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Tag: LogicMonitor

  • LogicMonitor Expands Reach and Scope of Observability Platform

    LogicMonitor Expands Reach and Scope of Observability Platform

    At its LM Elevate user conference, LogicMonitor today formally launched LM Envision, an observability platform that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) to both discover and then remediate issues.

    LogicMonitor CEO Christina Kosmowski said LM Envision is the only observability platform available via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that can be applied to both on-premises and cloud applications. In total, there are already more than 2,000 integrations for the platform as part of the open LM Envision ecosystem, she noted.

    Over the last year, additional capabilities have been developed and added to the observability platform. These include application performance monitoring (APM) tools to identify bottlenecks and optimize performance, expanded support for public clouds and Kubernetes environments, integration with the StackStorm automation platform, integration with Terraform infrastructure-as-code tools and more advanced tools for searching logs.

    The company has also extended its AI operations tools to provide more context when troubleshooting issues by aggregating logs and including topology tools and graphs.

    Finally, LogicMonitor has added a push metrics application programming interface (API) to make it simpler to ingest data, pre-integrated dashboards and support for open source OpenTelemetry agent software.

    Kosmowski said it’s only a matter of time before observability and AIOps converge to the point where IT teams will finally be able to spend less time managing platforms. One of the major challenges IT teams face is that each platform they use requires its own framework to monitor and manage it. As observability and management frameworks converge, the overall overhead associated with managing modern IT environments should steadily decline as machine learning algorithms make it easier to surface issues before they create a major disruption, she noted.

    The overall goal is to close the loop between the discovery of an IT issue and its remediation, Kosmowski added.

    Observability, of course, is one of the core tenets of any set of DevOps best practices. Achieving it, however, has always been a challenge. The goal now is to eventually replace the hodgepodge of monitoring tools that track a limited set of pre-defined metrics with an observability platform that not only aggregates metrics but enables DevOps teams to launch queries and surface IT issues. In some instances, the rationalization of monitoring tools will help justify the acquisition of an observability platform. The paradox is that, as IT environments become more complex, it may actually become easier to manage those environments as more applications become instrumented and the various silos that isolate IT teams from one another start to collapse.

    In the meantime, there is no shortage of observability platform options. The primary difference between each of them is the degree of integration they provide and their ability to employ AIOps to automatically resolve issues, said Kosmowski. Each minute DevOps teams don’t spend on managing IT platforms is a minute that can be applied to spurring innovation, she added.

    One way or another, DevOps teams will soon have more access to information about their IT environments than ever. Less clear is how much of the data being collected by observability platforms will actually constitute actionable intelligence. But as observability continues to evolve, it’s now more a question of the degree to which that goal will be achieved versus if or when.

  • LogicMonitor Introduces Unlimited Log Data Retention

    LogicMonitor Introduces Unlimited Log Data Retention

    LogicMonitor today announced it will provide an option that allows IT organizations to retain an unlimited amount of log data on its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

    Tej Redkar, chief product officer at LogicMonitor, said one of the issues that is holding back advances in observability is the cost of storing log data. LogicMonitor has decided to remove that issue by allowing IT teams to store log data on its LM Logs service for as long as they require, Redkar said.

    That data will also always be readily available as hot storage with no need to wait for data that has been stored offline to be rehydrated, he noted. Instead, that data is readily accessible alongside the metrics and distributed tracing data that LogicMonitor also collects, said Redkar.

    In general, LogicMonitor is making a case for centralizing observability for the entire IT organization via a SaaS platform infused with machine learning algorithms that automatically surface anomalies in real-time based on millions of events captured via log data. The issue many organizations encounter today is silos of decentralized observability data that are more complex to maintain while providing less visibility at a higher total cost, said Redkar.

    The LogicMonitor platform, in contrast, is designed to be equally accessible to, for example, a network operations team as it is to a DevOps team, he noted.

    Not every organization needs to store log data forever, but Redkar said as IT management continues to evolve, more organizations are moving toward storing metrics, traces and logs for longer periods of time. The rise of open source agent software is also making it less costly for organizations to capture that data in the first place.

