, so when a new one comes online, set up is quick and efficient as they can easily go in under their designated group to find things they monitor. Active discovery has also been incredibly beneficial for quickly spinning up new environments, especially with their vCenter instance. 

Finally, the days of excessive alert fatigue and letting important alerts slip through the cracks are over. Now, Aungst looks forward to his new morning routine. 

“That’s how I start my day off: the first thing I look at is LogicMonitor,” he said.

Henrico IT will always be dedicated to keeping the lights on for their county and supporting services. But now with LogicMonitor’s automation, actionable alerts, enhanced visibility, and ease of use, Aungst, Gambardella, Grubbs, and their teams can sleep a little easier knowing that once that 9am meeting rolls around, they’ve got a game plan.

Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) provides retirement, disability and survivor benefit programs for public employees throughout the state who are not covered by another state or local retirement system.

The Situation

The Data Engineering (DE) team at OPERS is in charge of scheduling downtime and maintenance for their large scale server environment. These servers handle critical processes and applications for the business organization, so the DE team has to ensure that whenever a server is taken down for maintenance, the other servers can handle the workload appropriately. Previously, the DE team didn’t have any information or visibility into utilization trends or graphs depicting peak usage hours on the servers, so the team was left assuming which servers could handle what loads during certain hours of the day. These assumptions led to significant lags across the business, causing delays on services across the organization. The DE team was also being requested by their internal customers, teams like operations, finance, and executive management, to send reports displaying why the chosen servers were taken offline for maintenance. 

The Solution

In early 2021, the IT infrastructure team at OPERS made the switch from Solarwinds to LogicMonitor due to security concerns and a need for an observability platform to make the transition to a hybrid environment more fluid and efficient. With this migration, the IT team gained new capabilities for monitoring and displaying key information, including the ability to create custom dashboards to monitor and log their server utilization – a capability that was instrumental in their decision in implementing LogicMonitor. These custom dashboards also allowed for more collaboration between the IT team and the DE team. The IT team gave viewing permissions to the DE team, who started using these new graphs to inform their server maintenance schedule. 

The Results

By implementing LogicMonitor, the DE team now has a straightforward way of accessing server performance and scheduling maintenance. LogicMonitor’s custom dashboards and graphs help the team draft a SDT policy and schedule that no longer causes lags across the business. The success of the cross collaboration between the teams has also benefited the internal customer groups, as the DE team can now provide solid data justifying their decision-making, allowing their strategy and success to be viewed across the entire organization. One member of the DE team has praised LogicMonitor for making his role easier and is particularly thankful to have a monitoring solution in place that can help demonstrate his effectiveness and analytical thinking.

Challenge: 

Louisiana State University, located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is home to 35,000 students and more than 250 buildings. The Network Operations Center (NOC) is the University’s 24/7 system operations and monitoring center, running 365 days a year through holidays, hurricanes, and more to make sure everything runs smoothly for staff and students. 

Like many academic institutions, LSU experiences a significant network spike when students return to campus every August. And for Ethan Bateman, Manager of the NOC, challenges arise due to this cyclical nature of demand. Bateman’s team must be prepared to meet the expectation to provide 100% connectivity and uptime at once across a large environment.

“We needed a monitoring platform that was going to work for leadership all the way down. In order to have a true single pane of glass view, you have to have everything in there,” Bateman explained. 

To improve visibility and provide a more proactive monitoring experience, LSU needed an AI-powered hybrid observability platform that matched the needs of their growing hybrid environment, as well as quick anomaly detection and automation. 

LSU has been moving toward a modern hybrid IT infrastructure with some parts of their environment remaining on-premises, like their public branch exchange phone system and mainframe that hosts the student information system. Other resources, like the O365 shop, are in the cloud. 

To help migrate the University’s systems to the cloud, Bateman and his team needed to ensure that their business was functioning properly, getting ahead of any bottlenecks, and delivering top quality service.

Solution: 

During the team’s search for a platform that met their visibility needs, LSU turned to LogicMonitor for a holistic, modern approach to monitoring. By implementing LogicMonitor, LSU was able to address several major business challenges caused by their previous open source monitoring solution. 

“We needed to find something we weren’t going to have to dedicate personnel to, something that was hosted so we don’t have to take care of any infrastructure on site, and something that could give us hybrid observability in a single pane of glass,” Bateman said. 

LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based approach and unified display gave Bateman and his team much needed visibility into their modern hybrid IT environment, allowing them to get ahead of any potential issues before they arose. Instead of a reactive approach and scrambling to quickly identify and resolve any issues, the NOC team could now implement proactive alert structures to reduce downtime. 

Hybrid observability allowed the NOC team to engage in more value-add operations for their organization. They have been able to help the Engineering and Architecture teams with lifecycle upgrades, install and configure new switches for their Technical Architecture Group, and support strategic initiatives for the institution.

Furthermore, accurate root cause analysis not only helped LSU to quickly identify issues, but to escalate the issue to the proper administrators for speedy resolution.

