Idea 11 Automates Workflows with LogicMonitor to Support 50% YoY Business Growth

Challenge

Founded in 2009, Idea 11 is an award-winning, full-stack Amazon Web Services (AWS) IT company based in Australia that specializes in digital transformation, cloud infrastructure, software development, and managed services. Idea 11 is a leading AWS Consulting Partner and has won numerous awards, including the CRN Fast 50, AFR Fast 100, and the Deloitte Technology Fast 50.

Idea 11 has grown by 50% year-over-year for the last four years. Its previous monitoring tool, PRTG, required extensive manual labor and wasn’t able to scale with Idea 11’s growth. Idea 11 also required a more cloud-centric monitoring solution, since it is an AWS Advanced Partner, and many of its customers are in the cloud. “We have experienced high growth and we continue to grow our customer base across the cloud and hybrid. It’s important for us to have tools that will scale with us so we don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel,” explained James Kahn, CEO of Idea 11. Idea 11 began its search for a single SaaS-based monitoring platform that could scale with its cloud growth and allow the business to better serve its customers.

Solution

Idea 11 selected the LogicMonitor platform after reviewing a handful of monitoring solutions and conducting a cost-analysis and technical evaluation of the top contenders. LogicMonitor was the only platform that included all of the features that Idea 11 was looking for within a single pane of glass. It would allow the business to scale without hiring as many additional staff. LogicMonitor’s Active Discovery™ capabilities, which automatically update monitoring instances when a change is made to the production environment, was also a deciding factor.

“As a managed services provider, we wanted to make sure monitoring is our first line of defense when it comes to maintaining our customers’ environments and keeping them online,” said Kahn. “LogicMonitor eliminates maintenance and heavy lifting and allows us to instead provide a better service to our customers.”

Benefits

After implementing LogicMonitor, Idea 11 was able to drastically speed up the customer onboarding process. The time required to onboard a new customer prior to implementing LogicMonitor varied depending on size, but it could take days or even weeks. With LogicMonitor’s API-driven approach and integration with AWS, Idea 11 has built extensive automation around its onboarding process. Discovering a customer’s environment and setting up monitoring is one part of the onboarding process and now only takes 15-20 minutes to complete. Setting up monitoring for a customer that is fully in the cloud takes just 10 minutes. “A big portion of our onboarding process was spent identifying which systems needed to be monitored,” explained Ben Gittins, Tech Lead at Idea 11. “LogicMonitor’s Active Discovery and Auto Discovery are lifesavers since we know that everything is being monitored correctly and we can take on new customers faster.

Gittins continued, “Automation is a huge part of what we do at Idea 11. LogicMonitor has empowered us to automate our onboarding process as well as many other areas of the business.” LogicMonitor’s policy-configuration capabilities have allowed Idea 11 to automatically change its monitoring policies for all customers at once, instead of tediously changing each individual customer’s policy as they did previously. This has freed up more time for Idea 11 to focus on its customers and other areas of the business. “LogicMonitor sits right in that sweet spot where it is highly automatable and also highly powerful out of the box. We do not need to build anything ourselves, and that is where it has been most powerful,” said Gittins.

LogicMonitor has enabled Idea 11 to identify and solve many long-standing problems, such as gaining improved visibility into customer environments. Idea 11 is also able to respond to customer incidents much faster since everything is in one place. “Our engineers don’t need to log into AWS or other tools in order to pull up the metrics and see what is going on. It’s all in one single pane of glass,” said Gittins. “LogicMonitor gives us good visibility and allows us to provide a premium level of service to our customers to hit SLAs. We can scale our business without reinventing our monitoring process every year.”

Idea 11 is seeing a majority of its growth in the cloud and is focused on scaling its cloud and hybrid customer base over the next few years. “LogicMonitor is a key part of being a next-gen MSP for our customers,” said Kahn. Idea 11 uses the extensiveness of LogicMonitor’s feature set to monitor edge cases from many different brands, network devices, and classic VM and EC2 instances. “LogicMonitor is the beating heart of the MSP side of the business,” said Gittins. “Alongside our ticketing tool, it is the most used tool. It is monitoring thousands of end-points and makes sure we keep our customers’ systems running. It works right at the center of everything.”

“LogicMonitor is a platform that is ready to scale. Its ability to accept such a high velocity has made it easy for us to scale monitoring at Idea 11. LogicMonitor has supported us in being able to grow so quickly, and will continue to grow with us,” concluded Kahn.