    It’s not clear to what degree other providers of observability platforms will provide unlimited retention of data, but as the cost of storing data in the cloud continues to drop it’s apparent that billing IT organizations for storage costs is becoming untenable. There is always going to be some cost associated with storage, but it’s not enough to charge extra beyond the core cost of the service. The only thing accomplished by billing separately for storage is discouraging IT teams from storing the data required to both attain observability and better train the machine learning algorithms that surface anomalies.

    Observability, in one form or another, has been a core tenet of DevOps best practices for years. Initially, DevOps teams focused on continuous monitoring as the most effective way to proactively manage application environments. Observability platforms infused with machine learning algorithms make it possible to correlate events so that analytics tools can more easily identify anomalous behavior in real-time. Armed with those insights, it becomes a lot simpler for IT teams to resolve issues faster.

    In fact, there may even come a day when the so-called “war room” meetings that are convened to identify the cause of an IT issue via a painstaking process of elimination are no longer required. In the meantime, however, the total number of IT incidents that actually lead to disruption should steadily decline, even as IT environments become more complex.

  • LogicMonitor Acquires Airbrake to Accelerate Performance Monitoring and Unified Observability Roadmap

    Cloud-based product suite automates visibility into application errors and performance

    SANTA BARBARA, Calif., February 23, 2021 – LogicMonitor, the leading cloud-based infrastructure monitoring and observability platform, today announced that it has acquired Airbrake, a developer-centric application error and performance monitoring company. The acquisition will extend LogicMonitor’s award-winning ITIM platform into developer environments and will enable customers to gain visibility into continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) workflows to ensure that every code release delivers a flawless customer experience.

    “Our product vision has always been to equip enterprises and service providers with the industry’s most comprehensive, extensible and intelligent performance monitoring and observability platform,” said Kevin McGibben, CEO of LogicMonitor. “LogicMonitor is committed to helping our customers and partners meet the challenges of today’s ever-changing technology landscape and gain visibility into the end-to-end technology performance that drives their organization, regardless of what tech stack their business is built on. Today’s acquisition of Airbrake marks the latest step in our journey towards unified observability.”

    Airbrake was founded in 2008 and is based in the Bay Area. The company was created to solve problems of code and performance issues impacting production environments, and received a funding round in 2020 led by Elsewhere Partners. Hundreds of engineering teams at enterprises ranging from Ring, Adobe, SoundCloud to MyFitnessPal use Airbrake today. Airbrake’s cloud-based, agentless solution enables developers, QA, Engineering and DevOps teams to:

    • Access on-demand application error and performance monitoring, plus automatic user experience insights for fast-moving test, staging, and production environments.
    • Deliver frictionless code deployments and automated analysis and troubleshooting for microservices-based applications.
    • Gain deep code and user experience insights into a wide variety of applications with coverage for 20+ front end and back end programming languages, including Node, Go, Python and Ruby on Rails.
    • Keep code and user data secure with industry-leading protocols and protections.

    “We’re very optimistic about what LogicMonitor’s acquisition of Airbrake means for customers. Having infrastructure monitoring, logs, and error and performance monitoring accessible within a single observability platform is the ideal solution for a global organization like ours,” said Oscar Garcia, Senior Vice President, Managed Services & Platform Automation, NTT. “LogicMonitor and Airbrake coming together will likely result in a platform that will give teams the ability to detect bugs and prioritize code fixes in the early stages of the software development life cycle, and will enable businesses to reduce outages and maintain the SaaS-based applications instrumental to today’s digital business operations.”

    The Airbrake acquisition marks the second acquisition in just over a year for LogicMonitor, who also acquired Stockholm-based log analytics company Unomaly in January 2020. The terms of the Airbrake transaction will not be disclosed.

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    About LogicMonitor®

    At LogicMonitor®, we expand what’s possible for enterprises and MSPs through infrastructure monitoring and observability software. LogicMonitor seamlessly monitors everything from networks to applications to the cloud, empowering companies to focus less on problem-solving and more on evolution. Our cloud-based platform helps ITOps, developers and business leaders see more, know more, and do more. For more information, visit www.logicmonitor.com.

