ScienceLogic EM7 - hard to beat for mission critical monitoring
August 07, 2018
ScienceLogic EM7 - hard to beat for mission critical monitoring
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ScienceLogic
We have data centers around the world, colocated with satellite ground stations of our satcom providers. Our NOC staff has to be able to monitor our servers and those of our satcom suppliers to detect problems as they occur. By monitoring our hardware and our satcom provider's hardware we can see and hopefully fix problems before they lead to SLA violations with our largest customers.
- Snippet dynamc applications. Simpler monitoring solutions don't make it possible to incorporate your own custom code into the monitoring application. Science Logic's EM7 allows you to write pythin applications that get executed by EM7.
- Snippet alarms. When EM7 detects a problem and sets an alarm state as defined by my configuration, EM7 allows me to write custom python code that defines how to handle the alarm state.
- Dashboards. EM7 makes if almost trivial to merge outputs from multiple dynamic applications or for multiple devices into a unified graphic dashboard.
- Performance graphs. When using lower end open source monitoring solutions performance graphs are not integrated, and can be very inconvenient to install and configure. These graphs are built in to EM7.
- SNMP traffic generation. When you have a lot of devices being monitored with a lot of OIDs being monitored per device, the collector devices can generate a LOT of SNMP traffic. We have had instances of our internal routers blocking access to EM7 collectors, flagging them as denial of service attacks.
- Performing upgrades that are anything more involved than simple security updates can be a bit challenging.
- Technical support ranges from excellent (response in a couple hours or less) to horrible (tickets remaining open for years).
- It has allowed us to effectively monitor device performance, which has allowed us to move quickly to head off issues that could trigger SLA penalties.
- When we experiment with wetwork tuning to optimize performance, EM7 allows us to very quickly observe the effects our changes have.
- Nagios. Difficult to configure properly. Not able to add custom tests easily. Performance graphs aren't included without additional tools that require nasty configuration.
- Zabbix. Reasonably easy to install, but non-intuitive in parts. Does not allow simple addition of custom tests. Graphs are included but without the click-to-adjust functionality of EM7.
- Zenoss. Some comments as Zabbix.