You only get noticed when things go wrong.
The burden of entire companies rests on your shoulders.
Your work day never ends at 5:30 pm.
You’re on call 24/7/365.
You keep things running 99.999% of the time.
Today, we express our gratitude for your knowledge, dedication, and patience.

Until very recently I was your client: the VP of Marketing for a business consulting firm where I doubled as the in-house IT. It was my job to bring on MSPs who could solve the bigger problems within our infrastructure. This included two complete office moves involving all new cat-6 cabling in newly built offices, new servers, new backup, migration to MSFT Server 2008, a switch to hosted exchange, and much more. For one reason or another we went through 3 MSPs in less than 5 years. It took some time to find that perfect MSP, but once we did we became an instant source of referrals.

Here are 5 things this MSP did really well that made us loyal customers:

1. We had less downtime

When our phones, internet, file server, network, or SaaS applications are down, we couldn’t work. This is the number one thing we do not want to happen and the only way it happens is through negligence, not having a Plan B, or an accident.

Great MSPs can explain why we’re down in plain english, and don’t blame the failure on us for not knowing enough about our IT infrastructure. A great MSP understands we’re a small business and everyone is doing 10 things. I was offered a simple solution to get back up, fast. Even better, they provided me with a plan for how to avoid these things in the future. I loved hearing about redundancy scenarios, it felt like I was saving the business money before anything actually happened.

2. They kept us in the loop

Great providers discussed changes with me before making them. Sometimes seemingly minor changes have major consequences. If my MSP tells me something big is going to happen, and I can think of any reason why that might adversely affect our day-to-day operations, then I’m glad I was told before something just “happened.”

There was peace of mind knowing that there’s nothing major going on behind the scenes without my knowledge, and our MSP showed that they were considering the possible workflow impact of changes made. The side benefit for the MSP is that they’ve absolved themselves of blame — at that point it’s something we agreed to work on together.

3. Things were fixed before they broke

A great MSP is like a great doctor; you’re monitoring our health and thinking holistically about what I’m trying to get done. Whenever our MSP was updating the server, or performing regular system maintenance, they would provide us with “things to be aware of” – completely outside of what he was there to do. That kind of check up gave me the freedom to worry less about the things the MSP said they were monitoring.

Weekly reporting helped, too. We are very analytical about things like website uptime, latency, and general speed of productivity. The reports they were able to create through monitoring and site visits were remarkable and allowed us to make data-driven decisions about the business. This kind of insight and thoughtful attitude towards our business changed the way we perceived an MSP. Consequently we sought out more solutions through them.

4. They went beyond a “fix”

Being kept up-to-date on the latest and greatest can help us move the business forward. Solutions that give us a competitive edge, save us money, or otherwise move the hassle of IT off of our plate is preferable to just “fixing the glitch.”

Small businesses are typically against large capital expenditures. The ability to scale quickly with solutions that keep us lightweight are attractive ones. Even something as simple as moving to a hosted Exchange solution will drastically change our infrastructure if we’re currently relying on a SBS 2003 (no fun at all).

At times, this is how it feels when an MSP explains technology to us.

5. We were given simple explanations to complex IT problems

The technical intricacies of an error are usually lost on small business people. There’s generally more pressing matters we’re obsessing about. So the more digestible an MSP can make that explanation, the better. We were always impressed by our MSP’s ability to distill something highly technical into something we could wrap our biz-dev brains around.

There’s a degree of comfort and familiarity when working with MSPs that understand our level of technical know-how. The more digestible that information is, the more likely I am to adopt whatever it is you’re suggesting.

Summary:
At the end of the day, we don’t want to switch MSPs. It’s a pain to ask around, read reviews, set up appointments and listen to the sales pitches. So that means we’ll suffer through a lot of pain before saying good-bye. That said, a proactive, intelligence-driven, and quick-to-action MSP that is personable, but doesn’t outstay their welcome will retain existing clients and be referred more new ones over time.

