Unified Logs & Metrics Opens a Rich Universe of Opportunities for Our Customers

Two weeks ago, we announced an important and exciting milestone for Sumo Logic: more than a 1,000 customers are receiving instant value from our machine data analytics platform to build, run and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructures. Supported by the platform’s powerful, machine-learning algorithms, our customers gain business speed and insights from uncovering application patterns and anomalies, speeding issue resolution, enabling deeper security monitoring and understanding customer usage needs – all from analyzing real-time log data streams, or what we call, “Continuous Intelligence.”

With the Sumo Logic platform, our customers are better equipped to take advantage of disruptive trends, such as public cloud adoption, DevOps, security forensics and machine data analytics. They no longer wait weeks or months to get the intelligence they need to decide and execute faster. Our customers are taking advantage of Continuous Intelligence, which we consider business intelligence reimagined for software-centric businesses.

Initially, our customers buy our service because it frees them up to focus on what they do best, while utilizing a continuous stream of machine data analytics and insights without the hassle of maintaining license-based software. Getting up and running takes minutes, not days. In addition, after a few weeks of use, our customers often discover the variety of ways to view and use machine data analytics. As a result, what usually starts off as one use case – application troubleshooting or PCI compliance – quickly spreads to many others — DevOps, IT Ops, product management, tech support, help desk, SecOps and LoB KPIs, to name a few. And, what I find most interesting are all the creative ways our customers leverage the platform to track the metrics and insights that matter most to their business. In other words, a tsunami of log data that is often a pain in the you-know-what now becomes a unique world of opportunities for our customers with the help of our platform – rich in application, business KPIs and end-customer insights.

And now, that world of opportunity just graduated to a universe. Sumo Logic is now the first and foremost cloud-native, machine data analytics SaaS to handle log data and time-series metrics together. That means our patented, machine-learning, advanced analytics technology is natively optimized for both structured (time-series metrics) and semi-structured and unstructured (log and event data) streaming. With this capability, correlating log and metrics data is easy, instant, contextual and comprehensive, opening up a rich universe of opportunity that spans the full application footprint — from code to end-user behaviors. Here are four primary reasons why this is truly groundbreaking for our customers:

Instantly Know Your Modern Application Inside and Outside

Modern applications are not just their inherent code, but also the complete experience they provide to engage end-customers with information, products, services and experiences. The emphasis on experience has made digital companies measurement-obsessed (in a good way), capturing a wide assortment of metrics across application, system and end-user behaviors. For example, these companies want to correlate CPU, memory and application uptime with end-user activations, usage, transactions, drop-offs, etc. to optimize application changes while not impacting performance, bolster security and most importantly improve user satisfaction. By unifying log and metrics data into a single platform, Sumo Logic is providing cross-functional teams with richer and deeper visibility and insights to holistically manage their modern applications. Now, Sumo Logic customers will have access to the complete application picture in real-time, continuously, to build, run and secure their modern applications – from code to end-user behaviors.

The Advantage of One Platform to See It All

Obviously, many of our customers have access to logs and metrics data, but in doing so, they often have to rely on different tools for each, and in many cases, the tools are multiplied based on a cross-section of functional responsibilities – development, IT ops, security, customer service, LoB KPIs, product development, etc. In addition, most of these tools are not equipped to handle the volume, velocity, variety and veracity of machine data generated from modern applications. Our multi-tenant, cloud-native, machine data analytics platform not only provides the scalability and elasticity-on-demand to ingest, index and analyze modern machine data (structured and unstructured), but also eases cross-functional collaboration by eliminating barriers inherent in disparate tools without losing controlled access to discrete data sets. And, for businesses that continue to collect log and metrics data through open source or third party commercial tools, Sumo Logic can ingest this data via Stats D, Collect D, host metrics, AWS Cloud Watch integrations and more. Regardless of how the data is collected, cross-functional teams now have a common platform to view and share their discrete data insights as they collaborate to solve problems, push timely improvements and execute new business opportunities.

The Power of Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics

For digital business, modern applications are real-time, all the time, and revenue generating. They are no longer monolithic implementations running on 3-tier IT architectures, but a set of loosely-coupled micro-services with daily or weekly deployments, running on platforms-of-choice, such as public cloud. In this new world, there’s no room for down time or slow performance, so identifying problems, resolutions and opportunities quickly is no longer an option – it’s mandatory requirement. Sumo Logic customers rely on our platform to reduce thousands or millions of logs into discrete patterns, identify and address anomalies and outliers, and predict patterns or states critical to future needs. Now, this same advanced analytics capability, powered by machine learning, can be applied instantly to time-series metrics. Log and metrics data queries can be conducted side-by-side, with the results viewed independently or contextually overlaid to get the complete picture of the situation to speed operational or business decision-making.

The Multi-Tenant Advantage

Last but not least, the compelling value of unified logs and metrics is provided through a multi-tenant, cloud-native SaaS, with proven, superior benefits to single-hosted cloud and on-premise solutions. For example, as the creator and provider of a multi-tenant platform, we use Sumo on Sumo, just like our customers. That gives us the competitive advantage of real-time, machine data analysis – continuous intelligence – across the metadata usage patterns from 1000+ customers. In other words, the more our customers use our product, the more information we have to improve the product, and roll-out compelling new capabilities, like unified logs and metrics. We are thrilled by the broad adoption and usage of our platform, and this has enabled us to continually innovate and support our customers.

We encourage you to join us by inviting you to experience the power of the Sumo Logic for free. Additional information for our early access program to unified logs and metrics is here.