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Happy MSP Engineer Likes ScienceLogic and the EM7 Platform
April 24, 2019

Happy MSP Engineer Likes ScienceLogic and the EM7 Platform

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with ScienceLogic

As an MSP, we use ScienceLogic as our primary monitoring and management tool for small to medium commercial businesses, health care, financial, as well as medium-sized government department customers. We also use it to monitor our own internal infrastructure. The business problems solved by our ScienceLogic installation are numerous, but here are the top few:

  • Needed a single platform for monitoring of all IT infrastructure elements.
  • Required a method by which we can accurately fill, and keep up to date, our CMDB.
  • Required multi-tenant environment with a focus on data segregation.
  • Required a vendor agnostic platform.
  • Required the ability to ingest data from many sources/protocols (APIs, SNMP, SMI-S, Powershell/WMI, etc.).
  • Required an ability to automate the creation, update and automatic closure/resolution of tickets in external ITSM platform.

The EM7 platform meets (and in some cases exceeds) these requirements.
  • Data segregation for multiple tenants. This is the core for any MSP and must be built in from the ground up in order to be secure and relied upon.
  • Flexible API integration. While this hasn't always been the case, the newer Integration Service platform offers extended flexibility and allows customers to build integrations without necessarily conducting a professional service engagement.
  • Speedy deployment. One of the main goals of our initial deployment was to *quickly* replace another platform which had suffered poor support and stability after an M&A incident. We were able to bring more than 80% of our customers online with this system within 3 months from the initial deployment.
  • Usability for the most core user features. The GUI is intuitive enough to require little training for end users and NOC technicians alike. Advanced features (reporting and dashboard/widget programming) can easily be removed from the GUI for those users as well, limiting the experience to only those features which will be used.
  • Report creation. This can be difficult (in the legacy platform anyhow) and requires significant PHP/SQL knowledge.
  • While not technically part of the platform, the Support Portal has room for improvement. It is not always easy to navigate the portal, and the threading features of the cases could be cleaned up or turned off entirely for clarity and ease of use.
  • It allowed us to quickly decommission former tools which were no longer being actively maintained.
  • It allowed us to get a better handle on the CIs in our customer's environments as well as our own.
  • It allowed us to easily stand up a publicly accessible portal where our customers can view the current state of their systems, events, alarms, reports, and dashboards without having to file a request with the NOC. Self service!
Yes - 
  • CA - Nimsoft. This product was defective and not well supported. CA could not deliver a comparable solution.
  • PacketTrap Network Monitoring/Foglight. These products were EOL.
My level of visibility across my, and my customers' infrastructure has increased markedly. On top of that, my NOC engineers now have more faith that the data they see in our monitors is accurate and that the data on our CI is as well. This allows the engineers to move more quickly and decisively which reduces the MTTR for our customers.
Of course! This is a great benefit. The flexibility of the platform allows us to say "no" in far fewer instances. When a proposal calls for monitoring a new device type, we can often find an available power pack. When that is not an option, we can quickly build custom SNMP monitors with only a MIB. If that too is not an option, we have the ability to integrate with API calls. This allows us to take on new customers with new types of technology much more rapidly with less required pre-sales engineering and fewer meetings before an engagement begins.
The primary automation and workflow integrations we use are with our ITSM platform. This allows us (via API) to automatically have tickets created, updated, resolved, etc. This, combined with ScienceLogic's CMDB integration, allows us to consider ScienceLogic the ultimate "source of truth" within our systems.
  • Clever use of RBA: Some of our engineers have leveraged Run Books to creatively and selectively separate and escalate the events from specific devices and initiate specific workflows within our ITSM.
  • Graphical views of devices and their components. This is an added benefit I wasn't expecting or relying on when we selected this product. However, it has come in handy a number of times, especially when describing component relationships to non-technical customers.
Of the above products, ScienceLogic stands alone. The above were one or more of the following:
  • Unsupported.
  • Poorly maintained/documented.
  • Too specific or proprietary (Cisco and Meraki).
Well Suited:
  • MSP. This is an ideal platform for managed service providers.
  • Custom monitors. If/when you require the ability to script out your own tests and rapidly generate new monitors, the selection of Python as the primary platform scripting language lends itself well to this.
Less appropriate:
  • In situations where redundant tools already exist.
  • In situations where licensing cost may become prohibitive.