  • New LogicMonitor Study Reveals that 51% of Enterprises Experienced an Increase in IT Downtime During Pandemic

    Strategic influence of CIOs and CTOs within organizations is growing as companies race to shore up cloud, remote work, and full-stack IT observability capabilities

    SANTA BARBARA, Calif., February 2, 2021 – LogicMonitor, the leading cloud-based IT infrastructure monitoring and observability platform, today released a new global research report, titled The Race to IT Observability, which delves into the ways that the pandemic has impacted traditional CIO, IT operations and developer roles within organizations while also shifting executive priorities towards cloud migration, remote workforce enablement and end-to-end unified observability.

    The study of 600 global IT leaders reveals that previously siloed IT teams and technologies are converging as enterprises accelerate their modernization efforts in reaction to COVID-19. The responsibilities of CIOs are expanding and the roles of traditional IT operations and administration teams (ITOps) are moving closer and closer to those of agile application developers and quality and security engineers (DevOps) as business priorities shift to align with the customer and their digital experience.

    • 79% of global CIOs and CTOs feel that their input and importance within the boardroom has increased in the last 12 months (86% of CIOs/CTOs based in North America feel that way; 78% based in EMEA; 74% based in APAC).
    • The vast majority of global enterprises (93%) have seen some level of convergence between traditional IT operations and administration teams and development teams in the last 12 months.
    • 94% of those respondents credit the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic with accelerating this convergence.
    • 21% of global IT leaders believe that improved security will be the top benefit resulting from convergence between ITOps and DevOps; followed by greater ability to scale (16%); better cross-org collaboration/alignment (14%); reduction in outages/brownouts (12%); and better customer experience (11%).

    “One of the key benefits of the convergence between ITOps and DevOps is that such a synergy makes it increasingly feasible to achieve true unified IT observability within modern enterprises,” said Christina Kosmowski, President of LogicMonitor. “As our research shows, observability is all about gaining full visibility into the health, performance and availability of an organization’s IT stack. Companies who achieve unified observability will find it far easier to complete their digital transformation initiatives and succeed in today’s digital economy, which is why LogicMonitor is focused on becoming the industry’s leading IT observability platform.”

    Enterprises are prioritizing data security, cloud and IT automation in today’s era of remote work

    Many IT leaders are changing the way they invest in various IT initiatives as digital transformation accelerates due to COVID-19 and the rise of remote work.

    • In 2020, 73% of global IT leaders substantially increased their investments in data security; 71% substantially increased their investments in cloud technologies and services, and 68% substantially increased their investments in IT automation.
    • In 2020, 17% of global enterprises decreased their investments in on-premises technologies.
    • 11% of global enterprises say that expanding use of the cloud is their number one priority in 2021.
    • 75% of global IT leaders plan to increase investment in both data security and cloud technologies and services in the next 12-24 months; 71% of global IT leaders plan to increase investment in IT automation in the next 12-24 months.

    IT outages and brownouts remain widespread

    One negative IT trend that global businesses continue to experience at alarming rates – despite the severe negative business impact – is IT downtime, which includes both brownouts and outages. Global IT leaders identify remote work, the Internet of Things (IoT) and migration to the cloud as the top three trends contributing to widespread downtime, although respondents based in EMEA mention mobile computing as a key contributor, and respondents in APAC mention edge computing as a key contributor.

    • In the past three years, 97% of global IT leaders said their organization had experienced an IT brownout; 94% said their organization had experienced an outage.
    • 51% of IT leaders said they had seen an increase in IT downtime as a result of the pandemic since March 2020.
    • Respondents in North America were more likely to see an increase in downtime since the pandemic began (57%), compared to Europe (50%) and APAC (48%).
    • 7% of IT leaders admit to experiencing 50 or more brownouts and 50 or more outages in the last three years.
    • Enterprises experience an average of 15 IT outages every 3 years and 19 brownouts.
    • Lost productivity tops the list as the most negative impact IT leaders have experienced as a result of IT brownouts (66%) and outages (61%), followed by lost revenue (43% for brownouts and 42% for outages) and damage to brand/reputation (31% for brownouts and 32% for outages).
    • 16% of IT leaders say their organization was shut down permanently as a result of IT outages during the past three years.

