The future of Sumo Logic begins at the atomic level of logs

This time of year, complete with Thanksgiving, re:Invent and December holidays around the world, ends up feeling like a natural moment to pause, reflect, and plan for what’s ahead.

This is especially true this year, as it also marks my half-year anniversary as CEO of Sumo Logic. I have a strong sense of why I joined, what I’ve learned since leading the incredible team of Sumos, and where I see us going in the future.

Why Sumo Logic?

I built my career in the security and observability spaces. As a result, I’ve known and admired Sumo Logic for many years, especially the platform’s ability to deliver powerful insights about customers’ cloud infrastructure and applications through its solutions.

As I did my due diligence – on my own and as an operating partner at Francisco Partners (FP) – it was evident that I was not the only one who felt this way. What I found is that Sumo Logic customers absolutely adore the products. They use the capabilities in so many unique ways to solve their observability and security use cases. In fact, the more sophisticated and challenging the problem is to solve, the more they love Sumo Logic.

Why logs?

At its core, it comes down to the platform's ability to manage and analyze the most fundamental and naturally generated artifact in technology - logs. In other words, not only is this the "atomic level" of observability and security data, but it is a natural byproduct of the application development process.

This is why we work so closely with our customers to ensure that you can ingest and analyze logs in all shapes and sizes — structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Only then can this data be useful for all organizations and functions equally as the single source of truth.

Too often, we’ve seen organizations doing otherwise, with unfortunate results:

• Critical initiatives like DevSecOps become impossible. Without agreement on the data, developers, SREs and security operations fight about whose information is the "most right".
• Developer work is focused unnecessarily on non-IP work. Too much of their time is spent on manual instrumentation for observability and security purposes instead of auto-instrumentation.
• Cutting-edge capabilities like AI/ML, LLM, etc. are less effective because you are running them on top of sampled or aggregated data, like metrics, alone.

Sumo Logic brings teams together through the power of logs.

Sumo Logic aims to shift that paradigm, and we’ve already done it in various organizations. By starting with logs, a data source that everyone can agree on, we help to build consensus and trust in a single source of truth.

Of course, the observability and security markets are separate, but underlying technology can help both. The ideas of common collection and open standards have been around for decades but were always impeded by the issue of how to capture everything without instrumenting up front. As futurists, we often fall in love with things in tech, but that doesn’t mean they fit the use anymore.

I see a new path forward for us, paved with the infinite power of logs. From massive legacy organizations developing green field projects built on cloud architecture to the necessary digital transformation required for a modern planet racing to figure out how to scale climate tech, it all begins, iterates and ends with logs. Using raw data and not just a sample, I’ve seen how we can simplify the complexity across teams. When it’s less complicated, developers, observability and security teams can establish common frameworks and build toward even greater innovation.

What’s to come for Sumo Logic?

Change is never easy, so I want to first stop and thank all of the Sumo Logic customers, partners, vendors, and our employees for their ongoing support, patience, and trust during the transition to becoming a private company.

I see a path forward for us – to become the most powerful, cloud-native, big-data platform that can handle logs and the analytics capabilities to auto-generate most of the insights necessary to observe and secure applications and infrastructure.

We have plenty of innovations releasing in the coming months and further down the roadmap and I am excited to showcase what Sumo Logic is working on. I am equally thrilled to see how our customers and partners will continue to innovate in your markets as you use our platform to turn powerful insights into impactful action.

Learn more about Sumo Logic’s SaaS Log Analytics Platform. If you will be in Las Vegas for re:Invent, come see us there.