Item: ScienceLogic SL1
Rating: 10
Author: Andy Roughton

Overall Satisfaction with ScienceLogic SL1

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Science Logic SL1 as our monitoring and event-based automation tool to help manage our managed service customers networks and infrastructure. We also offer a Monitoring as a Service proposition, where our clients can just purchase a monitoring and automation service only.

ScienceLogic helps solve a number of problems:

Monitoring of status and performance of assets and services.
Displays and views via dashboards and Business Service views of the overall health/risk and performance of key higher-level services.
Event-based automation. ScienceLogic is a great platform to launch automated actions from. It comes with a large number of pre-build infrastructure specific scripts, which are easy to customize (with basic knowledge of Python).
Integration with other IT deliver tools such as ITSM tooling & CMDB.
Auto-generation of network maps that show asset dependency.

ScienceLogic is a great tool to bring together aspects of service operations and lead a customer from a reactive firefighting position towards a more mature operational model. The industry buzzword, AIOps, is a good one and ScienceLogic will start the journey to automating support and operations functions.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Status and performance monitoring with great de-duplication of events.
Event-based automation.
Easy integration with ITSM tools for CMDB, Incident Management and Change Enablement.
Dashboards and Business Service views.
Network dependency mapping.

Cons

One of the strengths of ScienceLogic is its investment in the roadmap and development.
SL always listen to ideas on how we think we can improve the product.

Return on Investment

SL1 has simplified our event monitoring system, taking less time to manage than competitor products.
SL1 is starting to save engineering time by reducing the effort and time taken to get the information required during the Incident process, reducing the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).
SL1 saves time as its discovered asset information can be auto update the CMDB.
SL1's deep monitoring catches more events before they turn into Incidents enabling a more proactive approach.

Products Replaced

Yes - ScienceLogic replaced a mish-match of SolarWinds instances.

Innovative Uses

SL1 is a springboard on the route to AIOps / the automation of services.
We have developed an innovative vulnerability management system using the SL1 provided asset data.
Tighter integration with ITSM tool than expected.

Alternatives Considered

SL1 is my monitoring and performance tool of choice.
It has greater functionality, flexibility, scaling, and easier management than the competition (For example Logic Monitor, SolarWinds, Broadcom UIM, Kaseya).
Cisilion selected SL1 because of its flexibility, wide coverage, and ability to bring everything together (removing silos).

Likelihood to Recommend

I have been working with monitoring solutions for 20 years and ScienceLogic is, in my opinion, the best tool. It covers all the functionality you would expect in a monitoring and performance managing tool and does it as well as any other tool and in many cases better than competitive products. On top of that functionality, SL offers a highly configurable automation platform whereby events trigger code snippets to do specified actions.
When applied with the 'correct philosophy' it can deliver a great reduction in effort and efficiency in supporting an IT environment. The SL marketing material makes some bold claims about the efficiency and reduction in MTTR that can be achieved. I agree that these efficiencies can be achieved in the real world when applied looking at the whole IT Support processes.

Comments

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Kyra Ecker
commented 5 years ago
Andy, your comments and feedback are so very much appreciated. Learning and hearing from customers on the value you're getting from ScienceLogic is invaluable to us! Thank you again for taking time out of your busy day to write us a great review! Kyra Ecker Director of Customer Advocacy

ScienceLogic SL1 review and why you should use it