— This guest article was contributed by Matt Harding – Business Consultant

On my flight out to the ConnectWise IT Nation event, I thumbed through the Wall Street Journal old school style and ran across an ad for the WSJ Wine Store claiming you can save $100 on a special Thanksgiving pinot. My first reaction was to ask myself, “Why is Rupert Murdoch selling wine to WSJ readers?”. I suppose it’s his form of product extension — when companies add connected products in an effort to increase stickiness, average revenue, usability and sometimes, happiness. This particular stretch might actually be a distraction from WSJ’s core business, but you can imagine a couple of cigar smoking fat cats enjoying their pinot and telling each other how great the WSJ is and complaining about the election results. At least that’s probably Murdoch’s premise.

For LogicMonitor, the idea of product extension is more simply tied to the fundamental user experience. You may know that LogicMonitor was founded by SaaS industry vets who built out the datacenters for web businesses like Citrix Online and ad networks like ValueClick. “Tech Steve” founded the company leveraging a deep understanding of the IT ops technology that lives in the datacenter. The experience made him want to solve the age-old monitoring problem that legacy solutions still struggle so hard to do well with their premise-based technology. So later, it wasn’t a surprise that web-based businesses started subscribing to our SaaS monitoring service in large numbers as they exhausted their ability to rely on open source monitoring tools like Nagios.

As early adopters, the web-based businesses pushed us hard to monitor all sorts of new technologies, and bake the functionality into the same software platform so that it “just works” in the same way. Responding to their requests, we queue up the development of most any new datasource (the sw package that we drop into our platform to monitor a given device or app) that can be deployed among our greater user base and then incorporate it into the product. Sometimes this takes a day (other times weeks), but it gets done and represents our core philosophy to make our customers’ lives easier by making their monitoring way better than they could have imagined.

What we stumbled on along the way is that other business segments aside from web-based companies have unmet monitoring needs as well. Managed service providers (MSPs) are a prime example. MSPs take a variety of forms, from value added resellers to System Integrators to Cloud Providers. Not only do MSPs need to monitor their own infrastructure, more and more of them are turning away from the thin margins of the equipment trade to a recurring revenue services model and need to ensure uptime and performance for their hosted or managed services.

LogicMonitor uniquely solves a problem for these MSPs in that they can use a single portal to manage their own infrastructure along with their customers’, wherever the services live. Many MSPs provide role-based access of their LogicMonitor portal to their customers, offering a higher level of service by not only showing the customer what they are paying for, but also how their services are performing. Transparency is an important value in today’s competitive MSP market.

Back at the office the scene is a whir of activity. Mostly engineers cloaked in LogicMonitor tees, flip flops and pens behind the ears with a mantra of getting things done and empathizing with our customers monitoring needs and determined to build the best product. Empathizing with our customers means finding ways our product can be connected seamlessly with their other fundamental technology solutions. That’s why we recently announced Puppet integration for scaling web businesses like Cedexis – to eliminate human intervention when deploying servers and apps, and know with confidence that what they deploy is automatically monitored.

The most recent example is ConnectWise integration. ConnectWise is a professional services automation solution used by several thousand MSPs. And although we had a work around in place for some time (by sending alert emails to ConnectWise to open a service ticket), our customers asked for a more thorough integration to utilize ConnectWise in a best practice manner. We just announced our integration and will continue to advance the functionality between LogicMonitor and ConnectWise. Which reminds me of why I got on the flight to Orlando in the first place and had a chance to read the paper. If Murdoch can sell wine as a WSJ product, maybe we should start selling pocket protectors. We could use them back at the office.

– This article was contributed by Kevin McGibben, CEO at LogicMonitor

One of the great things about being a customer of a SaaS delivered monitoring service like LogicMonitor is that they can get best practices in monitoring of all sorts of technologies without having to have an expert in that technology on staff.

A recent example when LogicMonitor updated some of the CPU datapoints used for VMware monitoring. (more…)

My grandpa loved cars. He worked on them with a level of passion most people reserve for things like expensive red wines and members of the opposite sex. He didn’t believe in outsourcing the care and maintenance of his wheels.

