It’s 11pm – do you know where your data are?
This venerable public-service announcement could serve as a slogan for LogicMonitor, which partners with the likes of NetApp, VMware, Dell, HP, and Citrix to deliver SaaS-based monitoring software.
Case in point: company CEO Kevin McGibben points out that during a big Amazon reboot earlier this year,“if you didn’t have notification tools in place for that reboot and if (Amazon’s) monitoring was in that cloud, then you weren’t notified at the time.” Furthermore, he points out that “interdependencies in the entire stack were affected” by the reboot.
Santa Barbara, CA-based LogicMonitor monitors “physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environments,” McGibben says. “numerous data sources with literally hundreds of device types and technologies are monitored.”
McGibben says the company’s customers are using cloud-computing initiatives because “they have to stay nimble, so are constantly adding data sources to their stacks. Well more than half of our customers have at least some multi-tenant or some presence in the cloud.”
“Most of our customers are going from legacy (infrastructre) to embracing virtualization hosted-services and using private cloud, while figuring out public cloud. We also work with companies who are building their own private clouds.”
The company works on month-to-month contracts, and allows business-side people to “bring business metrics into the system and plot them. (There are) multiple dashboards, so you can wake up in the morning, drink your coffee, look at overall metrics, and get a big overview. You can see how much money you’re making – or not, if you have an interruption.”
This doesn’t imply that you must have someone sitting there with coffee in hand around the clock, McGibben points out. “There is automated alerting, so you don’t just have to star at the glass,” he says. “You can drop a lightweight Java collector in (for the data folks), which watches anytning to be monitored – apps, servers, networking, storage, virtualzation, etc. It will use whatever protocol is appropriate for polling.”