LogicMonitor vs. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) vs. Sumo Logic

We have several government departments and universities as our clients, and we conduct online examinations for them. Therefore, our servers require additional security to prevent unauthorized access to our systems remotely without our permission. We were performing an examination for one of our clients when someone from outside attempted to access our systems by creating a backdoor to our servers. Our team was busy handling the examination process and ensuring its smoothness. However, thanks to LogicMonitor, we were alerted at the right time, and we were able to save our data and clients' information with its help.

Incentivized

If your IT team isn't proficient in automation and scripting, Solarwinds NCM can fill that gap (assuming your company's security team signs off on approving SW in your environment given the hack.) Basic device configuration, pushing mass changes reliably and backups are NCM's strong suites. If you have a complex scenario where if/then cases are needed, NCM is a bit lack luster. Auto discovery isn't as easy either as certain parameters need to be met for that feature to work 100% of the time

Incentivized

SumoLogic is a fantastic log aggregator and analysis tool, a fine alternative to Splunk. Searching is powerful and mostly intuitive and results come fast. If you have application logs in clusters or Kubernetes pods that lose their logs every time they're restarted, Sumo is the solution for you

Incentivized

• LogicMonitor is very customizable. We can build whatever modules we need, because it uses standard protocols like HTTPS, SNMP and WMI to gather data and metrics.
• We like that LogicMonitor is an agentless solution for our use case. Not all customers will allow an agent-based approach to 3rd party tools.
• LogicMonitor has thousands of out of the box modules, which work on their own and also act as good baselines for the ones that we will end up customizing more. We are rarely starting at zero when we decide to do something new with LogicMonitor.
• LogicMonitor has great documentation, and support has been helpful in the instances where we've needed them.

Incentivized

• Integrates with Network Performance Management for Alerting and Reporting.
• NetPath and detects issues due to Configuration Change.
• Keeps a record of which user made the change.
• Which devices are not being backed up, devices where backups are failing, dashboard and alerting available.

Incentivized

• Log Aggregation and uploading. The architecture for Sumo Logic makes a great deal of sense and works very well.
• Automated analysis. It still impresses me how well a newly uploaded log can be broken into intelligent parts, then searched and sorted using their tools.
• Dashboards. It might not be what YOU will need as an IT admin, but you can give access to these dashboards easily to business users who love that kind of stuff. Most other types of (monitoring / alerting) tools, for no apparent reason, lack this feature.
• Reporting, monitoring, and graphing. Given, you need to have useful log generation for an application or service as a prerequisite for sumo logic to be able to gain use, once it has it is an amazingly powerful tool.

Incentivized

• Because of the rapid change in technology, maintaining DataSources to the most current level can be time-consuming for staff.
• The network discovery and mapping capabilities are not as robust when compared to other solutions
• While it can back-up configuration files on devices, it does not have the ability to push or modify configuration files back to devices.

Incentivized

• For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.

Incentivized

• I like the help center, but I think if it had more GUI tools, it could help new users.
• Pulling out data is sometimes hard to read, (Maybe if I knew how to export data better, this would not be an issue for me).
• I would like better know-how on how to create reports that will help our business.

Incentivized

This product has met virtually all of our needs. It was easy to implement and has been simple to support. Customization has been intuitive with many options available. They keep adding features and expanding available options. The future of LogicMonitor looks even better than it is today which is very promising. The management and support teams at LogicMonitor are always helpful

Incentivized

Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.

Incentivized

Set up is super easy. Just stand up a small Linux or Windows server to act as a collector. There are no agents to install on monitored devices and all you need is SNMP or WMI access. When creating dashboards, all you have to do is find the widget on the device you want to show up and choose the menu option to add it.

Incentivized

The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.

Incentivized

Sumo Logic is very powerful but definitely requires some configuration work to get the most out of it. You can get a certification related to this, but it is definitely not something you can just throw together.

Incentivized

The sales team support we received was top notch. They worked hand in hand to make sure the product met all expectations. So far we have not really had to work with support that much; we have worked with setup team after purchase to deploy product fully. No issues so far and we are four weeks in.

Incentivized

To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.

Incentivized

I would give this rating because I attended a free Sumo Logic training at a WeWork in Chicago. I found the training very useful, and I learned a lot of features that I was not aware of before I went to the training. I like the idea that SumoLogic provides free training seminars. I am certified in level1, and I plan on certifying to level2.

Incentivized

Add good training

Incentivized

The training is good but room to improve

Incentivized

Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it

Incentivized

I did not truly dedicate myself to implementing LogicMonitor. However, I overheard the IT team members explain that "LogicMonitor is perfect for us as it has made most of the work automated, and implementation and training sessions were perfect for us." Thus, I can state that everything went smoothly with our implementation.

Incentivized

Change management played a key role in our organisation. We didn't have any major downtime but it was crucial for us to get his product.

Incentivized

I was satisfied with the implementation, as at the time, it was the best way to implement the product with the available feature sets in Sumo Logic. User creation and management became more of an issue during continued use, instead of it being an issue related to deploying the product in our environment.

Incentivized

We did not use software like LogicMonitor for the same work before, but I must say that my experience with LogicMonitor has been outstanding so far. It helps me to be free of tension. I can now concentrate on the actual work I was hired to do for my company.

Incentivized

Auvik has some similar features but it is very expensive. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) has gone up in price but it is much more affordable than Auvik. Auvik has no way of sending a script to more than one device at a time so that is a downside of Auvik versus SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM).

Incentivized

We had used Splunk previously. Sumo Logic defeats them when it comes to cost, including the costs that would normally come with supporting/managing/patching/upgrading your own infrastructure and storage. Those were wins, but especially the real-time CDN integrations due to Sumo Logic's collaborations with other vendors. We had spoken to Logentries and discovered that many of the cons we found with Sumo Logic seemed to have been resolved in their product. Their pitfall was that, at the time, Logentries did not have the ability to get real-time log ingestion from our CDN. They said they had a solution, which was scripted, but we had not evaluated/tested. Logentries also did not have a User / RBAC REST API, and are nowhere near the level of compliance that Sumo Logic had (https://www.sumologic.com/press/2015-02-19/sumo-logic-successfully-completes-pci-data-security-stand...). In the end, I believe Logentries and Sumo Logic would be two good vendors to get involved in a bake-off

Incentivized

• We have been able to eliminate multiple tools through LogicMonitor's ability to use collectors to run scripts and collect any numerical data from any reachable endpoint along with the customization and widgets available for dashboards. This has allowed for reduced costs and consolidation to a single point of view.
• The ability to grant our clients access to see their data in real time has improved both our client satisfaction surveys and attributed to a few point gain in our NPS score. The ease of getting to the data has also reduced the quoting time for our sales teams during renewals to quantify what a client is consuming.
• The amount of data that LogicMonitor collects affords our technicians a wide area of review when trying to isolate an issue and find a root cause. With the standard out of box data that is collected we have often been able to set a new threshold on something not previously thought of to proactively alert us in the future after identifying those root causes. This has reduced our Major Issues from 3-5 per month to usually 1-2 or less per quarter.

Incentivized

• Saves 100s of hours a year in man hours over manual configuration.
• Saved easily 50k in lost revenue when a switch rebooted with months old unsaved configuration. NCM let us quickly restore a snapshot of the running config from the previous day.
• Saves us several man hours per week of config auditing by reducing all changes to a summary email.

Incentivized

• Sumo Logic has allowed us to move forward quickly without having to maintain a custom log service
• The service runs in the background without much interaction from the dev teams
• Because logs aren't lost, we are able to support our customers quickly

Incentivized