SL1 in a Managed IT Services Environment
Updated January 04, 2024

SL1 in a Managed IT Services Environment

Benjamin Gerber | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with ScienceLogic SL1

A smooth implementation depends on the knowledge of the implementers. Our own company implements Sl1 on the different customer environments. When they encountered hurdles, they were dependent on other resources to help them figure out what the issues were, before they could continue. This puts a lot of strain on the project and the timelines they have to complete it in.
We use SL1 predominantly for Event Monitoring and overall health in our different customer environments. One of the business problems that we addressed by using SL1's process monitoring on servers via a custom dashboard, was to identify which application was causing high CPU usage and related processes. We created a custom dashboard that combined all the pieces of the puzzle together in one window, and we could focus our attention on what needed to be done, instead of trying to log onto to each server and see what was causing the problems. Creating dashboards in SL1 is quite easy and when there are issues in any of our customer environments, a dashboard can easily be put together, that highlights certain areas of technology, and this enables us to
Both

Pros

  • Event Monitoring
  • Dashboards and creating custom Dashboards
  • Device Discovery

Cons

  • More freedom to create custom dashboards as on the previous versions we could do much more
  • The Performance TAB windows is too small and cannot be resized or maximized when looking at reports for "Overview", "File System" and any of those items.
  • There are not enough widgets to create stunning dashboard in AP2
  • The reporting feauture is a very untouched area.
  • Better visibility into different customer infrastructures if you are a Managed IT Services Provider
  • Offers a "One Tool One Product Solution" to manage all of our customers infrastructures environments. Trend analyses enables us to collate event trends throughout all the customers and easily identify problems that may arise on other customers environments.
  • Reporting on devices and software have become much more faster and takes the guess work out of what is in the environment
We used BMC as our monitoring tool, and BMC True Sight for Capacity Management. SL1 is great in Event monitoring, but it lacks the Capacity Management features as it is not a Capacity Management Tool. It would be great if we can use it as a Capacity Management Tool with all the rich feature sets that BMC True Sight offers. One Tool that does it all!

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy ScienceLogic SL1 again?

Yes

BMC Helix ITSM (Remedy)
In most of the scenarios I was able to assist users to view info pertaining to there specific case study. In cases where I was unable to help users or customers, it was a lack on our side, and not a problem with the product as we have not implemented all the functionality as I would have liked. SL1 is not a capacity tool, but it can be used to feed information into systems like BMC Truesight to do capacity reporting on.

ScienceLogic SL1 Feature Ratings

AIOps Features
10.0
Monitoring and Alerting
10
Performance Analytics
10
Incident Management
10
Service Desk Integration
10
Root Cause Analysis
10
Capacity Planning Tool
10
Configuration and Change Management
10
Automated Remediation
10
Collaboration and Communication
10
Threat Intelligence
10

Integrating ScienceLogic SL1

I am not part of the integration team, but again I can assure you, because of the many customers we have and the different systems they have that we need to monitor, ScienceLogic was the obvious choice and it's ease of integration with other systems. When we take on a new customer, we do not always know what to expect to find in their environments, but whatever we have faced in our customer environments, ScienceLogic was able to provide an integration.
  • BMC Truesight - Wee feed data into BMC TrueSight for our Capacity Management Team
  • We have integrated with our customers VMware environments to all info to report on without the need of having to access the vCenter Servers.
  • We have also integrated with our customers Citrix environments
  • We also integrated with our customers Azure environments without any issues.
With the correct access, the integrations are really seamless. One of the biggest plusses of ScienceLogic is it's ability to integrate with different systems and especially in an environment with multiple tenants.
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Service Now
We do not currently have customers that uses AWS, but ScienceLogic integrates with the platform already, so when the time comes, we will be ready.
We are standardizing our systems and Service Now is one of those systems that we will be integrating. ScienceLogic has the ability to feed information into the system, that will make our life's so much easier.
  • File import/export
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
If you have an integration that you are not sure of, reach out to the ScienceLogic Support Team. With their many years of experience and knowledge, they will be eager to help as our success, is their success. When it comes to any integration, it is always best to reach out to the vendor before attempting an integration. The chances are that they have already done this in other customer environments, and can give you guidance to help you get your integration up and running with another system, and alleviates the stress of having to figure it out all on your own.

