SL1 Shines
Updated June 02, 2022
SL1 Shines
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ScienceLogic SL1
We are an MSP providing monitoring and analytics services to audio/video and UC customers. We use SL1 to monitor customers' audio / video integrated rooms and UC endpoint-enabled rooms including Poly, Cisco and LifeSize devices. We have a 24/7 customer support operation centered around receiving customer device events from SL1, auto-generating tickets into our ITSM platform and providing real-time analytics and trending report analysis through SL1 collected data. This data and analytics help customers make business decision surrounding the use and optimal deployment of their conferencing and enriched media services to their internal teams.
Pros
- Automation engine - easy to take scripted action on specific device events.
- Automation action open source - the platform allows you to custom build snippet actions with Python to remediate any unhealthy event detected on devices.
- Manager of managers - the platform has several ways of receiving inbound alerts and alarms not only from directly monitored devices but from 3rd-party solutions in the form of traps, emails and REST API connections.
Cons
- Built-in Reporting - the reporting engine that comes with the platform is woefully inadequate to perform most of any report request that is not a very simple and basic output of data.
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment support - the platform is bound by Power-Packs for deployment of monitoring solutions for specific device types. These are great when first starting out using the platform as they allow you to on-board several types of device support, but when you mature and start building your own actions and monitoring solutions, they are cumbersome to work with.
- Current Platform Architecture - the main CDB design requires lots of memory and CPU to handle the load of all the threaded processing of even a few thousand monitored devices. To scale up to several thousand or tens of thousands if devices becomes a pricing hurdle. Also, in a cloud deployment strategy, this processing power comes at a hefty price for cloud resources, not including the pricey SL1 license costs as well.
- Custom development support - when you start developing your own snippet actions for monitoring custom devices or solutions, ScienceLogic only provides a pay-for Professional Services resource to assist you in even the smallest of development questions. The product customer support desk will not spend time discussing development solutions and providing development support. This has been an issue for SL from the beginning and the company needs to put together a development support arm.
Being a Managed Service Provider, we have greatly increased our visibility into customer networks and devices using SL1. It provides a solution that allows us to not only be alerted to customer events and issues, but through the single pain of glass design and multi-tenancy of the application, we can safely and securely offer customers visibility to the dashboard to see their events and our team responses as well.
Every new product that we add to our managed service portfolio requires that we have monitoring support in place. This means that we are constantly looking at new devices or solutions to monitor using SL1. This is allowing us to more effectively grow our service offering to our customers.
Over the course of working with SL1 for the past 10 years, I have been the designer of 3 separate ITSM integrations to SL1 (Twice with ServiceNow, once with SalesForce and once with Solutions360). I have also integrated SL1 as a manager of managers to SolarWinds N-central, PRTG, vRealize OPs, ReliaTel, various AWS resources events from CloudWatch, a custom-built ELK stack app, and various direct email alert formats (Cisco TMS, Poly RPRM, etc.). With all of these apps, the longest development items have been the other vendor APIs and connectivity issues and not SL1. SL1 is very easy to integrate with as a platform and its API is very well documented, easy to reference and manipulate, and the API objects have most of the resources necessary to do anything you want through the API calls.
- Business services - we are just starting to use the business services section, but the idea of transitioning from a device monitoring paradigm to a service monitoring paradigm sites right where we need it as a managed service provider. Our customers don't usually care too much about specific monitored events in one particular room as those are remediated locally and with our help desk support, which they are generally pleased with. What they really want is to have metrics that comprise 'services' and to see how that service is doing on a monthly basis. We are looking into the SL1 business services feature to do just that.
- DCM - the device component mapping function in SL1 is really neat and compelling for most customers. I have not seen this type of breakdown of nested or component devices to describe a room or conglomerate system in any other apps.
- Positive - it enables our managed service business and provides the collection and event management arm for our customers.
- IBM Netcool Network Management, SolarWinds N-central, HP BTO (formerly OpenView) Discontinued, BMC Helix ITSM (Remedy), PRTG Network Monitor, ReliaTel, vRealize Operations, IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold, Nagios Core and Elasticsearch
SL1 stands apart from the others, imo, in their workflow automation capabilities. Giving customers a Python snippet environment to develop customer-coded diagnostic and remediation solutions stands out for us. Some of the other products I've looked at provide similar capabilities, but SL1 seems to just work better end-to-end.
ScienceLogic SL1 Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Not sure - I did not have any change management issues
- DRBD syncing has historically been hard to set up and get working
Using ScienceLogic SL1
100 - Sales, Product Management, IT, Customer Operations
4 - Network and systems administration experience, database query knowledge/experience, VM deployment/configuration, Linux administration experience
- Internal systems monitoring and management
- Customer systems monitoring/management
- Managed service enablement
- Manager of managers
- Monitoring of multiple SL1 instances and infrastructure
- Remote jump host to customer devices
Evaluating ScienceLogic SL1 and Competitors
- Product Features
- Product Usability
Back when I first selected it, the support to monitor video endpoints and infrastructure drove our decisions because we were a video managed service provider. Today, the flexibility to build your own device support through dynamic applications with Python is the most important thing to us.
We did a thorough evaluation of NMS/EMS platforms and SL was the only one with enough flexibility to develop our own device monitoring apps. I would not change the process.
ScienceLogic SL1 Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
No. I am a long time SL customer and don't need it. SLAM group helps out a lot.
Yes - No. It was eventually resolved several releases later but the SDLC process takes forever unless it is a massive product failure.
I have had a couple of system crashes over the years. There are team members in support (James Tsurata, Leo Tsoi, etc.) that if they get involved in your issue, it will be resolved immediately with several resolutions to choose from. I have had the pleasure of working with both of these guys on issues and they have restored my systems from backup or to a useable point with great urgency. They are top shelf!
Using ScienceLogic SL1
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Event management
- Device management
- Device discovery
- Reporting - throw that report engine away and start over
- Dashboard development - again, throw it away and start over
- Ticketing - not easy at all to use
Yes - Works well, but needs more detailed capability. Might want to refactor it to come up to speed with other mobile apps.
Integrating ScienceLogic SL1
- Crestron XIO Cloud
- Solutions 360
- SalesForce
In each case, we have integrated SL1 (EM7) for the purposes of workflow automation. For Solutions 360 and SalesForce, it was to generate trouble tickets from SL1 events. For XIO Cloud, it was to ingest XIO Cloud alerts and create SL1 events. All solutions were REST API development efforts with programmatic PUT and GET requests respectively. The ScienceLogic API call for creating events is very simple to implement and we've found the API very flexible to use.
- ServiceNow
Yes. We have purchased the ScienceLogic PowerFlow app especially for this integration. It is a purpose-built app for integration third-party systems to ScienceLogic.
- File import/export
- API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
- ETL tools
The PowerFlow app from ScienceLogic
From an integration standpoint, SL1 is very open and easy to work with. LoEs should be low for any integration project and will only be dependent on the third-party system, not SL1. Even if you make straight database queries for your data (which I would not recommend since the API is so straightforward), the database schemas are also very intuitive and easy to use. All-in-all, SL1 is an easy system to integrate with.
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