Synoptek Reduces Costs by 80% and Alerts by 60% With LogicMonitor

Over the years, Synoptek has grown rapidly through acquisition. Each of its acquisitions came with monitoring tools, resulting in duplicate licensing costs and extensive tool sprawl. Synoptek needed a single SaaS-based platform that could simplify existing processes, lower overall costs, and handle all of the organization’s monitoring needs.

After evaluating many IT infrastructure and intelligence options, Synoptek selected the LogicMonitor platform. “When we were looking for a new monitoring platform, the agentless nature and flexibility of LogicMonitor really stood out,” explained Mike Moffatt, Director of the Enterprise Operations Center at Synoptek. “We needed to be able to rollout quickly and replace all of the other tools, and the ease of deployment and use of LogicMonitor allowed us to do that.”

After just a few months, Synoptek was successfully monitoring thousands of devices. “There are so many LogicModules ready to go out of the box that we don’t have to write a ton of custom modules for base infrastructure monitoring. This allowed us to get up and running really quickly,” said Moffatt.

After implementing LogicMonitor, Synopek saw an immediate and positive impact on their bottom line. “Right away, our licensing costs went way down and it simplified processes for our monitoring customers — everything from the onboarding process to standard day-to-day operations,” said Moffatt. “From a cost perspective, I don’t need to worry about maintaining the infrastructure and storage. The total cost of ownership now is 20% of what it was five years ago before LogicMonitor.”

To increase efficiency, Synoptek has automated its client onboarding process by writing custom code to interact with its PSA tool and LogicMonitor. “The tool automatically creates the device group with some standard sub-device groups, like an onboarding folder, where we don’t react to the alarms for those devices because they are onboarding,” explained Mike Hashemi, Systems Integration Engineer at Synoptek. “It creates a matching website group, three alert rules, and a dashboard with standard widgets, default widgets, and a report folder. What used to take someone more than 30 minutes is now done in seconds, and human error is no longer a factor.”

Another way Synoptek has built automation into their workflows is by using LogicMonitor’s integration with Autotask to create tickets. “It’s a big time saver. You click escalate, and it’s done in seconds,” said Hashemi.

The MSP has also been able to quickly identify and manage problems by creating a weekly alarm report for its clients. The reports get sent to the Client Delivery Managers and they review every alarm that occurred within that client’s environment over the past seven days.

The Client Delivery Managers look for trends in a larger data set in terms of environmental or infrastructure health for a client, such as the LogicModules and the pieces of infrastructure that are driving the most alarms.

“The alarm report allows us to get away from a chronic incident management process and evolve,” said Moffatt. “We can see the broader infrastructure issues that may otherwise go unnoticed. The report allows some of our more senior engineers to dig in and engineer solutions. We are using LogicMonitor both in an incident management capacity, as well as a problem management capacity.”

With the increased visibility and additional reporting features, Synoptek has seen a huge decrease in alerts. “We have reduced the overall number of alerts in the environment by over 50-60% in the past year,” said Moffatt. “We no longer end up with alert storms and we can now see what the issue is a lot quicker and get the right people engaged to drive resolution for our clients.”

Synoptek has experienced significant growth over the years, and as it grows, the company continues to leverage even more of LogicMonitor’s capabilities. “LogicMonitor is so flexible that we are monitoring things that we would never have monitored with our previous solutions,” said Hashemi. “And as we’ve grown, LogicMonitor has grown with us. What we are doing today is miles ahead of even what we were doing with LogicMonitor probably three years ago. I would highly recommend it to others in the MSP industry — and I have.”