Why Remote Network Monitoring?
When it comes to network monitoring you can never ever be too safe. With remote network and system monitoring, an IT team can monitor the network in real time from anywhere and can be mobile without risking network neglect. Remote monitoring increases overall network efficiency by saving time and reducing expenditures, allowing the organization to put its valuable resources elsewhere. It also allows proactive maintenance of network and systems, and early detection of potential issues.
Why LogicMonitor?
As a managed IT service provider for small to mid-sized real estate companies, we have come across many remote network monitoring tools, but one truly stands out. LogicMonitor is an all-in-one IT management tool that sports cutting-edge capabilities including sophisticated collaboration and workflow management features, comprehensive reporting, and highly customizable dashboarding capabilities. It spans network monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and website monitoring; and its depth and command of management capabilities has earned it PC Magazine’s 2017 Editors’ Choice for network monitoring.
Simply put, this is the best option for small to midsized businesses and an awesome fit for one in the real estate space. Based on our exhaustive research, scouring vendor websites, publication reviews, user ratings, and comparing features and products side-by-side, we narrowed down our focus to three products. These three were SolarWinds, ManageEngine OpManager, and LogicMonitor; and LogicMonitor takes the cake.
It has a great deal to offer, but we will say this: LogicMonitor has a steep learning curve. This means it might be difficult for a small business to take advantage of unless it works with a managed IT service provider.
Candidly, it is of utmost importance to use a superior network monitoring solution in order to keep your business safe and running smoothly. Let’s spend some time outlining why we feel LogicMonitor does just that. We’ve broken down our key points into two sections, a simple overview for C-suite executives and a deeper, more complex and technical summary for your company’s chief technology and information officers.
HIGHLIGHTS FOR SENIOR EXECUTIVES:
If you’re a C-level exec, we think you’d find these points about LogicMonitor of most value and interest.
Configurable Dashboards: First and foremost, LogicMonitor has an understandable interface and does a superb job at monitoring infrastructure. Its dashboard can be configured to provide any information at a glance; and compared to other network monitoring tools like Solarwinds, LogicMonitor provides a much easier to use, customizable monitoring environment.
Security & Privacy: Data encryption is available in LogicMonitor to protect your most sensitive data, earning it a near 5-star user rating. LogicMonitor also offers multi-factor authentication options rather than a weak one-step process. Here’s the simplest example: When you pay for something online via credit card, the bank sends you a verification code on your mobile number to verify authenticity. Only when you enter this code on the website is the transaction completed. This is a two-step verification and authentication process. A multi-factor authentication always requires two or more steps.
Reporting: LogicMonitor’s interactive graphs, powerful dashboards, and intuitive, customizable reports make it easy to trendspot and create reports specific to any company’s needs. LogicMonitor really stands out here as customized reporting is lacking in other well-known network monitoring tools like ManageEngine and OpManager.
Monitoring: Maybe we should have led with this one… LogicMonitor audits cloud services, databases, infrastructure, networks, storage, virtual machines (VMs), and website monitoring data using a single interface. With this cloud-based remote network monitoring tool, your team or ours can quickly track your complete infrastructure system using one unified tool, monitoring performance to assure optimal service and uninterrupted uptime. This means we can efficiently perform root-cause analysis plus historical data to monitor and quickly respond to issues with instant alerts that are routed via email, phone, or SMS. Finally, we can make informed decisions regarding when and where to scale.
Alerts: LogicMonitor has impressive alert handling features. Whether you manage LogicMonitor internally or hire a managed IT service provider like REdirect, you can easily set up alerts—categorizing and color coding them based on severity. And even dictate when to be notified based on the level of severity. The Alerts tab shows all open alerts further organized by device or service; and for easy reference, the number of warning alerts, error alerts, and critical alerts is shown directly on this tab. Alerts are automatically configured for a device or service when added to LogicMonitor, a huge time-saver, and this feature also allows you to create and configure escalation chains where certain types of alerts get sent to those who are responsible. Alerts can be sent via email, SMS, and/or phone call and can be forwarded to other software or services such as PagerDuty.
Backup: In case of a failure, data backups are set up in multiple locations. No worries here.
A TECHNICAL SNAPSHOT FOR THE CIO & CTO:
If you’re the chief technology officer or chief information officer of a small to mid-sized real estate company, here are a few more technical points that might interest you. We dissected the features of the top three remote network monitoring products—LogicMonitor, SolarWinds, and ManageEngine OpManager—to show you how LogicMonitor comes out on top. Let’s get into the nitty gritty.
SNMP & API Support: LogicMonitor is a remote network monitoring tool that supports both SNMP and API capability. SNMP, or Simple Network Monitoring Protocol, is a network protocol that collects information about hardware devices within a network, while API (Application Programming Interface) allows software to interface with other software. The LogicMonitor
REST API allows you to programmatically query and manage your LogicMonitor resources: dashboards, devices, reports, services, alerts, collectors, datasources, SDTs, and so on. When looking at all three monitoring tools, ManageEngine OpManager supports API capability, but SolarWinds does not.
Heightened Security: Logic Monitor’s SaaS environment is secured with HTTPS protocol. For any business execs that have gotten lost in this blog and found themselves reading into this section, HTTPS means “Hypertext Transfer Protocol-Secured.” In other words, it’s a secured version of HTTP, where data is super secure and encrypted. What’s shocking when looking at all three monitoring products is that SolarWinds offers neither encryption of sensitive data at rest nor HTTPS for all pages; ManageEngine OpManager does.
Hybrid Monitoring: Furthermore, LogicMonitor offers a top-of-the-line SaaS to monitor on-site, co-lo, or cloud servers.
ActiveDiscovery: LogicMonitor’s ActiveDiscovery provides automated detection, management, and configuration with built-in best practices that save tons of engineering hours.
Comprehensive device coverage: LogicMonitor is a single solution that tracks everything. You can combine point solutions and even break down monitoring silos to streamline monitoring.
FINAL THOUGHTS
LogicMonitor is a highly sophisticated infrastructure monitoring and alerting service with an easily customizable web portal. It displays in-depth metrics and device/system information simply, and offers smart alerting capabilities. It is truly dynamic and extensible, allowing it to scale to your company and its needs. For small to mid-sized real estate companies looking for a remote network monitoring solution, LogicMonitor is it. Based on our extensive research and expertise, nothing comes close to LogicMonitor.