So I was shocked when one day he announced that changing his own oil was senseless.  He was prideful, but he also valued his time and was adept at basic math:  4 quarts + 1 filter + 1 oil pan + 1 jack + 10 greasy fingernails + 2 trips to the auto parts store + 3 hours labor was not less than $29.99 + 45 minutes of watching television in the lobby at Oil & Tune.

This same general equation comes to mind when we hear tales of people instrumenting their own network monitoring solutions with open-source tools (see price comparison chart). When you factor in not just software costs, but hardware costs, and people costs to maintain everything, open source monitoring tools can quickly become more costly than a SaaS-based monitoring solution like LogicMonitor. (For more detail, download the network and server monitoring comparison whitepaper.)

You don’t have to take our word for it. This recent Twitter exchange between a Nagios fan* and a LogicMonitor client illustrates the difference in philosophies.

@NagiosFan:  #Nagios is awesome Except for the parts that are terrible and inexcusable.  But mostly awesome.

@LogicMonitorUser:  @NagiosFan I cannot disagree more. Too much work for not enough gain. But we each value things differently #nagios is not for me.

@NagiosFan: @LogicMonitorUser haha that’s ok I like the extensibility and the initial ‘crafting’ for gains later. Plus, hella-automatable. What do you use?

@LogicMonitorUser:  @NagiosFan I went down a #SaaS path with @logicmonitor services. Rocks in so many ways, and responsive as hell. Most of my RFEs done.

Of course, there are use cases where building your own monitoring tool makes sense. But for the greater percentage of SysAdmins, IT departments, and CTO’s out there, LogicMonitor has done the hard work for you, and serves it up on a silicon platter.

You may want to take a minute and do the math, like grandpa finally did.  Then take your overalls off, put your toolbox away, grab a cup of coffee, and fire up a free trial…

*Twitter exchange was excerpted and the @names changed

- This article was contributed by Blake Beltram, Community Evangelist at LogicMonitor

Our digs here at LogicMonitor are cozy. Being adjacent to sales, I get to hear our sales engineers work with new customers, and it’s not uncommon that a new customer gets a rude awakening when they first install LogicMonitor. Immediately, LogicMonitor starts showing warnings and alerts.  ”Can this be right or is this a monitoring error?!”,  they ask. Delicately, our engineer will respond, “I don’t think that’s a monitoring error. It looks like you have a problem there.”

This happened recently with a customer who wanted to use LogicMonitor to watch their large VMware installation. We make excellent use of the VMware API which provides a rich set of data sources for monitoring. In this instance, LogicMonitor’s default alert settings threw several warnings about an ESX host’s datastore. There were multiple warnings regarding write latency problems on the ESX datastore, and drilling down, we found that a singular VM on that datastore was an ‘I/O hog’ that was grabbing so much disk resource that it was causing disk contention among the other VMs.

Finding the rogue host was easy with LogicMonitor’s clear, easy to read graphs. With the disk I\O of the different VMs plotted on the same graph, it was easy to spot the one whose disk operations were significantly higher than the rest.

We’ve seen this particular problem with VMware enough that our founder, Steve Francis, made this short video on how to quickly identify which VM on an ESX host is hogging resources: (Caveat: You must be able to understand Austrailian)

All our monitoring data sources have default alerting levels set that you can tune to fit your needs, but they’re pretty close out of the box as they’re the product of a LOT of monitoring experience.  This customer didn’t have to make any adjustments to our alert levels to find a problem they were unaware of with potential customer-facing impacts. The resolution was easy, they moved the VM to another ESX host with a different datastore, but the detection tool was the key.

If you’re wondering about your VMware infrastructure, sign up for a free trial with LogicMonitor today and see what you’ve been missing.

