G2 Tech Group Delivers Granular AWS Monitoring with LogicMonitor

Challenge

With a focus on helping small and growing SaaS businesses leverage cloud services with managed DevOps, G2 Tech Group brought a specialized set of requirements to LogicMonitor. G2 Tech Group needed a single platform that could handle the complexity involved in monitoring substantial cloud deployments in Amazon Web Services, specifically EC2 instances, RDS, ELBs, and ElastiCache.

G2 Tech Group required a comprehensive monitoring solution that could consolidate the tools needed to monitor hybrid and cloud environments. They were looking for a way to put all of their customers’ key data in a single platform, preventing the need to jump from CloudWatch for AWS resources to other tools for networking gear, storage appliances, databases, and other virtualization platforms. G2 Tech Group was also looking for a solution that would deploy quickly and automatically and require less configuration and ongoing maintenance than the open source options they were using; the open source platform offered some functionality but left little opportunity for their customers to access key info on their own and required much more ongoing development resources. For clients focused on rapidly scaling up their operations, having to manually build out monitoring capabilities meant the potential for delays in growth and increased burn rate.

Solution

Deploying LogicMonitor as its infrastructure performance monitoring platform has allowed G2 Tech Group to consolidate its monitoring toolkit, bringing its customers’ on-prem, hybrid, and cloud infrastructures into a single access point. With LogicMonitor, G2 Tech Group has been able to deliver previously unavailable metrics on AWS resources, including EC2s, RDS, ELBs, and ElastiCache.

LogicMonitor pulls metrics from AWS using three different methods: the CloudWatch API, the AWS SDK, and via the LogicMonitor Collector installed within the AWS environment. These multiple approaches come together in one dashboard for a comprehensive, aerial view of a client’s entire AWS environment. The vast majority of G2 Tech Group’s clients maintain substantial EC2 deployments.

Prior to deploying LogicMonitor, G2 Tech Group relied on CloudWatch to track basic EC2 datapoints, including CPU utilization, Disk Read/Write, and Network In/Out. LogicMonitor’s nearly 2000 integrations, dozens of which are dedicated solely to AWS resources, go beyond CloudWatch.

LogicMonitor takes advantage of the AWS SDK to provide in-depth, custom metrics on G2 Tech Group’s EC2s, including memory usage, database performance, and the ability to drill into applications like Tomcat, Apache, PostgreSQL, and even custom Java apps. For example, LogicMonitor can pull metrics like Requests, Status, Response Time, and Busy vs Idle Workers, from an Apache instance running on an EC2.

In addition to more granular device metrics, LogicMonitor allows G2 Tech Group to present AWS resource allocations and billing info on dashboards to help customers better track their monthly spend. With LogicMonitor, G2 Tech Group can retain this billing information, as well as the above device metrics, for 1-2 years instead of the standard 14 days provided via CloudWatch. G2 Tech Group uses this increased data retention to perform long term trend analysis for their customers, allowing them to more proactively manage financial and development resources and decrease the number of midnight phone calls for preventable issues and routine SDT.