My first couple of months at Sumo Logic have been a whirlwind of good activity and I thought I’d share some of the reasons that got me excited about the opportunity and that continue to hold true after talking with customers, partners, and prospects.
Sumo Logic = Short Time to Operational Value
When I started the interview process with Sumo Logic, I registered for our free product to understand the experience. It took me 15 minutes to register, download a collector, point it to log files on my laptop and see the first set of analyses in the Sumo Logic cloud-based application. If the process was fairly seamless to me as a marketing person, it certainly bode well for the technical IT and Operations teams who typically work with log management products like ours.
Powerful Analytics (Of Two Kinds)
It’s one thing to ingest the volumes of machine data that get generated every day; it’s quite another to provide useful insights into what that data means for the business. The Sumo Logic approach has been to focus on two types of analytics.
a) The first is to focus on the “known unknowns” issues associated with your machine data – typically these approaches consist of some combination of search functions, reports and real-time dashboards.
b) The second is the far more difficult process of helping customers analyze issues that fall into the “unknown unknowns” category, and this is what got me extremely excited about what Sumo Logic is doing. If you have hundreds of pages of log files, how do you know what to search for? Enter the concept of LogReduce, our patent-pending technology that enables companies to take hundreds or thousands of pages and distills them down into a meaningful set of patterns. These patterns enable you to understand issues with your infrastructure that you typically had no idea were occurring.
The Opportunity For Community
I’m a big believer that communities are a natural way to help people solve problems, get answers to pressing questions, and feel like they’re part of a network that can help them professionally and personally. Having run a developer program at scale in a past life, I think there is plenty of opportunity to build a community of passionate Sumo Logic users around the world, at both a program level and within the product itself which is easier to do with a cloud-based service like ours.
If you’re interested in seeing why I’m excited, try Sumo Logic Free and participate in our community via Twitter.