Datto SIRIS vs. ScienceLogic SL1

Datto is a fantastic option for smaller businesses who don't have as large of a budget. It might work well for larger businesses as well, but the features are not exactly on par with more prevalent backup solutions. So, that should be kept in mind while determining a good fit for a company. But if selling a backup solution is met with push back, this can be a great option to give a good working backup solution. It offers the main features solutions should have, so it's definitely not a compromise. Just keep in mind the features it does not offer.

For the last ten years, ScienceLogic SL1 has been my go-to recommendation for monitoring platforms. Its ease of learning curve and its out-of-the-box capabilities provide a majority accurate representation of alerting expectations with their eagerness to offer customizable solutions for one-off needs.

• Simple agent setup for new machines to be protected. A new machine can be setup on the server in under a minute whether it be a Linux or Windows based machine.
• Local virtualization on the Datto is quick to start up. After a physical problem with a server I had the machine locally virtualized on the Datto before users had a chance to report service issues to me.
• Nothing to do on my end to get backups shifted to offsite data center. Schedules are setup for each machine or group of machines and I sleep well knowing all our backups are safely stored offsite.

• Automation in terms of alert and ticket enrichment with diagnostic details
• Incident ticket reduction, reducing operations workload
• Alerting and ticketing
• Account team is outstanding, very supportive on issues and with feature requests
• Support is great, especially on the critical issues when you need them
• ScienceLogic aggressively pursues customer engagement and improvements.
• Recently added ChatOps and Ideas Boards are examples
• Dynamic application and Powerpack framework enables quick build and share and as such many community built Powerpacks are available

• Initial backup sync: The downside to the cloud backup is that, if you have a lot of data, you need an external hard drive to seed to the cloud. And you usually have to request this after you've already got everything else working.
• Unsyncing: We have pretty decent bandwidth, but with 8TB of data, we'd get syncing issues with the cloud servers every 3 months or so. The only way to address it was to request another external drive and resync it, but that also meant losing the older data.
• Availability and support: Datto only operates through MSPs and VARs, and will not help you directly without putting in a ticket with your provider. This causes delays, and extra epenses, and if you grow beyond the need for an MSP, you have to keep them around for at least that piece.

• Cisco ACI Monitoring has some challenges with Rest APIs as we are facing some issue with the endpoint alerting which we don't have a way to properly snooze.
• Alerts or KPIs needs to be flexible so it can adept easily while we migrate form any other tool in the market.
• Tool should provide Flexibility locally in the configuration so that we don't have to alter the Global settings until/unless thing is required on a Global span.

I trust the product and service and am satisfied with the direction of the company

We migrated away from our 20-year-old homegrown solution and have no back-tracking capability. ScienceLogic is demonstrating new capabilities that we would not have been able to do on our own using our legacy system.
We understand the capabilities of competitors based on our bake-off selection where ScienceLogic won on capabilities and future near-term potential (expandability, platform growth). We know that those competitors are not really close to where we have been able to push ScienceLogic (as a partner).

Usability is great. The web interface is simple and easy to use. While various options are available for client backups, it is very easy to re-use settings of the existing client, so adding new clients is a very fast process. Configuration of the agent on the client-side cannot be easier as well. Datto dashboard provides an overview of the client status, and email notifications can be configured for various events.

Product is capable of monitoring different
technologies like OS, MS Infra apps, cloud services, Databases, network etc...
this can be a single solution for most of the technologies end to end monitoring

It is more flexible for customization and
support is good

Science Logic SL1 provides the option of Distributed deployment where multiple instances of each appliance can be deployed to manage the load and availability. SL1 provides a High Availability feature for Database Servers and Data Collection. If one of the Data Collectors in the collector group fails, it will automatically redistribute the devices from the failed Data Collector among the other Data Collectors in the Collector Group. The high availability feature for the Database server ensures that SL1 performs failover automatically to another server without causing the outage to the application.