- This article was contributed by Jeffrey Barteet, TechOps Engineer at LogicMonitor

While most may not see Microsoft as a ‘disruptive innovator’ anymore, they seem to be claiming exactly that role in the enterprise hypervisor space, just as they did in gaming with the Xbox. As noted in “VMware, the bell tolls for thee, and Microsoft is ringing it“, Hyper-V appears to be becoming a legitimate competitor to VMware’s dominant ESXi product.  As described in the article, people reportedly now widely believe that “Microsoft functionality is now ‘good enough’” in the hypervisor – and it’s clearly cheaper (in license terms, at least.)  So is this change in perception really turning into more enterprises choosing Hyper-V?

From LogicMonitor’s view of the situation, we can say that in our customer base, virtualization platforms have been almost entirely VMware in the enterprise and most private cloud providers, with some Xen and Xenserver in the cloud provider space.  But, we have also been seeing more Hyper-V deployments being monitored in the last 6 months.   Still a lot less in absolute numbers than the number of ESXi infrastructures being added to LogicMonitor: but the rate of growth in Hyper-V is certainly higher.

This sounds like a “low-end disruption” classic case study from the Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton M. Christensen), except for the fact that the Innovator is a $250 billion company!

Right now, Microsoft seems to offer the ‘good enough’ feature set and enterprise features, and ‘good enough’ support, reliability and credibility, leading to some adoption in the enterprise datacenter. (From our biased point of view – the metrics exposed by VMware’s ESXi for monitoring are much better than those exposed by Hyper-V. But perhaps Hyper-V is ‘good enough’ here, too…)  There are lots of ways this could play out – VMware has already dropped the vRam pricing; Microsoft being cheaper in license terms may not make it cheaper in total cost of ownership in the enterprise; VMware is starting to push VMware Go, which could turn into a significant disruptor itself.

So can the $250 billion Microsoft really prove to be more nimble than the $37 billion VMware? History would suggest Microsoft will deliver a solid product (eventually). Hypervisors themselves are becoming commodities. So the high dollar value will shift upward to management.  VMware may chase the upward value (like the integrated steel mills did, that were largely disrupted out of existence); they may go after the commodity space (reducing their profit margins, but possibly protecting their revenue).  Or they may push VMware Go, Cloud Foundry, and other cloud offerings, disrupting things entirely in another direction.

Of course, there are many other possibilities that could play the role of disruptor in the enterprise hypervisor space: Citrix (Xenserver) and KVM spring to mind, but these (currently) tend to play better in the large data center cloud space, rather than the enterprise.

Still, VMware is very much in a position of strength and is well suited to lead the next round of innovation which I see as the release of a product which allows for the movement of VM’s seamlessly from my own infrastructure to a cloud provider’s and back, while maintaining control, security and performance (and monitoring) that IT is accustomed to.  Let’s see if I am right. Fun times ahead!

- This article was contributed by Steve Francis, founder and Chief Product Officer at LogicMonitor

We use snmp a lot, and know it well. However, not everyone of our customers has spent years working with OIDs in ASN.1, MIBs, Access types, and so on – and nor should they. (As we like to say, “Your monitoring solution should make your life easier, not harder.”) So one question we often get is the difference between the different SNMP versions.

So here’s the quick rundown:

• SNMP version 1: the oldest flavor.  Easy to set up – only requires a plaintext community. The biggest downsides are that it does not support 64 bit counters, only 32 bit counters, and that it has little security. A community string sent in plaintext, possibly from a restricted range of allowed IP addresses, is as good as the security gets. In other words, no security from someone with access to the network – such a person will be able to see the community string in plaintext, and spoofing a UDP packet’s source IP is trivial.  (On the other hand, if your device is set up to only allow SNMP read only access – the risk is fairly small, and confined to evil people with access to your network. If you have evil people with this access, SNMP is probably not what you need to be worrying about.)
• SNMP version 2c: in practical terms, v2c is identical to version 1, except it adds support for 64 bit counters.  This matters, especially for interfaces. Even a 1Gbps interface can wrap a 32 bit counter in 34 seconds. Which means that a 32 bit counter being polled at one minute intervals is useless, as it cannot tell the difference between successive values of 30, 40 due to the fact that only 10 octets were sent in that minute, or 30, 40 due to the fact that 4294967306 (2^32 +10) octets were sent in that minute.  Most devices support snmp V2c nowadays, and generally do so automatically. There are some devices that require you to explicitly enable v2c – in which case, you should always do so. There is no downside.
• SNMP version 3: adds security to the 64 bit counters. SNMP version 3 adds both encryption and authentication, which can be used together or separately.  Setup is more complex than just defining a community string – but then, what security is not?  But if you require security, this is the way to do it.

