My ScienceLogic Review
Updated August 30, 2023

My ScienceLogic Review

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

Overall Satisfaction with ScienceLogic SL1

We do not have many issues in what we need to do, it is very flexable
We use it to monitor our on prem and cloud platforms (Azure, AWS). It escalates callouts to our engineers via PagerDuty and then raises a ticket in hornbill for the incident.
  • It monitors our devices and reports on the detections we have created.
  • monitors web endpoints
  • can handle bespoke complex monitors
  • discovery of devices automatically
  • Most of the things I can think of have now been addressed in this new release.
  • Documentation could be less ambiguous sometimes
  • More active to detecting system alerts and having them sorted before we have need to inform them SAAS

Do you think ScienceLogic SL1 delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with ScienceLogic SL1's feature set?

Yes

Did ScienceLogic SL1 live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of ScienceLogic SL1 go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy ScienceLogic SL1 again?

Yes

ScienceLogic was implemented before I started 4 years ago, I don't know what they had before that.
We put this into every acquisition we make for monitoring, we are in Australia, Malta, America and the UK.
It raises callouts and hornbill tickets.
  • We have built our own Hornbill ticketing integration
  • we have also integrates SL1 into firing jobs of on Rundeck
  • It tells us when things have gone wrong or are going wrong which helps us to fix things quickly and inform our clients before they inform us.
These are two different type's of products really that cross over each other at some intersections. Dynatrace is a Deep Diving monitoring tool as ScienceLogic monitors what can be seen on the surface, like logs, cpu memory, cpu and memory would be a crossover, and ScienceLogic would tell you about usage and Dynatrace could tell you how much each element was using.
This is well suited for medium to large business and not really needed for small companies.

Integrating ScienceLogic SL1

This is like anything, its easy when you know, the product is so diverse to be able to give the flexibility that you need, because of this there is a lot to it. That said, it is presented in a way that that is very logical, it is very powerful, it is the only monitoring system anyone will ever need and the staff are friendly to deal with and will also support you through your learning curve.
  • AWS Cloud Platform Linux and Windows Servers
  • Azure Cloud Platform Linux and Windows Servers
  • Onsite Linux and Windows Servers
  • Mashery
  • Hornbill
  • Rundeck
  • pager duty
We monitor memory, cpu, swap, ping which are under the standard discovery along with bespoke monitors, the bespoke monitors range from checking for URL sites being down to writing python code in a dynamic app to integrate and interrogate other systems which pull back information and act upon that information, either with an alert passing the alert to pager duty or passing it to Rundeck to fire off an automation to try and fix the issue or fire off a runbook to try and fix the issue along with raising a ticket into the hornbill system for tracking. We have also integrated this into the hornbill's cloud ticketing system. If anyone would like to see a working example of python code that they can use and expand on to help integrate Hornbill ticketing with SL1 I have an example in the hornbills forums that you can create a runbook automation from. https: //community.hornbill.com/topic/22170-im-wanting-to-create-hornbill-tickets-using-linux-os-with-curl-also-by-using-the-python-programming-language-to-access-the-api/#comment-105100 Remove the space in-front of the https above This should Fastrack anyone who is trying to achieve the same. The alerts in science logic do not inherit ticket number information, i.e. an alert is raised as a major, it creates a ticket and receives a ticket number then the Alert changes to a critical state. in essence the major alert and the critical alert are totally individual and the details of the ticket reference will not be passed through, you have to manually fire off a runbook which looks for a previous state and if it exists then pull the ticket value from that and update the new alert with it. This for me was an unexpected find but I did manage to create a work around by directly calling the Database and performing queries on it to obtain the information needed. I did reach out to science logic on this, through the management team and through the support portal, once again I found them very helpful.
  • Kubernetes
ScienceLogic have given me a quick walkthrough of how they support Kubernetes as we plan to move our systems over to it next year. Although ScienceLogic does support Kubernetes, our Kubernetes runs with bottle rocket, this doesn't not use ssh for login and the ScienceLogic documentation stats that it requires it, I have to re-connect with ScienceLogic to see if there is something in this area that can be worked on. Our Migration is planned for next year so there is time to get something sorted and investigated of this style of platform.
  • File import/export
  • Single Signon
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
  • Javascript widgets
Python, back end direct connection to the SL1 database using python.
Take out the cloud platform against taking the on-prem version, this will focus the majority of your time to setting up alerts and focusing on your company and not managing the systems other than the collectors which will be on your premis.

