Humio Adds Unlimited Ingest Plan to Log Management Service

Fresh off raising an additional $20 million in funding, Humio, a provider of a platform for analyzing log data, has added an unlimited ingest plan to a cloud-based service to make it easier for organizations to retain massive amounts of log data.

The unlimited ingest plan for the company’s cloud service extends a similar option Humio already makes available to customers that deploy its log management platform in an on-premises environment.

Morten Gram, executive vice president for Humio, said one of the significant limitations of rival log management platforms is they charge customers based on the amount of data ingested. That approach only serves to dissuade organizations from ingesting data to limit their costs. The trouble is that organizations won’t be able to discover outlier issues in data they never see in the first place, he said, noting issue becomes even more problematic as organizations embrace best DevOps practices to deploy more applications both in the cloud and in on-premises IT environments. The Humio Bucket Storage can retain more than a petabyte of log data.

Given the scale and scope of modern applications, Morten said organizations are now using log data to drive a wide variety of analytics tools to automate processes in real-time. Log data is also playing a critical role when it comes to applying artificial intelligence (AI) to IT management. The more log data made available, the more accurate the AI models being employed become, he noted.

In addition, Gram said that because Humio doesn’t rely on an index engine to organize data for a search engine, IT teams can launch any type of query they like. In contrast, rival platforms are optimized for specific types of queries, he said, which also substantially reduces the amount of compute and storage required to analyze log data. That capability is why Humio can offer unlimited ingest of data and still remain profitable, as long as there are enough customers to enable Humio to operate at scale, he noted.

Given the current need for many IT employees to work from home to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear more organizations will be relying on tools hosted in the cloud to manage IT environments. Many of those organizations will also be a lot more sensitive to costs given the impact the COVID-19 pandemic is having on the economy. Of course, it’s probable many organizations will postpone new application development projects until sometime after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides. However, as more organizations start to appreciate the extent to which people may adopt social distancing, many of them will soon be re-engineering business processes to adjust to a new reality. As such, it may now only be a matter of time before there are even more digital business transformation projects being launched than ever before.

— Mike Vizard