Sumo Logic Inc., a Redwood City, Calif.-based provider of log data analytics services, has added the ability to analyze business and operational metrics to its platform, creating what it claims is the first cloud-native solution to let infrastructure administrators—including managed service providers—study and act on both types of information in real time within one comprehensive package.
With the new system’s help, technicians can now apply machine learning and predictive analytics informed by over 100 petabytes of administrative records not only to unstructured log data but to structured metrics on topics like CPU utilization and mobile shopping cart availability as well, enhancing their ability to spot anomalous patterns, potential breakdowns, and customer satisfaction threats earlier. Users can view log data and metrics separately via graphical, interactive dashboards, or overlay them on top of one another to correlate events and perform more sophisticated troubleshooting.
According to Suku Krishnaraj, Sumo Logic’s vice president of product marketing, customers have been clamoring for a consolidated log and metrics analysis tool for some time.
“They want a unified platform that kind of pulls together these data types, these different metrics, into a common dashboard that they can share with the different teams that are collaborating to drive these modern apps,” he says.
Those modern, software-defined, and cloud-focused applications produce vast quantities of information, turning infrastructure and application management into enormously complex tasks even as end user expectations of continuous availability and speedy response times continue to rise. Buried within those masses of machine-generated data, however, is what Krishnaraj calls a “goldmine” of uptime-preserving analytical insights for companies equipped to find, interpret, and take action on them. That’s the capability Sumo Logic’s service seeks to provide.
Though Airbnb, Twitter, and other large cloud infrastructure operators utilize Sumo Logic’s solution to optimize service delivery, the company’s 1,000-plus customers include many SMBs as well.
“We’re seeing growth across the board,” Krishnaraj says.
On the other hand, Sumo Logic currently has somewhat limited ties with mainstream managed service providers. Most of the MSPs it partners with at present are larger firms such as Cloudnexa, a cloud implementation and management specialist and major Amazon Web Services partner headquartered in Philadelphia.
In addition, the Sumo Logic platform doesn’t integrate with RMM or other network management solutions presently, so MSPs must act on anything they learn from Sumo Logic’s dashboards manually.
Even so, however, Sumo Logic’s service represents another potentially useful addition to a rapidly expanding managed services administrative toolkit that now includes next-generation performance and operational monitoring and evaluation tools from vendors such as New Relic, OpsClarity, and Vitria in addition to classic RMM systems.