ScienceLogic SL1 Implementation

  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - When doing any type of change to any infrastructure, it is always important to test the implementtation before hand and gather as much info as possible that would simulate a live scenario. Test every scenario that you can think of, as this makes your case for implementing much stronger as you have the facts at hand. When your change for implementation get presented at a customers Change Approval Board, then you would have no hassles of getting it approvedas we did with our customers as we test and test and test befor we implement.
  • Increased CPU utilization on overall VmWare infrastructure
  • Interference from customer Antivirus product

ScienceLogic SL1 Reliability

SL is always there and online when you need to get info from it. The only times when SL was not available in our own data center, was when network links from out side of the data center was down and those links were not in our controll. Having a central database and people accessing it all over the world, may put a bit of constarin on the performance of the dashboards when reports gets generated, but that is far and few n between.
SL's overall performance is outstanding, but SL's reporting sections is a bit of a nightmare and hopefully attention will be given to that section when a new release comes out. The reporting interface is not great and it looks like this section did not enjoy as much attention as the rest of the products interfaces. Depending on the info that needs to be generated in the report, the delivery of that report can vary. It will also depend on other activities taking place at the same time. Sometimes a report takes long, and when you evetually et it, it is empty.

Configuring ScienceLogic SL1

The configurability of ScienceLogic SL1 is great and would cater for any type of business no matter how limited or complext that environment is. The only limitation would be of the person who is doing the configuration, but even that has been simplified by ScienceLogic SL1 team to allow for faster implementation and integration into a customer's environment.
It is always best to keep to the manufacturers recommendations no matter the product. If you get support from a vendour and not directly from SciencLogic support team, it is always advisable to keep to the standard recommendations as you may change in future to another vendour for whatever reason, and the new vendor would have no problem in supporting your ScienceLogic implementation due to evrything that has been configured according to best practices
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
Some - we have added small pieces of custom code - Although the product supports the adding of custom code and it is quite easy to add if you are a person that understands Python coding language, but it is kept to the bare minimum, and merely added or altered to fix a bug that have not yet been identified by SciencLogic support team.
Our company has a few members that are part of a wider group of people across the world, who regularly meets and discuss configuration or customization issues or improvements with the ScienceLogic supportteam, that helps improve the product for all customers worldwide, and this is normally considered when a new version of the product is rolled out.

Using ScienceLogic SL1

5000 - The business functions range from Operators that monitor Events, Administrators that use dashboards to get an overview of there specific devices, to the managers that that just need to have a birds eye view of how the environment looks on a daily basis.
20 - We have most of the skills in-house to support ScienceLogic SL1 on an on-going basis. Most of them come from a tooling background and have been working with similar products. I started implementing SL1 with the team, and was involved on the Wintel side to figure and sort out all the snags during implementation. I then started to explore SL1 and how it could make my job easier, and it put me on a path to get my operator certificate, as well as my Professional certificate. I create dashboards in AP2 for the different organizations.
  • Dashboards to have an over all view of our customers infrastructure health
  • Data provided by SL1 to BMC TrueSight for Capacity Management
  • Event Monitoring of different customer environments
  • Dashboards for specific Technologies like the Exchange team, the Wintel Team, the SQL team
  • There are a lot of built in monitoring tools that we have not utilized
  • We have also just touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building a dashboard and we will be catering to the specific needs of our teams
  • Auto restart feature in Sl1 will allow us to get event when those crucial services has not started after server reboots and also minimize the P1's that we have as a result of that.
Our company has standardized on SL1 as we are a managed service provider and SL1 caters for all our needs. The fact that SL1 is a multitenant solution makes it an obvious choice as we do not have to implement different software for each customer. The other important thing is that we can start collating information and identify trends. This allows us to be proactive across all our customers and stop a problem before it arises.
  • We created a dashboard that shows the highest process untilisation to identify what was the major cause of High CPU usage in one of our customers.
  • We also created custom dashboards to fullfill each individual teams need to be able to perform their daily tasks.

