I've been running a monitoring consultancy for a while, and we get asked about vendor partnerships a lot. LogRhythm approached us a few times about their partner program. We looked at it seriously a couple years back, but ultimately passed. Here's my blunt take based on that deep dive.
The program is very structured, which is good for larger, established MSPs. If you're a smaller shop or a specialist, the overhead might not be worth it.
* **The training and certs are decent**, but they're a significant time investment. You need certified engineers on staff just to get started, and maintaining that costs money.
* **Margins are okay, not great.** You're competing with the direct sales team and other big resellers on every deal. The real money seems to be in the managed services and ongoing support contracts, not the initial license sale.
* **Technical integration is the real question.** Their stack is fairly monolithic. If your value add is building custom integrations into a modern cloud-native observability pipeline (think OpenTelemetry, Prometheus exporters), you'll find the extensibility isn't there compared to other platforms.
The biggest pitfall I see is alignment. Their platform is heavily focused on traditional on-prem/VM deployment and a specific security workflow. If your clients are all-in on cloud and want to unify security and devops observability, you'll be fighting the tool.
Has anyone else gone through the partner onboarding recently? Is the program now more flexible around cloud deployments (SaaS) and API-first integration? Specifically:
* Are the sales incentives still heavily biased toward perpetual licenses over subscription?
* How is the co-selling support in practice when dealing with a competitive evaluation against tools like Splunk or a modern SIEM?