“When you have all parts and pieces of your systems and your infrastructure in the platform, and you see a failure higher up in the stack, but the root cause is lower in the stack, you can go to that admin or engineer team with that information,” Bateman explained. “What it does for us, is we can attack the problem immediately and get it resolved faster, instead of going to the app admin, for example, and saying your app is running slow, when that isn’t the issue.” 

Benefits: 

LogicMonitor has reduced downtime and outages, which contributes to better productivity. Additionally, the NOC team can now predict when issues are going to arise in order to bring services to continuous uptime. With predictive monitoring, the team can create a plan to tackle issues ahead of time, which leads to more process improvements and fewer mistakes.

“If it’s the fiber line that we need to get tested or cleaned, we can get that specific group involved and resolve that quickly,” Bateman said. 

Without hybrid observability, LSU would have a much harder time maintaining the 24/7 uptime that is now industry standard. The University leveraged LogicMonitor metrics and data to proactively work against potential system or service failures, instead of waiting to hear about an issue when an end user experienced it. 

“If you don’t know until your users are calling that they can’t get to a specific resource or a service isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, you’re just dealing with what the universe gives you and spending time mitigating after the fact. You’re not being proactive in keeping that uptime standard,” Bateman said. 

LSU has also been able to decrease the manual workload when it comes to administrative tasks and platform management. Their previous open source tool required more work and valuable time from people inside their organization to maintain. With LogicMonitor, Bateman and team are able to prioritize working on strategic projects instead of general platform upkeep by accurately predicting potential issues in their environment.

“My vision for observability is to be able to see all of the data points and metrics of everything that exists in the infrastructure, because once you know everything that is going on, you can then begin to predict things,” Bateman explained. “You can see things that are going to go wrong, before they fully break.” 

Over time, Bateman’s team monitors for Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) errors, which is indicative of an impending optical outage that would cause networking to fail in a building. The implication of downtime is significant for a student. Even 30 minutes of downtime could result in 500 hours of lost productivity. With LogicMonitor, the team has gotten ahead of those instances nearly 100 times. 

These CRC errors also degrade the ability to transmit data, causing users to see a “slow network,” which also greatly affects productivity. 

In one case, a registration portal that is heavily used at the beginning of each school year would crash after some time. That amount of time wasn’t consistent enough to track a trend, but the team was able to decipher that it would load slower before it completely crashed. LogicMonitor was able to alert once the load time began to increase, and the admin was able to go in to activate a restart within 30 seconds. Being able to proactively address this issue meant the team didn’t have to wait for an outage to occur and then spend valuable time getting in touch with the admin and then time spent resolving the issue. This created a better experience for the University and built trust between students and the IT team.

“The biggest benefit to hybrid observability is 100% service uptime, and that’s the new standard,” Bateman said. 

By partnering with LogicMonitor for hybrid observability and predictive monitoring, LSU will continue their migration to a modern hybrid infrastructure – all while maintaining 100% service availability.

Challenge

Loyola University of Maryland, a Jesuit Catholic university located in Baltimore, Maryland, is home to 5,500 students across the main campus and three remote campuses. The Technology Services Department is the centralized provider of technology to the entire Loyola community, supporting applications, storage, security, connectivity, and all devices.

The challenges of so many devices, combined with the importance of uptime and visibility, led Loyola to search for an observability platform after a radical redeployment of the university’s network. What started as a simple hub-and-spoke topology, where all services symmetrically overlaid the network elements themselves, was migrated to a flexible collection of virtual networks operating independently of each other to serve different constituents and functions.

Because of this major network change, as well as an impending rollout of VoIP and the need to support new network-first facility safety devices, Loyola soon realized the mentality and capabilities of the native monitoring tools they had been using were not going to be enough.

“We just don’t have the time to be babysitters. We can’t afford to spend our time keeping the lights on. That’s a recipe for disaster,” called out Mike Dieter, Senior Systems Engineer in the Technology Services Department.

Loyola needed to minimize administrative overhead and day-to-day demands of an observability platform, as well as persistence in business continuity and disaster recovery type situations. Visibility was key to Loyola. If some or all of their services were disrupted, they didn’t want to waste precious time trying to bring those back up without any visibility into their environment.

Loyola was also looking to the future when it came to its partnership with an observability platform. They were going to need to easily access not only their data but also their account team to make any changes to their evolving and growing landscape. Overall, Loyola needed a partner that would grow with them.

Solution

Loyola knew they had found the solution they needed with LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based platform, out-of-the-box interoperability, flexible alerting, and notification delivery.

“Nothing is more frustrating than wasting time struggling to get somebody’s product to talk to somebody else’s product,” said Dieter.

LogicMonitor’s robust integrations have allowed simple and fast discovery, monitoring, and visibility of Loyola’s infrastructure, including Juniper, Palo Alto, and Aruba devices. Within minutes, Dieter and his team can see reports, metrics, and data points within their dashboards, with ease.

Loyola has also leveraged LogicMonitor’s integration with third-party notification delivery mechanisms, giving peace of mind that when issues arise, the correct person will be alerted and provided the information they need to quickly resolve the problem.

