As Logic Monitor gears up to launch a channel program and a partner portal, it unveils a new Kubernetes service, and another with a services-based focus that monitors resources together in logical groups.
LogicMonitor Kubernetes Dashboard
Today, SaaS-based performance monitoring platform LogicMonitor is announcing two new services, one for Kubernetes monitoring, and the other, LM Service Insight, which provides a services-based approach to monitoring and mapping.
“We are a SaaS-based performance monitoring platform, that is unique,” said Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer at high-flying LogicMonitor. Banfield’s presence itself is generally seen as a sign of their momentum. He had been SVP of Sales and International General Manager at Datto, after coming there from Autotask in that acquisition, before moving to LogicMonitor last October.
Mark Banfield, LogicMonitor’s CRO
“All organizations are all on the digital transformation journey,” Banfield stated. “They are embracing cloud, and adopting a DevOps approach to get an agile development process to leverage technology. Most organizations, however, live in a world of hybrid. They still have to manage a large on-prem infrastructure, We are the only SaaS-based true hybrid monitoring platform.”
Banfield said that there is plenty of competition in this space, but that they all fall into two buckets.
“One is legacy on-prem technology that mainly monitors on prem, and the other is newer SaaS-based companies that are focused on cloud,” he said. “We are completely in the middle. We do both, and do them very well. Customers can use one platform and have one pane of glass to monitor everything. We are also agentless, and very extensible.”
He indicated their customers consist of three types: traditional enterprise IT with infrastructure; born-in the cloud SaaS companies; and MSPs.
“We have had a huge amount of success in the MSP community,” Banfield said. “MSPs use us to monitor systems they run themselves on behalf of customers.”
The two new offerings meet a strong customer demand that already exists.
“We have developed these two offerings because there is a huge demand for them in the market,” Banfield said. “The type of monitoring that LM Service Insight offers is what customers today want. And Kubernetes is growing quickly, so providing that monitoring support from a hybrid platform is really key. It began in DevOps, but has expanded more broadly in the enterprise and is also moving into the SMB space.”
Kubernetes monitoring cries out for a solution because of an ominous conjuncture of developments. On the one hand, it has become a flavour of the month in the enterprise. Gartner found that 78 per cent of enterprise organizations plan to run containers in production by the end of 2019. On the other hand, Kubernetes is a new technology, so is not well understood, and it poses some specific challenges to monitor properly. In particular, the short, transitory lifespans of containers make it hard to make sure they are properly monitored, and ensure visibility into the applications within them.
“Our solution provides an event-based Kubernetes monitoring capability,” Banfield said. “It removes the need to have an agent on every mode, with two applications that each run as a pod in the cluster. It removes the issue of adding and removing cluster monitoring from containers by doing this automatically, based on Kubernetes events. This ensures the Kubernetes monitoring stays up to date. It provides full performances and health metrics on both the container and the applications within it. And it gives insights on underutilized resources so that they can be optimized.”
Banfield noted that the Kubernetes monitoring is a separate paid service, and not an addition to an existing service.
The other new service, LM Service Insight, is all about monitoring the resources that support a common application, service or cluster together, in one logical group. LM Service Insight aggregates key performance indicators across grouped resources to monitor and alert on the performance of the overall service, while still maintaining visibility into the underlying resources. In Kubernetes environments, LM Service Insight aggregates data across ephemeral containers to provide an understanding of overall application performance over time.
“This provides more of a service-oriented approach to monitoring, by grouping together resources,” Banfield said. “It’s a different way of providing a monitoring service to a customer.”
LogicMonitor expects the new offerings will add to their momentum in the MSP space, which has led them to develop a channel program that will be rolled out very soon.
“We are launching a channel program in a couple of weeks, and also launching a partner portal, which we are in the process of developing,” Banfield said.
Banfield noted that LogicMonitor has a different type of service offering set than Datto, his old employer, which has a channel of many thousands of MSPs.
“I don’t see us having that kind of broad brush approach,” he said. “Any MSP could use our product, but they tend to be those into providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which often means larger MSPs. Certain kinds of specialized partners will also do well selling LogicMonitor. You do need a lot of skills to sell it, as it is quite technical.”
