Log management and analysis is a crucial element of effective DevOps. In an effort to work more effectively and efficiently at the same time, gathering and analyzing feedback provides essential input that organizations can use to correct issues and enhance performance. There are a variety of log management tools out there, but Sauce Labs solved its log management and analysis challenge with Sumo Logic.
DevOps.com recently had a chance to sit down with Joe Alfaro, VP of Products for Sauce Labs, to talk about the decision to go with Sumo Logic’s software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based log management solution.
Prior to making the switch to Sumo Logic, Sauce Labs was using an ELK stack for log management. Alfaro explained that the ELK stack was tedious to maintain. “Our ELK-based solution required constant care and feeding. We were always having to make sure we had enough disk space and we were always fixing bugs or adding new features. We had a small team dedicated to management of this solution. In addition, it was difficult to bring developers up to speed on the tool, since documentation was not always kept up to date and there were no training materials.”
The effort required to troubleshoot and maintain the tool itself got in the way of Sauce Labs’ ability to use the tool to debug production issues, and used precious developer resources that were needed elsewhere. Sauce Labs decided it needed a new tool—something that was very flexible and cloud-based, so the company wouldn’t need to worry about maintenance or storage.
To find this new tool, Sauce Labs did proof-of-concept testing with a handful of well-known vendors: Graylog, Loggly, Splunk and Sumo Logic. Alfaro was emphatic about the Sumo Logic experience. “Implementation was ridiculously easy. We were up and running within a day,” he said, adding, “Sumo won out as it has the combination of: ease of use, includes all of the features we wanted, is cloud-based and within our budget.”
The switch to Sumo Logic has also helped the company streamline its DevOps practices. Sumo Logic provides a communication tool between the developers and ops engineers, acting as a common language that allows DevOps teams to work together to identify the root of problems quickly and easily.
Alfaro shared that the bridge between Dev and Ops provided by Sumo Logic has led to improved service, as well as savings in both time and cost. “It also finds patterns in our logs that lead to better analysis in discovering problems. This machine-learning-like pattern discovery is invaluable to getting to the root is issues. These days we spend minutes finding problems rather that the hours or days we used to spend in the past, before Sumo. This leads to more uptime and more developer productivity.”
Of course, your mileage may vary. Graylog, Splunk and other log management and analysis tools are formidable in their own right. If you’re in the market for a new log management solution, though, Sumo Logic should be on your short list for consideration. If your results are anything like Sauce Labs’ results, it would be a crazy move not to check out Sumo Logic.