GigaOM » Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic raises $30M for log analysis as a service

Derrick Harris — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:04:09 +0000

Sumo Logic, a Mountain View, Calif.-based log management startup, has secured a $30 million Series C funding round from Accel Partners along with existing investors Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures. The company, which competes primarily with Wall Street darling Splunk, has now raised $50.5 million since its creation in 2010 and its public launch in January 2012.

Sumo Logic is one of many systems management and analysis startups looking to disrupt their established fields by introducing a software-as-a-service approach to markets traditionally served by software software vendors. Sumo Logic’s core technology is a process, which it calls LogReduce, for detecting patterns among log files so systems administrators have a better idea where to start looking for problems when application begin behaving funkily. In early November, the company released a dashboard feature so users can track certain aspects in real time.

According to Chief Marketing Officer Sanjay Sarathy, one of Sumo Logic’s real values is in how easy it is to get started. Because it’s hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud, users don’t have to worry about managing any servers or scaling physical infrastructure when traffic — and, therefore, data generation — spikes. ”We don’t have any professional services people on staff,” Sarathy said. “We don’t need to.”

Although he said Sumo Logic competes mostly with Splunk and companies’ homegrown log-management tools, they’re not the only two companies around. Other cloud-based startups include Loggly (see disclosure) and LogLogic.

Sarathy said Sumo Logic has about 1,000 users of its free version, and another 40 paying customers, including Netflix. That’s a far cry from Splunk, which boasts thousands of users and has established itself as a player in the burgeoning big data space. But the market for products centered on deep analysis of log data is still young and companies of all sizes are getting comfortable with SaaS offerings for certain non-critical workloads.

Disclosure: Loggly is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 06:55:39 +0000

Cloud computing continues to change and shape the technology industry, and these days discussions are about more than simply reorganizing the IT department. New developments in chip and hardware architectures, finding greener data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying data analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. For this report, GigaOM Pro has gathered six of its analysts to discuss these topics and others in current cloud market. Here we present several areas to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud.

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Sumo Logic drops cloak, picks up cash to take on Splunk

Barb Darrow — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:30:24 +0000

Sumo Logic emerged from the shadows on Tuesday with $15 million in Series B funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Greylock Partners and Shlomo Kramer, bringing its total to $20.5 million since its founding in April 2010. Greylock and Kramer also participated in the Series A round.

The company, founded by Arcsight veterans Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, aims to bring log monitoring and analytics to cloud computing environments via a Software-as-a-Service model. In that arena, Sumo Logic is bound to face off against Splunk, which filed for a $125 million IPO two weeks ago, as well as Loggly, a company that spun out of Splunk (see disclosure).

Computer logs — and other machine data — are an important component of the big data phenomenon. This machine data, if collected, analyzed and searched — provides important insights into how systems and applications are working (or not) and can pinpoint bottlenecks, server errors and other glitches before they get out of hand.

“As infrastructure gets more complex, there are not only more systems and more heterogeneous systems but not everything sits in the customer data center anymore,” said Beedgen, who is also Sumo Logic’s chief architect and director of engineering. That means on-premises logging systems — which he contended are expensive to maintain and upgrade — are on their way out.

“The idea of sitting in a data center with a nice perimeter around it and just listening to what’s happening there isn’t going to cut it anymore,” Beedgen said in an interview on Monday. The trick is to see into a customer’s computing infrastructure regardless of where it is running. Once those logs can be viewed and monitored, forensics can be applied to pinpoint and trace security threats or other problems.

The service has been in use by select customers including Roblox and Ooyala for a few months. Roblox, an online gaming company, integrates Sumo’s service into the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) it uses to run its business. These “instrumented” AMIs give Roblox visibility into its Amazon infrastructure, Beedgen said.

The ability for companies to have a window into their compute infrastructure, wherever that is, will only get more important as more workloads move out of the customer’s own data centers and into the cloud. For more on this big data phenomenon, be sure to check out GigaOM’s Structure:Data Conference in New York City on March 21 and 22.

Disclosure: Loggly is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user 401K

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