News

Sumo Logic Expands its Observability Suite

• By John K. Waters
• August 25, 2020

Sumo Logic has expanded its growing portfolio of observability solutions with new distributed transaction tracing capabilities and new solutions designed to unify application and infrastructure logs, metrics, traces and metadata to enable more sophisticated analytics on both structured and unstructured data.

The new solutions, Sumo Logic Distributed Transaction Tracing and Sumo Logic AWS Observability, are aimed at developers, cloud architects, and site reliability engineers, among others. The company's existing Microservices Observability Solution gets an upgrade with new tracing capabilities, and its Software Development Observability Solution has been extended to support GitHub, Jenkins, and PagerDuty.

"Observability" comes from the field of engineering. It's defined as the ability to infer the internal states of a system based on its outputs. In IT, it's the practice of instrumenting systems and applications to collect log data, metrics, and traces to provide actionable insights into what's going on in a system.

"Observability is making the transition from being a niche concern to a mainstream approach for user experience, systems and service management in startups, SaaS, and enterprise companies," said RedMonk analyst James Governor. "Change rather than stability is the goal and there is a lot more uncertainty in systems and applications than there used to be. Sumo Logic is building tools designed to support this new culture and the platforms associated with it."

Bruno Kurtic, Sumo Logic's founding VP of strategy and solutions, sees the concept in a DevOps context.

"Observability is the latest evolutionary step in methodology that DevOps and DevSecOps teams employ to deliver reliable digital services that, in turn, deliver best-in-class customer experience," he said, in a statement.

The company's newest release, the AWS Observability Solution, became generally available earlier this month. The new solution takes a "cross-cutting approach" to managing reliability of AWS services, the company says, by collecting, unifying and analyzing telemetry data from popular AWS services, such as Application Load Balancer, Amazon elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Amazon Relational Database (RDS), AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon API Gateway.

The solution is designed to detect anomalous events, determine timeline and scale of anomalies, and enable root cause analysis through machine-learning aided technology. It employs an "innovative user experience approach" that enables navigation through the AWS hierarchy using metadata to enable customers to explore their multi-account and multi-region AWS deployments. "With the Global Intelligence Service for AWS CloudTrail, enterprises can also benchmark the behavior or their own usage of many of these services against AWS peer user groups to monitor efficiency, detect misconfigurations and security exposure," the company says.

The company's new Distributed Transaction Tracing solution enables customers to monitor and troubleshoot transaction execution and performance across a distributed application environment. These new tracing capabilities are integrated with logs, metrics, and metadata in order to provide "a seamless end-to-end experience during the process of managing and responding to production incidents," the company says. And it's designed to reduce downtime by streamlining root cause analysis.

Sumo Logic Tracing, currently in closed beta, supports the OpenTelemetry standard and leverages open source componentry from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to collect distributed tracing data. Sumo Logic has been an active member of CNCF since 2018.

New updates to the company's Microservices Observability solution build on capabilities for monitoring and troubleshooting Kubernetes platform and custom applications. These updates include expanded metrics collection from application components and infrastructure, the company says. The solution enables hierarchical, metadata based topology navigation, contextual drill down from signals, to traces, to logs across application, platform and infrastructure in order to enable rapid diagnosis and troubleshooting of production issues.

The solution leverages open source components ,such as Prometheus, FluentD and FluentBit, to integrate into Kubernetes platform and collect data and enables "single click" deployment using Helm charts.

Sumo Logic is also extending its Software Development Observability solution to support GitHub, Jenkins, and PagerDuty, which enables development organizations to benchmark and optimize their software development performance continuously by automatically correlating data across their continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. The solution currently integrates with leading development tools, such as Jira, Bitbucket, and OpsGenie, and it can be set up in minutes to help teams collaborate more effectively and release secure, high quality code faster, the company says.

The Software Development Observability solution leverages the KPI methodology developed by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization to automatically derive industry standard metrics backed by actionable insights and raw logs that are specifically designed to give teams complete visibility and observability of the entire DevOps lifecycle.