News

Sumo Logic's Illuminate Conference Observability Announcements

• By John K. Waters
• October 8, 2020

Sumo Logic's fourth annual Illuminate user conference, virtual this year because of the pandemic, wrapped up yesterday after two days of educational sessions, expert keynotes, and product and initiative announcements.

Conference tracks at this year's event, which the company bills as "the premier education platform for machine data analytics," included sessions focused on professionals in DevOps, observability, SecOps, platform leads, and business leaders.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based Sumo Logic, widely known as a leader in the observability space, has been expanding its product and services portfolio this year, effectively defining a new software category, "continuous intelligence," and in some ways, broadening its mission. The Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Platform automates the collection, ingestion, and analysis of application, infrastructure, security, and IoT data to derive actionable insights within seconds, the company says.

"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.

The long list of announcements at this year's conference included three focused on observability.

• Updated Application Observability solution: Sumo Logic's Application Observability solutions enables customers to rapidly monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot applications and infrastructure across any architecture, technology or environments. The solution integrates to more than 200 applications and infrastructure out of the box. With the additional support for open-source Prometheus and Telegraf technologies, it extends support to hundreds of new sources and environments. In addition, support for Open Telemetry enables the collection and correlation of traces with relevant logs and metrics. And a new set of dashboards, along with topology and entity models, provide intuitive workflows and allow for cross-linking to automate troubleshooting playbooks.

• General availability of Kubernetes Observability solution: Sumo Logic's Kubernetes Observability solutions provides rich monitoring, diagnosing, and troubleshooting capabilities for Kubernetes-based microservices applications in a unified platform for all application and infrastructure telemetry. This solution was designed to automatically create preconfigured dashboards and alerts by automatically instrumenting and discovering Kubernetes topology and entities, and collecting logs, metrics, traces, and metadata.

• General availability of AWS Observability solution: Initially unveiled in August, the Sumo Logic AWS Observability solution for Amazon Web Services takes a "cross-cutting" approach to managing reliability of AWS-based applications and underlying services. The solution automatically ingests, collects, unifies, and analyzes telemetry data from popular AWS services, such as Application Load Balancer, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database (RDS), AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon API Gateway to quickly detect anomalous events, determine timeline and scale of anomalies, and enable rapid root cause analysis through machine learning aided technology.

The company also announced the general availability of the Sumo Logic Observability solution for DevSecOps, and additional enhancements to its cloud-native, security intelligence solution.

"Digital transformation is now at the forefront of all companies of every size from every industry, and the need to build reliable, secure digital services is more critical than ever," said Ramin Sayar, president and CEO of Sumo Logic, in a statement. "Digital and cloud transformation requires the migration, modernization and development of new workloads, all of which require modern management and analytics capabilities, while also being secure given the vast amount of growing threats. The challenge is these services that run as modern applications are highly complex and difficult to manage without real-time analytics to drive comprehensive observability for DevSecOps teams. That means it requires the ability to monitor, detect, isolate, diagnose, troubleshoot and remediate issues in real-time for these constantly changing and complex environments."