Evaluating ScienceLogic SL1 and Competitors

  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
As we are a Managed Service Provider, SL1 offers scalability as we do not always know what the future holds. We needed a platform that would cater for each individual customer, but allow us to manage them all under one umbrella with ease. SL1 offer this capability without the need of different software and the resources and technical personnel to operate those platforms. We have a group of people that focusses on implementing SL1 on all the customers and grow their expertise and experience on a daily basis due to the different customer environments. Sl1 integrates with most if not all of the different systems that we encounter in our customer environments and again offers us the One Tool Solution to manage our customer environments.
I was unfortunately not part of the evaluation and selection process. But the guys in our company made the best choice that suites our needs and the needs of our customers. If we only catered for one customer, I am sure that we would still have chose SL1. No matter the size of the company or the amount of customers. SL1 caters for them all and has the scalability to grow, as your company grows. It is a modern tool for the modern world we work and live in, but it also caters for those who were left behind in the technology world.
Yes - BMC Remedy was replace by SL. Our license have come to and end on BMC Remedy, and we wanted to standardize our software across all customers that we support. Apart from the standardisation of the software, this would also allow us to see anomalies and trends accross all of our customers. This would mean that we can be more proactive and our reaction times to resoltion would be faster.

ScienceLogic SL1 Training

  • Online Training
  • In-Person Training
When I joined our company, I did not know about the in person training at firts. Logging onto the SL University, I realised that there were different sessions being held at different times throughout the year. The training itself was good, but being in a different time zone, made it difficult to attend, but the sessions that I attended was great!
The training is excellent and I gained a clear understanding of each module. Most importantly, I could do it at my own pace to make sure that I understood each module. I also had the privilege to test what I have learned in our own test environment before I went on with the next module which gave me much more confidence in what I was doing.

ScienceLogic SL1 Support

We had an issue with a report that was not working correctly. In our company, we need to log a ticket with our Service Desk, which relays the request to our SL1 team. They have an SLA they need to adhere to, and if they cannot resolve with a specific issue, they then in turn log a request with SL1. I think that the Sl1 feedback in getting an issue resolved, is quicker than what our own team get get it resolved.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Due to us having so many customers that we support, it is vital to purchase premium support. Our customers are large companies that are result driven and cannot afford to loose money. Having premium support means that we can get the support we need, to be able to support our customers in return in the same way. SL1 aims to have happy customers and our aim is the same for our customers.
Being one of the large customers that use the product, we always get exceptional support. Our tooling team engage with ScienceLogic team on a weekly basis. I am not involved in raising tickets for support with the ScienceLogic Team, but I will bet my life on it that we would not have chosen ScienceLogic, if they did not provide exceptional support for this product. It is not only the ScienceLogic name that is at stake when you use the product, but also our name as we implement it on a variety of different customers. Our customers success, is our success and in turn is ScienceLogic's success.

Using ScienceLogic SL1

There are parts of the interface on AP2 that does not work well and cannot be resized.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
Requires technical support
Inconsistent
  • The Device Search Functionality
  • The Device Investigator
  • The Device Reporting function
  • Trying to run a report under the report section. Most of our reports do not work and the interface is quite shocking

Relationship with ScienceLogic

I have not been privelaged to have been part of the sales process. Our company has a rigurous process that is followed when a new vendor is chosen and any new vendor needs to meet our criteria before they are acepted. I can assure you, that every aspect has been taken into consideration before the choice was made and ScienceLogic was no exception to the rule.
The after sale process is just as important to our company, than the sales processand most definitely not a point that would have been overlooked by our company with there rigirous process when selecting a new vendour. The overall engagement is of the highest priority for us, and we continue regularly to engage with the ScienceLogic team on various subjects with geat interaction.
I was not privileged to be part of the principal
terms while they were negotiated. I do however believe that our company would
expect the same principal terms that our customers expect of us, from any vendor
that we do business with. These principal terms would be:

1. Technical Support

2. Aftersales support

3. A Dedicated Account Manager

4. A product that is customizable if needed

5.
A product that is maintained and developed constantly.

6.
A company which strives to improve customer satisfaction.

These are some of the principals that come to mind when I
think of getting a vendor onboarded into our company.
I think the vendor is currently at it's peak, but that is only from my point of view at this moment. The vendor engagement is great, but it takes willingness from both parties to make effective dealings, and ScienceLogic does not lack any willingness, enthusiasim or passion when it comes to dealing with them.

Upgrading ScienceLogic SL1

Comments

  • Mark Elbrecht | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Mark Elbrecht
    (Vendor Representative) commented a year ago
    Thank you for taking the time to share your experience using SL1. It is good to hear our dashboards were helpful, I will pass on the feedback to our product team in order to further improve them.

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