LogicMonitor Implementation Readiness Recommendations for Enterprise Customers

Readiness Overview

In most large or complex IT environments, the idea of consolidating various performance monitoring tools across technology stacks and business units can seem like a daunting endeavor. In Professional Services, we guide hundreds of our largest customers through the implementation of our SaaS-based, hybrid monitoring platform. Our belief is that well-prepared and highly-engaged teams are best positioned to adopt LogicMonitor rapidly and realize the earliest ROI.

Whether you’re onboarding LogicMonitor with our Customer Success team or through a Professional Services engagement, here are some recommendations for engaging your internal teams and workflows before you begin implementation to make the process as smooth as possible.

Appoint Power Users

Appointing technical champions to lead your LogicMonitor implementation is extremely important for achieving go-live date and adoption across your organization. Ensure you have the right people—with bandwidth—that know your current monitoring tools inside and out. This may be a small, central team or one individual across multiple departments. These people will be the power users that are best suited to engage with our Customer Success and/or Professional Services teams throughout onboarding.

Our LogicMonitor Certified Professional (LMCP) training is a great way to give power users the deep product knowledge to operate fully and successfully. We highly recommend you look to this certification to train internal experts in your organization.

Beyond initial implementation, these power users will also be crucial resources for the ongoing operations and usage of LogicMonitor as your business’ departments, infrastructure, and monitoring requirements change. Our product is continuously evolving and, through our SaaS release model, your power users will receive regular, automatic updates to LogicMonitor that they will want to keep abreast of via release notes.

In our experience, the most successful power users are:

• Deeply knowledgeable about existing tools with an understanding of how users employ them
• Great communicators
• Influential with other internal IT experts and teams
• Willing and eager to learn
• Ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty

Consider Implementation Order

As you look to deploy LogicMonitor across multiple teams and departments, consider the order in which you intend to migrate them. You may have multiple teams eager and interested to move off their legacy toolset and into our platform.

To minimize complexity and confusion across your departments, our recommendation is to implement departments in phases rather than in parallel. For example, attempting to rush your network, server, cloud and storage teams into LogicMonitor simultaneously may create additional complexity and workload for your power users. Staggering implementations across teams will result in a longer “bake-in” period before the next team begins and better cross-pollination of LogicMonitor awareness when these teams communicate with each other.

Summon IT Domain Experts

You will also want to select domain experts in the various technologies being monitored—Windows, Linux, storage, cloud, ServiceNow, etc. These are the folks who will give you valuable requirements for how they want to see monitored data in LogicMonitor. Domain experts will also provide context about all the locations in your company where their infrastructure resides, which is crucial for Collector planning and design. They’ll be responsible for any configuration changes across their technology domains to ensure LogicMonitor can poll and receive data correctly.

If multiple teams are impacted by LogicMonitor implementation, we also highly recommend appointing a Project Manager to tie together stakeholder communication and task assignments.

Set an Achievable Timeframe

Implementing LogicMonitor is more than just adding devices into monitoring. We believe in accelerated adoption for our enterprise customers, but there are many dependencies you will uncover that may impact your go-live date. Most of our customers who use Professional Services to guide their implementations take between two and four months to get fully onboarded. Some of our largest or most complex implementation projects take six months or longer when many different business units or clients are involved.

There are likely to be a lot of unique customizations in your current monitoring tools that need to be identified, assessed and perhaps migrated. This may include custom scripting, custom monitoring, datapoint thresholds or specialized dashboards.

Influence Stakeholders

Many of our enterprise customers need to influence other departments or clients to fully adopt LogicMonitor. This may require persuasion of teams that are content with their legacy, incumbent tools. Consider us a partner in equipping your champions and power users to demonstrate the value of LogicMonitor across your organization and build a successful migration plan.

The behavioral change within your organization to move teams and clients to LogicMonitor requires:

• Leadership sponsorship
• Clear communication
• Deep understanding of current use cases
• Good end-user training
• Incumbent tool access and decommissioning plan

Understand the Change Management Process

If your company, like many others, has adopted the ITIL framework, you and your teams are likely subject to internal controls and procedures required to manage infrastructure configuration changes as you transition to LogicMonitor.

As your team works through dependencies (see below), you’ll most likely encounter infrastructure change lead times and approvals required to migrate your IT infrastructure to LogicMonitor.

Examples of infrastructure changes may include:

• Spinning up new VMs for Collectors
• Adding exceptions to firewalls to allow monitoring queries over the internal network
• Applying or updating SNMP or SSH credentials on target devices being monitored

Depending on the nature of your IT Service Management practice, these changes may require ticket submission, Change Advisory Board (CAB) approval and planning for appropriate change windows—all of which can add delay to your go-live date.

Identify What to Leave Behind

Chances are, you’re migrating from incumbent tools that your teams have grown comfortable with and LogicMonitor may or may not monitor your infrastructure performance exactly the way it was in your previous tool(s).

In Professional Services, we routinely help our customers achieve parity with the existing monitoring tools. This involves taking a deep look at data collection, alerting, visualization, integration and reporting requirements in the current tools and assessing how to rebuild or migrate the equivalent solution in our platform.

As your team dives through these areas, we recommend that you:

• Forget stale configuration. Identify areas in your previous tools where configuration is no longer needed or used; leave behind old dashboards, reports, customizations, etc., and clean up your device inventory as much as possible before importing it into LogicMonitor. Otherwise, your team will be chasing false positives.
• Understand that monitoring might not be apples to apples. Your previous tool may be collecting data from your infrastructure differently than LogicMonitor collects data. Evaluate our 2000+ LogicModules before trying to manually recreate any DataSources or datapoints.
• Give our out-of-the-box alerting a shot. Our 2000+ LogicModules come with preset thresholds on common datapoints that are based on best practices we’ve gathered from our most complex customer environments. Before doing any global import and manual migration of thresholds from incumbent tools, we recommend starting with our out-of-the-box thresholds and, if necessary, using threshold tuning strategies to reduce alert noise to manageable levels.

Understand Dependencies

In our Professional Services implementations, we depend on customers completing numerous tasks that are needed to achieve a go-live target date. The points described above are important considerations when planning to adopt LogicMonitor. The earlier you understand and prepare for these, the quicker you can accelerate your LogicMonitor implementation.

As you get closer to actual deployment, there are additional dependencies for you to consider. These dependencies go deeper into the specifics of how LogicMonitor will be implemented in your environment and are detailed in Top Dependencies for LogicMonitor Enterprise Implementation.