    As the world continues the rapid pace of digital transformation—made even more imperative by the ongoing pandemic—organizations cannot afford to experience downtime. By embracing the technologies that provide them with full observability into their IT infrastructure, organizations can mitigate the risk of downtime and quickly resolve issues when they do occur.

    For more information about winning the race to observability, download a full copy of LogicMonitor’s 2021 Research Report: The Race to IT Observability.

  • LogicMonitor Releases IT Downtime Detection and Mitigation Study

    LogicMonitor Releases IT Downtime Detection and Mitigation Study

    Although 99.999% availability may be IT’s ambition, it’s far from reality. In March 2019, Google’s Gmail experienced a 4.5-hour global outage. In the same month, Facebook suffered a 14-hour outage, its most massive outage to date, crippling app-accessibility worldwide.

    Downtime and low availability will likely occur to all systems eventually, especially when introducing code changes. When outages occur, it’s truly the detection systems and smart mitigation processes that separate quick rebounds from long recoveries.

    LogicMonitor has released its IT Downtime Detection and Mitigation Report, a survey of IT professionals to uncover trends and tactics impacting availability in 2020. The report surveyed over 300 IT design makers at organizations with 2,500 or more employees within the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

    Below, we examine the LogicMonitor report’s key findings. We’ll discover, on average, what sort of projects are causing the most outages and brownouts. We’ll also see what strategies top IT teams are using to prevent, detect and mitigate disruptions.

    Which Transformation Initiatives Hurt Availability the Most?

    Ninety-six percent of organizations surveyed had experienced at least one outage in the past three years. But why? One reason LogicMonitor conducted this report was to pinpoint which digital transformation initiatives and IT trends are the leading contributors to high-profile outages and brownouts.

    When determining causation, answers revolve around novel cloud IT initiatives. Fifty-nine percent of respondents felt that mobile computing was causing more brownouts/outages. Fifty-seven percent found AI and edge computing were making outages more common. Other high-ranking reasons included digital transformation (57%) and IoT (53%).

    According to the report, “LogicMonitor’s research suggests that IT decision-makers hold IT transformation initiatives responsible for increasingly frequent outages and brownouts.”

    Though we generally view digital transformation initiatives in a positive light, they do come with caveats. The move from private to cloud infrastructure, for example, can bring unforeseen costs. Also, some authorities note a lack of talent specializing in cloud and hybrid environments. The report also suggested that accelerated cloud technologies may require time to mend before they realize positive business returns (and higher availability).

    Critical Strategies for Preventing Outages

    Another goal of the study was to discover what sort of tactics IT professionals are actively using to prevent outages.

    The study exposed many strategies that IT folks are currently undertaking. The top three tactics were performing preventative maintenance (75%), reviewing system logs (71%) and increasing the capacity of systems (71%). Other top strategies included designing redundancy into systems, and keeping an eye on customer support tickets.

    With the rise of a completely remote workforce, some IT executives do anticipate higher expenditures due to AI and cloud architecture, which could bring added pressure. However, it’s worthy to note the cloud hasn’t negatively affected all groups, or even reached all companies. According to another study conducted by Adobe and Fortune, only one in three organizations store their data in a public cloud. Of course, one could argue that in doing so, such companies substitute innovation for less breaking change.

    Another necessary aspect to keep a vigilant eye on the digital ecosystem is proactive monitoring. According to the report, 74% of teams rely on proactive monitoring to detect outages. Continuous monitoring has been a philosophy trumpeted time and time again by DevOps professionals to enable a better release frequency and a window to detrimental interruptions.

    Careful analysis ahead of time, active monitoring systems to spot problems and continuously reviewing system logs were the most important tactics found being applied by IT leaders to mitigate found outages and brownouts.

    Best Practices: Prevent, Detect, Mitigate

    In terms of takeaways (other than the ultimate LogicMonitor product sell), the IT Downtime Detection and Mitigation Report does reveal some interesting trends on what IT leaders view to be leading causes of system outages. It will be interesting to see how this evolves and what technologies mature (or remain headaches) into the future.

