Yeah, it's not great that we have to resort to it as often as we do. I'm working internally to get a new type of "collector" (i.e. the dropdown when building a datasource where you normally pick SNMP, WMI, BATCHSCRIPT, JDBC, etc.) called LMAPI. The idea would be to make it much easier to just call an LM API resource (without having to setup all the things you have to now) and parse through the data with a simple groovy script.
One thing I do with my LM API calls (well for all API calls that aren't associated with a particular device) is that I create a resource in the portal called "[portalname].logicmonitor.com". Among several advantages is the ability to monitor that resource with an auto balanced collector group, meaning that collectors can go offline without suddenly losing the data. Ownership of the keys is also addressed there.