The performance is entirely dependent on the complexity of the environment/network being used to host the platform. Outside of those factors, the platform runs very efficiently and quickly out of the box. We have integrations with other platforms and neither seem to take a hit from our moderate API usage. Any issues with performance would be experienced by choices made in infrastructure or complexity of things built by the customer to display in the GUI (overly complicated and cluttered dashboards for example)

My specific example or reason for this rating goes back to a need for support after a client on this platform has a fire. In a nutshell, Datto had no idea how to BMR the image back to the server correctly, and as a result, the RAID on the server was lost, due to the Datto BDR environment not being able to see the RAID card, and the support technician knowing how to inject drivers.

So far, it's good as part of my overall experience, except for a couple of use cases. The support team is well knowledgeable, has technical sound, and is efficient. When support escalates to engineering, the issue gets stuck and takes months to resolve.

On our side (students), we had a number of teams who were provided the deep developer training.
Of those students, the customized training provided a complete, 5 day training which enabled the deployed platform team to successfully deploy and mitigate user-experience issues for the vast majority of our end-users, including some of the teams who attended the developer training.

The knowledge kept pace with the class and sped up / slowed down (within the time constraints) as needed throughout the course.

This was developer to developer training and for those students who were developers the training worked well. For those who were just coders it probably worked less well as some of the topics still do not apply (a function of our course outline specification based on our knowing nothing).

Due to problems in sequencing we did the developer course BEFORE the admin course and realized that our requested ORDER was wrong.

The onsite admin course was much better received and led to deeper understanding of the developer course held a few weeks prior.

Only cover the basic, the most powerfull part of the tool was not covered.

I've not been too involved with this portion. SL1 fails to find all the devices to be monitored and has actually taken a very long time. I'm very unsure if this is an SL1 problem or the single individual our company has implemented to the product. My company began implementing this product 10 months ago, and it has just recently been added to production and utilized by the NOC.

Datto seemed to be better than other vendors I trialed, and I inherited an Alto device, so it was easy to stay with them. I also assumed the backups had been working with the previous contractor, but it turns out they had been failing for months and no one knew it.

Agentless monitoring is the best part of ScienceLogic SL1 monitoring, which is asked for by all the customers. UI is good and easy to handle. Port status from ScienceLogic SL1 collectors is easy even with bulk servers. The overall product is good for basic INFRA monitoring. Managing customer requirements is also achievable.

Our deployment model is vastly different from product expectations. Our global / internal monitoring foot print is 8 production stacks in dual data centers with 50% collection capacity allocated to each data center with minimal numbers of collection groups. General Collection is our default collection group. Special Collection is for monitoring our ASA and other hardware that cannot be polled by a large number of IP addresses, so this collection group is usually 2 collectors). Because most of our stacks are in different physical data centers, we cannot use the provided HA solution. We have to use the DR solution (DRBD + CNAMEs). We routinely test power in our data centers (yearly). Because we have to use DR, we have a hand-touch to flip nodes and change the DNS CNAME half of the times when there is an outage (by design). When the outage is planned, we do this ahead of the outage so that we don't care that the Secondary has dropped away from the Primary. Hopefully, we'll be able to find a way to meet our constraints and improve our resiliency and reduce our hand-touch in future releases. For now, this works for us and our complexity. (I hear that the HA option is sweet. I just can't consume that.)

• We've saved some money by consolidating backups offsite to the one appliance and letting it store backups in one location offsite, rather than trying to maintain several different platforms or connections.
• Negatively, since the appliance doesn't expand in storage, we've got sunk costs into this unit and will have to move to something else to continue growing. I work in healthcare and we can't just purge charts and stop backing up information, I've got to expand my ability to back up that information.

• we are still in the process of implementation
• after all of our production devices are onboarded to SL1, we will be able to bring network monitoring in-house instead of it being outsourced as it is now
• I am Engineer/SL1 user only, therefore I cannot comment on ROI or similar numbers