An ongoing SolarWinds effort to drive down the cost of implementing DevOps has been extended by acquiring Loggly, a provider of log analytics software provided as a cloud service.
Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products at SolarWinds, says the Loggly service rounds out a portfolio of DevOps offerings spanning application and infrastructure monitoring, website monitoring and log management software.
In keeping with the company’s overall DevOps strategy, SolarWinds will provide access to Loggly at substantially less cost than rival log analytics platforms such as Splunk, Pfister says. Pricing for the Loggly service starts at $99 per month. In contrast, other log analytics platforms charge IT organizations based on the amount of data being analyzed, which results in many of them limiting the amount of log data they analyze because of cost concerns.
IT organizations have been making major investments in log analytics to more proactively discover anomalies indicative of either potential application performance issues or security breaches. The more log data being analyzed, the more accurate the analytics being applied to those logs becomes. The goal should be to make data science capabilities as broadly available as possible, says Pfister.
Next up, Pfister says SolarWinds will be working on unifying the user interface experience between Loggly and the rest of its DevOps portfolio. In addition, SolarWinds is examining whatever opportunity there may be to bundle various cloud services together in a single suite of offerings, says Pfister.
Log analytics has emerged as a foundational component of both DevOps and, by extension, digital business transformation. Developers are keenly interested in being alerted to events that might have a potential impact on their applications before they occur. IT operations teams, of course, are relying on analytics to enable them to be more proactive when it comes to making sure IT infrastructure resources are continuously available. At the same time, business users are discovering that log analytics can provide them insights into events that are indicative of how, for example, end users are employing new capabilities that have been added to a website.
While most IT administrators have a lot of experience hunting through logs looking for specific events, the sheer volume of data in those logs prevents most of them from gleaning anything that approaches actionable intelligence. Advanced analytics applications provide the means through which all the log data being collected becomes more valuable to the business.
As it becomes more affordable for more IT organizations to apply monitoring and log analytics, the number of IT organizations embracing DevOps practices should increase. Having access to tools, of course, is only one part of the equation. But most organizations wind up backing their way into DevOps, starting with tools that provide them additional capabilities and insights. Once they master those tools they begin to apply the knowledge and insights they gain to implement more sophisticated DevOps processes. For many IT organizations, however, the cost of acquiring those tools to get started down the path to DevOps has simply been too high.