Note that while you may have to configure the snmp version on your devices that are being monitored, you do not have to configure the version to be used in LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor will automatically try version 3; if that does not succeed, it tries version 2, and only if that does not respond will it use version 1. We try to keep the work away from you when we can.

VMworld 2012 took place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco a few weeks ago. The weather was surprisingly nice, but the real buzz was inside the convention hall.  We had a pod in the New Innovators section of the Vendor Expo in Moscone West.  It being our first VMworld (as a sponsor), we were very impressed.

I was initially a little skeptical of our location, but it turned out we got a good bit of traffic and talked to dozens of prospects who were very interested in learning more about cloud-based technology infrastructure monitoring.  One of the surprises of the event was how many current customers stopped by to say hello and share how LogicMonitor is working out for them.

One customer had an interesting story about how LogicMonitor saved his movie. He had gone to see the latest Batman movie “The Dark Knight,” and apparently he’s one of those guys who pays attention to his phone while in the movie (you know, like every other SysAdmin in the world).  Half way through the film he got a text message alerting him to an issue.

He immediately logged into LogicMonitor and checked the systems he was responsible for and quickly realized the problem wasn’t on his end. He proceeded to dig around in the other systems in LogicMonitor and was able to pinpoint the issue and relay it to the team responsible.  Ironically, he was the super hero at that moment.  LogicMonitor not only helped him save the day, but it also saved the movie.

The takeaway here is that LogicMonitor helps provide insight into the entire infrastructure and so helps with collaboration across multiple teams.

You never know when the storage guy might help the virtualization guy or the database guy solve a major problem, even if by just proving the issue isn’t the database. This type of collaboration is invaluable when it comes to monitoring. It streamlines the troubleshooting process and motivates the right professionals to action sooner, allowing them to focus on and solve the problem much quicker.

I don’t think there is one SysAdmin out there who enjoys the length of time it takes during the thrill of the hunt, when trying to pinpoint the reason for a major problem or outage.

Needless to say we felt we had a great show. It was fun to be there and talk to really smart and interesting people. If your organization uses VMware in their infrastructure I would highly recommend attending this conference next year – same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

Coinciding with a break in the London rain, September 25th marked our first UK LogicMonitor User Group. (Earlier this year we started regional User Group events as a way for customers to interact with our team, hear about product updates, and share experiences with other users.)

CEO Kevin McGibben with the LM UK team.

At the London event, attended by some leading online media, SaaS and MSPs in the London area, we began with a “lunch-and-learn” to review enhancements in our latest product release. We spent the balance of the afternoon in a LogicMonitor portal, demonstrating the latest features, fielding questions and providing a sneak preview into some future additions.

A few meeting highlights:

• Great interest in tuning the LogicMonitor dashboard to present business-level metrics
• News of extended Engineering support hours (9am-1am GMT) was well-received
• Unanimous interest in a native iOS application
• Most of the feedback was positive, and we were successful in eliciting valid critiques that help us continually improve
• We agreed on methods to more proactively update clients of product updates

All in all it was a fantastic event. Good venue, lots of war stories, many laughs.

We’re looking at adding LM User Group events in Q4 in Los Angeles and Q1 of next year in NYC. If you are interested in interacting with our team and other LM users, don’t be shy – let us know where you want to see us next!