Broad support and customization, especially with a team of developers
March 20, 2019
Broad support and customization, especially with a team of developers
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ScienceLogic
ScienceLogic is our primary monitoring tool offered to our customers, both as a service and for operational outsourcing. It's a key piece of the integration in our suite of tools. Alerts from ScienceLogic trigger tickets, automation to gather information, requests to other tools to gather information, and ITOM activities. The managed services side of our business uses it, for both customers and internal monitoring, and it is a core piece of our business.
- Supports a wide variety of technologies, though at varying levels of robustness. Not every NMS has options for so many technologies, nor the ability to develop additional monitoring options.
- Agentless monitoring. ScienceLogic does this as well as anyone, leveraging SNMP, APIs, and SSH to gather as much data as possible without installing agents on customer devices.
- Cisco CUCM monitoring. The monitoring solution for Cisco's Collaboration Suite is excellent.
- Reporting. ScienceLogic has reports for a wide variety of data points, but customizing or creating new reports is an exercise in frustration. The current reporting system appears to no longer be supported and new reports via their updated UI have no ETA that we've heard of. If you're using their hosted service, access to the database for reporting is highly restricted, so even directly pulling reports is not possible.
- Every release of ScienceLogic in the past year or more has come with a host of new features, but also with significant defects, and for an organization that requires 24/7/265 monitoring as part of our business model, this is a large pain point. Defect lists are not available and sometimes we'll work a ticket with Support for multiple weeks before being informed our issue is a "known defect."
- Undocumented developer libraries. ScienceLogic has a host of useful Python libraries they've developed that are available for custom development, but they are compiled and undocumented. This often leads to having to re-write code when doing custom development or simply writing inefficient code because there is not easy access to those libraries. You can develop custom monitoring PowerPacks and automations, but there is a steep learning curve and little organizational support. Community groups are the best place to learn these ins and outs if you can't get an experienced ScienceLogic developer on staff.
- We've had to give refunds to customers due to unplanned downtime on our hosted ScienceLogic instance.
- Through a strong development initiative, we've been able to customize a large portion of the platform to suit our specific needs. This has allowed us to mitigate a large portion of risk from some of the out-of-the-box solutions.
Prior to using ScienceLogic, we had no significant visibility into our own internal systems, especially not from a single pane of glass. ScienceLogic enabled us to see our own internal infrastructure in one place for the first time, then offer that same level of visibility to our customers as part of an operational outsourcing offering.
With an in-house development team, we are able to offer support to potential customers for solutions that ScienceLogic's competitors don't offer. We've built a custom framework for automated troubleshooting and remediation, as well as enhancing what the software can do out of the box. It's a key piece of our software suite and offering for operational outsourcing.
Using ScienceLogic's SyncServer, we integrate our CMDB and ticketing automatically and to our Operations team's specifications. We do ticket rollup and correlation directly in ScienceLogic before passing it to ServiceNow. We also do automated troubleshooting and remediation, orchestrated by ScienceLogic, with workflows designed by our Operations team. By the time the information gets to ServiceNow we have already performed significant logic to ensure the tickets are timely and actionable.
- We've used ScienceLogic to perform ETL on data in a custom MongoDB database and created robust reporting on telepresence data.
- We've developed an automation framework that lets us adjust the severity of tickets going to ServiceNow from within ScienceLogic, on a per-device basis, and even a per-component basis.
- Leveraging data in ScienceLogic, we've built a customer portal that ties our monitoring suite into a single pane of glass, with custom reports and data. Customers will soon have the ability to discover and decommission devices directly from that portal, with billing being handled automatically.
ScienceLogic offers more flexibility in custom development than SolarWinds especially, and edges out LogicMonitor slightly. It also offers support for more technologies than either LogicMonitor or SolarWinds. ScienceLogic has longevity in the monitoring space, notably compared to LogicMonitor, but also SolarWinds. ScienceLogic has more affordable hosted options than SolarWinds. Each other tool boasted certain things that ScienceLogic did not, but overall, the offering from ScienceLogic edged them out.