Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is LogicMonitor?

LogicMonitor wants to be everywhere you need it.

That was the message communicated by Harry Guy, Regional Manager for Asia Pacific at LogicMonitor, during a recent interview in which he spoke about the company's rapid expansion, local investment, and plans to push the boundaries of cloud-based monitoring technology.

"LogicMonitor is a leading provider of SaaS-based infrastructure performance monitoring software," said Guy when asked to introduce the company to IT managers not yet familiar with its offerings. "We see ourselves as that second generation, born-in-the-cloud provider, who allow [customers] to monitor the modern environment, which has moved on from that typical legacy on-premises approach through into a very much hybrid model."

Guy explained that the product is aimed at serving organisations coping with increasingly complex IT set-ups, having to monitor not just traditional networks and on-premises systems, but also public and private clouds from the major vendors, all managed from a single platform. "Monitoring needs to cover not only networks and on-premises technology but also cloud and public cloud," he said. "That SaaS-based approach enables monitoring of that hybrid environment all from one platform."

Timing, he believes, has played a crucial role in LogicMonitor's recent growth. The rapid shift to remote work and the mass adoption of collaboration tools made resilient infrastructure and real-time diagnostics critical for IT teams. "We've seen a huge take up on Zoom and platforms like Slack," Guy recalled. "We were able to deliver Zoom monitoring within a two-week window when it obviously became mission critical for organisations and roll that out as part of our product set. That's the power of being a SaaS provider - being able to adapt and change to the changing landscape."

Asked about the company's size and regional presence, Guy outlined an operation that is becoming truly global. While headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, the company's key global hub is now in Austin, Texas. "We're now north of 600 people," he said, noting big growth at their engineering centre of excellence in Pune, India, and identifying Sydney as their principal regional outpost for Asia Pacific.

Recent innovation has focused on helping customers better anticipate and respond to anomalies in their environments, especially through features falling under the buzzword of "AI Ops". Guy highlighted two advances in the last year. "First off was our first development to the buzzword that is AI Ops, but for us that was actually a pretty significant change," he noted. "We brought in a number of key features within our early warning system. This isn't AI Ops completed; this is very much stage one, version one. But it's all around anomaly detection - really understanding the anomalies within the environment that may sit within an alert threshold, but may be very much out of kilter with what's been going on."

The second innovation relates to what Guy termed 'dynamic thresholds'. Rather than the old model of fixed alert thresholds, LogicMonitor monitors trends in performance and adapts expectations accordingly. "At certain times of the day, or certain days of the week or month, it might be normal to have a higher threshold," he explained. "So really enabling that is our first step, as we say, in our early warning system and AI Ops."

To complement these features, the newly released "LM Exchange" brings an app-store-like experience to pre-built monitoring templates, helping customers discover new data sources they might not even know they need. "That's pretty game-changing for us," Guy said. "It used to be powerful, but took a bit longer or was a little more roundabout. Now we're providing a forward-thinking approach, so we can flag to people if there are ones they don't necessarily know about."

Looking to the future, the company's product development teams are doubling down on these innovations. "Firstly, [the goal] is to develop and improve on that AI Ops capability," said Guy. "Release one was very much that, and there's a long way to go on that. We have a version two of the early warning system coming out."

Among other developments in the pipeline are enhancements to integration with ServiceNow, an IT service management platform widely adopted by large enterprises and service providers. While LogicMonitor currently offers alert-to-ticket integration and CMDB synchronisation, the company is working on a "version two" due in the second half of the year. "We see leading organisations, enterprises, service providers really moving to ServiceNow. Being able to make their lives a lot easier, and integrate even more deeply, is an important thing for them," Guy said.

Growth in Australia and New Zealand has been a particular focus. LogicMonitor's ANZ operations are only 18 months old, fuelled initially by Guy's own arrival "with a suitcase and not much else" and bolstered by speedy hiring. "Our first major step was getting the office and our first localised team on board in June last year. So we've now been a full ANZ team in operation for a year, and we're now just shy of 20 people," he said. The team covers everything from sales and account management, to technical pre-sales, customer success, professional services, and implementations. "It's the full life cycle as a customer," he said. "We haven't just plonked a couple of sales reps, we've invested. It's not a cheap operation, but we believe you've got to be close to your customers and your partners. Fundamentally that's what we're doing - we believe that will lead to greater success for our customers, our partners, and a much more enjoyable and efficient experience."

For prospective partners and customers keen to engage, Guy was clear: "Always happy for people to contact me personally on LinkedIn or one of the team," he said, before reiterating his belief in accessibility and dialogue. "Be in touch with us and we'll help you, whether you're an enterprise, a service provider, or anyone needing to monitor their IT environment."