    The report leaves IT professionals with some common, albeit helpful, advice to consider going forward:

    • Actively monitor IT systems.
    • Optimize IT systems with forecasting.
    • Prepare for tomorrow’s IT norms today.
    • Use intelligent monitoring.
    • Design redundancy into your systems.
  • LogicMonitor Embraces AIOps

    LogicMonitor Embraces AIOps

    LogicMonitor today announced the general availability of LM Intelligence, an extension of its monitoring platform that leverages machine learning algorithms to identify potential issues that are indicative of a major impending outage.

    Sarah Terry, manager of product management for LogicMonitor, said rather than acquiring a separate AIOps platform, it makes more sense to employ machine learning algorithms within the context of a tool that DevOps teams already are using to monitor their IT environment. Monitoring platforms collect the massive amount of data required to train those algorithms, but a separate AIOps platform has to find a way to collect that data, noted Terry.

    The LM Intelligence module created by LogicMonitor provides a root cause analysis (RCA) capability that automatically discovers infrastructure topology in both cloud and on-premises IT environments. Once an issue is discovered, LM Intelligence will aggregate all the alerts being generated into a single notification that pertains to the root cause of any potential issue. That capability will substantially reduce the amount of alert fatigue that today results in IT teams often disregarding what could be a critical alert that would have averted a system failure, said Terry.

    DevOps teams can also employ LM Intelligence to define expected performance ranges for IT resources based on historical trends. Any anomaly outside those ranges will generate a notification.

    As IT environments become more complex, thanks in part to the rise of multi-cloud computing and microservices-based applications based on containers, it won’t be feasible for the average IT team to identify all the relevant events that might be impacting that IT environment without help. There are simply too many parameters that need to be tracked. Tools such as LM Intelligence don’t replace the need for IT operations expertise as much as they augment the capabilities and expertise of the teams trying to manage complex IT environments, where there are large numbers of dependencies between systems. In effect, Terry said, tools such as LM Intelligence will enable DevOps teams to identify the signal in all the noise being generated within an IT environment.

    As IT management tools continue to evolve, DevOps teams should expect to see reliance on machine learning algorithms to become more pervasive. Rather than being a standalone platform, AIOps is quickly morphing into a feature that will become a capability embedded across a wide range of tools.

    Of course, each DevOps team will need to decide to what degree they want to trust any form of AI. However, the longer algorithms collect and analyze data, the more accurate they tend to become. That doesn’t mean DevOps teams should automate processes based on the recommendations of an AI engine; there are likely to be parameters that an AI engine may not have accounted for that could have an adverse impact. However, having the equivalent of a digital assistant that provides timely advice may soon prove indispensable.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Next-Generation Technologies Drive Widespread Adoption of Modern IT Service Delivery Solutions

    New industry study explores the State of IT Service Delivery and importance of monitoring for optimized performance

    LogicMonitor, Jul 18, 2018

    Santa Barbara, Calif., July 18, 2018 — Cloud-to-the-edge, digital transformation (DX), artificial intelligence (AI), and the proliferation of the subscription economy will impact the future of IT service delivery according to The State of IT Service Delivery Survey conducted by LogicMonitor. Driving this shift will be next-generation technologies (NGTs) and performance monitoring.

    LogicMonitor, the leading SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for Enterprise IT, sponsored the survey which polled 100 IT service delivery professionals at the ServiceNow Knowledge18 event, and current LogicMonitor customers to explore this topic. “Our customers continue to ask for guidance in planning their IT service delivery strategies,” said Jeff Behl, Chief Product Officer for LogicMonitor. “So we launched this survey to understand the dynamics fueling service delivery, and to provide our customers and prospects with the insights they need to plan for this shift.”

    Next-Generation Technologies Lead the Way

    Survey participants highlighted impactful NGTs that will fuel their ability to provide quality IT service delivery:

    • 60 percent believe cloud-to-the-edge, data processing at the edge of the network, will improve IT efficiency
    • 60 percent also believe the proliferation of the subscription economy will impact their IT service strategy
    • AI will have a major impact as well according to 57 percent of surveyed respondents
    • 56 percent believe DX will have significant implications

    Monitoring is Critical

    Seventy-six percent of respondents cite the delivery of a better customer experience as a key factor driving their IT Service Delivery investment. “Customer experience can be quickly degraded by faulty systems or errors produced by a poor NGT integration, so performance monitoring is crucial,” said Steve Francis, Founder and Chief Evangelist, LogicMonitor. “Organizations need an end-to-end monitoring solution that automatically monitors both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure, as well as services, applications and even IoT devices to truly understand what’s going on, so they can implement and leverage these NGTs.”