ScienceLogic SL1 Reliability

Its always available
Generally its very quick, we have a cloud platform so the hardware underneath is managed by them so its not an issue.

Configuring ScienceLogic SL1

This is so configurable its amazing
use the Autodiscover where possible
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface - its a point and click configuration so it is very easy. He have changes colour's to pectate between production and test, we have changed auto refresh rates, we allow each user to configure it there own way and we have change the displayed columns in the events page
Yes - we have added extensive custom code - Bespoke Dynamic apps written in Python and it was easy to do if you have developer knowledge and we needed to monitor things that where out of the norm, like logging onto vcentre with an auth token that you get from the API and then presenting this token back to it to log on to get some metrics.
We have written automations in python to talk to our ticketing system (Hornbill) and we have written many Python scripts to integrate into RunDeck and any other third party appliance along with writing bespoke monitor's that run through lists and lists of checks .

Using ScienceLogic SL1

21 - Sysyops, First Line of Support Devops Second Line of support SRE's Third line of support IT managers, manage the IT departments and the many business areas that use IT functionality.
7 - 1 Automations and monitoring Lead Engineer, a person who looks at things and works out integrations with third party bespoke monitors. 1 Sysops Manager, manages the first line of support who's team ensure that the relevant IT areas are notified of issues being shown in monitoring. 5 Sysop engineers who handle the ad-hoc IT requests and fault cases/monitored alert that are reported to them
  • detection in our racing services, this is our largest revenue service and is global, we use science logic to ensure we have this service up 24/7 so we do not have financial penalties for going over our pre defined SLA's
  • Content, this ensures that images from reporters around the work can get pictures and stories of breaking new globally, Science logic reports to us about any issues between when the reported connect up to send us there story all the way to our editing rooms.
  • Stream, we use ScienceLogic to ensure that streaming sports video footage is working globally across our platforms and that our delivery websites are working and not going over capacity.
  • We car looking at moving into Kubernetes and we have now started to system test this monitoring
  • integrating zebrum to scan logfiles
We are likely to renew our ScienceLogic platform as there just isn't anything we have found that beats it.

Evaluating ScienceLogic SL1 and Competitors

  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
Ease of use, when you already have complicated systems that you want to monitor, you dont want to have a complicated monitoring systems to add to your burden, Science Logic makes this easy
I would do it the same

ScienceLogic SL1 Training

  • Online Training
  • In-Person Training
It was good, Do the online training first and understand it and you will get the most out of the in-person training that way
The online training was fine, it gives you the first step that you need to take.

ScienceLogic SL1 Support

I have found the UK (Ireland) and the US support brilliant to deal with, knowledgeable and they understand me.
ProsCons
Kept well informed
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
Difficult to get immediate help
Premium support is not a thing that I have heard of, I've heard of there professional services, we have never had need to purchased that and this is down to budgeting, our budgets will not allow is to allocate money to a just in case item.
That said we have always found a way to get through, and the basic level of support and documentation has always been sufficient for us to work things out.
Yes - Mostly the answer to this is yes its resolved professionally and in a timely fashion, some times the fix is in the next release and you have to wait until an update is rolled out, this is not an uncommon thing in our industry.
There is one particular person who often goes above and beyond, he lives on long island in the united states called Christien, he's knowledgeable, proactive, and a star for the company, he goes out of his way to get things sorted and I'd like to thank him.

Using ScienceLogic SL1

Because I have not yet found anything that it cannot do.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • monitoring of endpoints
  • monitoring of standard metrics
  • the ability to set threshold's on metrics
  • importing of power packs
  • Discovering new devices
  • Bespoke Dynamic Apps
  • Discovering AWS Could services and devices and disabling what you do not require to save licenses
  • My List is small for what I find cumbersome

Relationship with ScienceLogic

I have never had an issue with any of the representatives I have seen from science logic they are very professional and very helpful and try to understand what you need as a business
Very good and they where very encouraging to help us all get skilled up and to use the produce proactively
I didn't do the negotiation

Upgrading ScienceLogic SL1

Yes - Sometimes, we have had some unexpected errors and some of the engineers have wanted to get off and I've had to ensure everything is working before I said I was happy, else if you find out later then you are down to putting a ticket into the support portal when previously you had a team of engineers around you that you let go of.
We have very few issues.
  • Bug Fix Issues
  • More functionality
  • Oracle Linux 8 support
  • monitors been able to use TLS 3
  • AWS service detecting cache working correctly
  • Kubernetes monitoring