It’s 11pm \u2013 do you know where your data are?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Case in point: company CEO Kevin McGibben points out that during a big Amazon reboot earlier this year,\u201cif 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.\u201d Furthermore, he points out that \u201cinterdependencies in the entire stack were affected\u201d by the reboot.<\/p>\n
Santa Barbara, CA-based LogicMonitor monitors \u201cphysical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environments,\u201d McGibben says. \u201cnumerous data sources with literally hundreds of device types and technologies are monitored.\u201d <\/p>\n
McGibben says the company’s customers are using cloud-computing initiatives because \u201cthey 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.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cMost 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company works on month-to-month contracts, and allows business-side people to \u201cbring 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 \u2013 or not, if you have an interruption.\u201d<\/p>\n
This doesn’t imply that you must have someone sitting there with coffee in hand around the clock, McGibben points out. \u201cThere is automated alerting, so you don’t just have to star at the glass,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can drop a lightweight Java collector in (for the data folks), which watches anytning to be monitored \u2013 apps, servers, networking, storage, virtualzation, etc. It will use whatever protocol is appropriate for polling.\u201d<\/p>\n