Sciencelogic. Put your back into it!
August 24, 2019
Sciencelogic. Put your back into it!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ScienceLogic
Sciencelogic, and specifically EM7, is used by our company for enterprise network monitoring. It has been used as one of two primary alerting and monitoring systems. It solves two very specific needs in our organization. In particular, this product is valued for its configurability and customization, that allows it to accurately monitor external databases. This has allowed us high-quality monitoring of a key performance metric that we had struggled to monitor under other systems. It also allows for very fine granularity of graphical data, and high levels of customization for the "output" graphs, that make at a glance presentation of business-critical data possible.
- Graphing - Sciencelogic has highly configurable, high-quality graphs that make the display of mission-critical data very effective.
- Customization - With a few exceptions, nearly everything in the system can be changed, modified, added or deleted to create your ideal monitoring environment.
- "Power Packs" - The built-in packages provide a good level of out of the box functionality.
- Updates can be problematic. The system has been very stable for us over the years we've used it. With the notable exception of upgrades. It seems like every other one has caused an issue where I neede to call support.
- Ease of use. This software is not exactly user friendly in terms of the interface. Can be hard to navigate to desired feature/option. Powerful, but has definite room for improvement
- Slow update cycle with requested feature sets. The company makes beneficial upgrades, but pacing can be problematic in regards to a particular need. Bugs can be slow to fix as well.
- This product made it possible to monitor things we couldn't before and allows us to paint a clearer picture of branch health to management than we've ever had before.
- Scienelogic is well suited to root cause analysis as well. If we find the underlying issue and fix it, we improve uptime, overall reliability, and customer/employee satisfaction.
Sciencelogic was our company's first successful effort to fully combine the monitoring of both corporate and branch networking infrastructure into a single management system. From a single dashboard, or in our case two running side by side, you could see everything from branch outages, VPN issues, hardware health, backup replication traffic, core switch health, and more. While the "single pane of glass" concept is largely salesman hot air, we were able to combine several monitoring and alerting targets into a single system, improving visibility and uptime as a result.
Due to the highly customizable nature of Sciencelogic, it is agile enough to support new technologies and emerging needs as they arise. While some research may be required on your part, it's almost always been able to perform a specific task we've needed. It has also scaled reliably as high as our license count would take us.
We have largely left Sciencelogic as a standalone system in our environment. While it is the backbone of our alerting and monitoring internal processes, our company doesn't use much in the way of automation for remediation. We have the system generate alerts, that are sent out via email and SMS (via an HTTP API call to a separate SMS gateway) that go to a team of engineers for investigation/potential remediation.
- We have been able to provide traffic utilization and basic alerting as a service to other departments in our company, such as telephony, disaster recovery, and various server teams, to provide them with additional visibility.
- IPSLA monitoring was basically enabled out of the box. This enabled us to find root cause, for an MPLS circuit issue that had plagued us for months.
We use two monitoring systems in our environment for the sake of redundancy and cross-checking. That said, we have seen that Sciencelogic occupies a unique space in the market. Its primary competition in our use case was SolarWinds NPM, and Whatsupgold. We found it could produce polished-looking results even better than SolarWinds while being nearly as customizable as WhatsUp Gold. While we eventually settled on using 2 of the 3 we heavily tested, we found Sciencelogic's graphing and customization to be indispensable, even if ease of use was lacking at times.