LogicMonitor has launched LM Cloud, a cloud services monitoring platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure resources.
The service allows MSPs and customers to automatically discover an organization’s entire public cloud environment and generates dashboards to help IT pros see the organization’s cloud instances. From there, the system offers enhanced visibility into cloud resources and application performance, LogicMonitor says.
A lot of companies can pull in metrics from Amazon CloudWatch. Fewer companies can pull in metrics from Azure. And even fewer can do both, according to Steve Francis, chief evangelist and founder, LogicMonitor. The platform does all that, but differentiates from rivals in other ways, he tells ChannelE2E.
LogicMonitor LM Cloud “Differentiators”
Francis says LM Cloud's three-part management strategy is unique in the industry. He points to:
1. Resource Monitoring: This allows customers to pull in data from cloud providers like Azure and Amazon, but also monitor event data like reconfiguring systems.
2. Cloud Provider Monitoring: Monitoring comes both from the point of view of the customer, with things like status updates, but also from LogicMonitor’s own collectors. Francis explains that because LogicMonitor everyone relies on their own data centers and firewalls, the way they collect data is by installing a simple program.
“There’s no configuration on it. You just install it. All it does is collect data using a variety of different methods, encrypt it, and post it back to us,” he says.
3. Billing Monitoring: This pulls in information from the cloud provider and allows customers to break it down by services, region, or other custom tags, Francis explains.
For many customers, Francis says they find it more convenient to pay for services in advance.“But what we’ve found is a lot of customers don’t know that their reserved instances expire and then they suddenly get a vastly increased bill for that month following,” he says. “So we automatically discover all the reserved instance and warn them as time as counting down that they need to renew them or decide to retire them.”
Francis says many customers also believe they have an infinitely scalable virtual environment, but that’s not the case.“(Some customers) were unaware there was a resource limit. They thought they were in good shape to autoscale for any future demand they had.”
Competition and Growth
Admittedly, LogicMonitor competes in a crowded market filled with emerging tools and M&A activity. Familiar names like Science Logic and upstart alternatives like Unigma (recently acquired by Kaseya) serve the cloud monitoring space in different ways. Overall, ChannelE2E is tracking at least 50 different cloud-oriented monitoring and management tools.
Still, LogicMonitor has a loyal following. The company serves MSPs, SaaS companies, and enterprises nearly equally, explains Francis, with each representing about a third of LogicMonitor’s business. On the MSP front, the company is particularly well known among midmarket providers.
LogicMonitor's approximately 200 employees are spread across five office locations in the United States and Asia, where they serve around 1,300 direct customers worldwide. The company attracted a $130 million investment from Providence Strategic Growth (PSG) in 2016. Last we checked, LogicMonitor has raised $151 million in funding.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