Loyola has partnered with LogicMonitor’s Account and Professional Services teams throughout their relationship. As their use case changes and evolves over time, they are able to add new features and functions quickly that align with their vision.

Benefits

Loyola was able to lower its overall administrative overhead with SaaS-based collectors, allowing the Technology Services Department to focus on data-driven decisions to advance their goals, rather than just trying to keep the lights on.

“It’s a huge improvement over past experiences with other products. Now it frees up our time to spend on things that add value back to our operations, instead of trying to figure out why this isn’t working. All of that is gone and we’ve really reaped the benefits,” Dieter said.

By partnering with LogicMonitor, Loyola has been able to provide and support connectivity across their community, with key insights and visibility into their growing virtualized environment.

In 2018, Loyola worked with LM’s Professional Services to implement a custom datasource to track switch ports in wiring closets. Years of renovations, office relocations, and the trend towards WIFI resulted in a significant number of abandoned wired connections across almost all buildings.

After observing the datasource output for an entire academic year, the team was able to identify and quantify closets where port capacity was no longer in balance with actual port usage, resulting in the removal of nearly forty switches from production.

“This was really cool for us and had a positive impact on our electrical consumption and carbon footprint. Electricity didn’t completely go away obviously, but we can certainly justify $5000 in cumulative electrical savings by now. Switches run around the clock for maybe 5-7 years, which adds up quickly,” Dieter explained about the high-value return provided by this engagement.

In 2020, the University’s Azure deployment reached a critical mass and Loyola adopted LM Cloud, gaining side-by-side observability for both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In early 2022, the platform they were previously using for log collection no longer matched their use-case demands and was susceptible to a nascent security concern. The team was able to solve two problems at once with the adoption of LM Logs, which was not vulnerable to that security concern and provided the needed log visibility.

Tool consolidation produced consistency for Loyola, who no longer had to deal with having multiple alert mechanisms. They are now able to effectively administer who gets notified for what alerts and when saving many hours of administrative time.

“With consolidation, the big benefit is for multiple teams to have consistent visibility across a range of technical infrastructure. When we have to talk to each other, we’re now comparing apples to apples because LogicMonitor is giving us consistent metrics for reference points,” said Dieter.

Reducing tool sprawl with the adoption of LM Logs also meant savings costs for Dieter and his team, who saved as much as $2000-$3000 a year by consolidating. The total of other alternatives would have been as much as $10,000 a year spent to keep the platform current and in production.

“For the University, IT infrastructure is evolving far faster in 3-5 years now than it did in the previous 5 years. What we really like about LogicMonitor is that it gives us the flexibility to adapt to those changes as it occurs,” said Dieter.

Loyola has leveraged the flexibility of LogicMonitor as the industry shift from on-premise to cloud happens quicker and quicker. The demands Dieter and his team are facing are changing faster than ever before, so the ability to add more to their arsenal when needed, like with the adoption of LM Logs, is critical.

Looking forward, the Technology Services Department is actively looking to structure and keep pace with the growing capabilities of LM Logs, including tripping alerts and notifications on log events and using dashboards to visualize log event patterns.

Loyola also has a huge project in place to replace switches in all of their locations that are end-of-life in the next two years. “Using LM Envision, LogicMonitor’s platform,” Dieter said, “is a very tangible return on our investments.”

Logs provide new improvements

The Situation

In September 2022, during the first week of school, one of Loyola’s WiFi controller nodes suffered an event that caused it to lock up and stopped responding to SNMP DataSources and any attempts at remote access. The team didn’t notice this issue immediately as High-Availability implementations can often mask the exposure of service delivery issues by standard SNMP monitoring. 

The Solution

By utilizing LM Logs, the team was able to realize the extent of the situation. While the device wasn’t responding to SNMP DataSources, it was creating a significant volume of syslog events causing the team to immediately initiate a call with Aruba Technical Support. Senior Systems Engineer, Mike Dieter, said “before they were even able to get a case open, I had downloaded a short time-slice of logs from the start of the situation and presented it to them.” It took Dieter 90 seconds to enhance an existing saved log search, customize the time frame, download the resulting file and share that with his colleague for delivery to Aruba’s team to quickly troubleshoot and resolve the issue. 

A week later, the other WiFi controller node failed, but this time the team was prepped for quick resolution. Based on the previous occurrence, Dieter had created a Logs pipeline and a corresponding alert that tripped and notified as designed. Dieter commented, “LM Logs worked perfectly and how I could imagine the product managers envisioned.” 

The Results

Comparing the start-to-finish time frame of the two incidents, LM Logs improved Loyola’s response time by over 2 hours. Dieter explained this was just one example of many other times that he and his team relied on LM Logs with immediate alerting and notification engineered to troubleshoot and rapidly resolve issues before they affect the university and the students studying there.

State and Local Government: IT Trends, Challenges and Solutions

In this solution brief we explore:

• Current trends in state and local government
• Common challenges faced by state and local government
• How a modern monitoring solution can help