    Eighty-four percent of survey respondents listed the monitoring of devices, applications, and services as critical to successful IT service delivery. This makes sense since effective monitoring allows for improved efficiency, better decision-making, and a better customer experience.

    Survey respondents also identified the core types of monitoring most important to IT service delivery: infrastructure performance monitoring, application performance monitoring, and log management. Finally, respondents described two core components of a monitoring solution: it should provide context-rich alerts so the response process is straightforward and efficient (82 percent), and automated synchronization between the monitoring platform and the CMDB (77 percent). “The LogicMonitor platform was built to monitor the technologies customers are using today and the NGTs they’ll implement to future-proof IT investment,” said Behl.

    To view the full report, “State of IT Service Delivery” please visit the LogicMonitor website.

    About LogicMonitor

    LogicMonitor® is the leading SaaS-based, performance monitoring platform for Enterprise IT. With coverage for thousands of technologies, and integrations with key business applications, LogicMonitor provides granular visibility into infrastructure, cloud and application performance across hybrid and cloud infrastructures. LogicMonitor’s automated device discovery, preconfigured alert thresholds and rich, customizable dashboards, come together to give IT teams the speed, flexibility and actionable insights required to succeed in today’s competitive markets.

  • LogicMonitor Extends Reach to the Cloud

    LogicMonitor Extends Reach to the Cloud

    LogicMonitor has been making available performance monitoring tools as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for several years now. At the Microsoft Ignite conference this week, the company announced it is adding a module through which IT organizations can gain similar insights into public cloud computing services.

    Steve Francis, founder and chief evangelist for LogicMonitor, says LM Cloud is designed to provide real-time visibility into the performance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure clouds, including resource performance monitoring, detailed billing analysis and cloud provider availability.

    Many IT organizations don’t realize just how different managing a public cloud is compared to an on-premises IT infrastructure environment, he says. Not only is too easy to let a workload waste resources, spiraling cloud service costs out of control, but also cloud service providers have policies that limit consumption of resources in a specific region.

    Capabilities provided by LM Cloud include automated discovery of an organization’s entire cloud environment and dashboards that can be employed to troubleshoot issues.

    Francis says that as an extension of the core LogicMonitor service, LM Cloud provides a means for IT organizations to employ one monitoring tool across what have become de facto hybrid cloud computing environments. In fact, using multiple clouds will require IT organizations to rely more on monitoring tools based in the cloud. Otherwise, Francis notes, IT organization would have to correlate data across multiple incompatible tools.

    One of the things that holds IT organizations back from using public clouds is simply that they are more familiar with their on-premises environments. Francis says tools such as LM Cloud will make it much simpler for IT administrators to explore a public cloud environment using a set of capabilities that cloud service providers are not inclined to provide.

    Thanks to the rise of public clouds, DevOps arguably has never been more complicated, with applications distributed across multiple public clouds. But it’s very difficult to manage what can’t be seen, and it’s nearly impossible to compare one public cloud with another—much less an on-premises IT environment—without access to a common baseline of metrics. All too often deciding where to deploy a workload is based on either instinct or corporate fiat rather than detailed analysis.

    While many IT organizations expect to reduce costs by moving workloads to the public cloud, the truth is more nuanced. Long-running applications tend to be less expensive to deploy on-premises. Shorter-run applications lend themselves well to public clouds. Yet, many IT organizations are simply not fast enough when it comes to deploying applications on-premises. Internal IT organizations that have embraced DevOps processes, however, are now more agile. That, coupled with software-defined infrastructure, is narrowing the dexterity gulf that exists between on-premises and cloud computing environments.

    All things may not be equal just yet. But the day when an on-premises IT environment is just another cloud that needs to be managed is that not that far off.

    — Mike Vizard