As enterprises grapple with rapidly evolving IT infrastructure, fueled and made even more complex by cloud migration that accelerated during the pandemic, Sumo Logic is offering a new set of infrastructure observability tools and telemetry data analytics designed to ensure maximum business uptime and smooth software application performance.The new DevSecOps-oriented tools, announced this week at the company’s Illuminate virtual conference, are part of Sumo Logic’s Continuous Intelligence platform, and designed to provide real-time, deeper insights into critical enterprise applications and infrastructure.Observability is a relatively new term in IT, used to describe the task of monitoring enterprise applications, data flow and distributed infrastructure. Systems that offer observability go beyond prior application performance monitoring (APM) programs, offering a high-level overview of IT infrastructure as well as granular metrics, to allow for efficient application, network, data, and security management.According to a recent report released by APM company New Relic, more than 94% of 1,300 respondents across companies in 16 countries said that observability, sometimes known as O11y, is mission critical for the success of their role. In addition, more than 80% of C-suite executives who participated in the survey said they expect to increase their observability budget.New Relic also reports that more than 91% of IT decision-makers who participated in the poll view observability as critical at every stage of the software lifecycle, with especially high importance for planning and operations. Advanced analytics bolster business uptime As part of its new set of offerings, Sumo Logic has released a new tool called Advanced Analytics for Comprehensive Alert Response, designed to automate the issue-resolution and troubleshooting process. In contrast to the earlier practice of manually identifying issues and then resolving them, the new tool uses machine learning to analyze data from all incoming data points to ensure that so-called observers (IT staff tasked with observability) know exactly where an application or network problem lies. This allows the company to take corrective measures while saving time, offering the best digital experiences for customers, and ensuring uptime for critical business applications, said Erez Barak, vice president of product development at Sumo Logic.Sensu adds insights across cloud platformsSumo Logic, which acquired code-monitoring software provider Sensu in June, is also adding Sensu Go’s ability to offer real-time insights from unstructured data for troubleshooting, performance improvement and security across IT infrastructure. “With the addition of Sensu Go, enterprises now have access to native monitoring-as-code capabilities to help fill gaps in their observability pipeline and accelerate troubleshooting, diagnosis and self-healing from bare-metal to Kubernetes,” Barak said.The addition of Sensu provides the Sumo Logic platform with observability of multicloud environments including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, said Andy Thurai, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.“When you combine the addition of monitoring as code, it is easier for developers to implement security, monitoring, and observability easily into all production applications. The integration with configuration management tools such as Chef, Terraform, etc. makes this a compelling option for site reliability engineers (SREs) as well,” Thurai said.In addition to Sensu Go, the company released Sensu Plus — a new service that can produce insights from an enterprise’s data pipeline. Observability across heterogenous data setsOther announcements from Sumo Logic this week include the launch, in beta, of Sumo Logic OpenTelemetry Distro and Ecosystem Support, aimed at enterprises working with heterogenous data sets — which is now typical for most large companies. Open Telemetry Distro is an agent-based collector that provides users with a single agent to collect all their critical telemetry data including logs, metrics, and traces.The company added that it will support AWS OpenTelemetry Distro to help with the collection of observability signals, in an effort to make it even easier to run workloads on AWS, and also will support Red Hat OpenShift Operator through the Red Hat Marketplace.The addition of OpenTelemetry Distro is a good step since observability of hyperscale infrastructure and cloud-native applicatins is more complex than management of private data center operations, Thurai said.“As developers and DevOps teams love to include the open-source, cloud-native, highly scalable tools such as Prometheus, any large digital enterprise must consider OpenTelemetry integration. SumoLogic’s adoption of AWS OpenTelemetry distro is a good first step. When you combine that with Redhat’s Openshift adoption, it can help the enterprises that are still exploring the hybrid or multicloud options as well,” Thurai said. On the security front, Sumo Logic has added several updates including out-of-the box XDR (open-extended detection and response) for workloads that run across servers, virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless functions in multicloud and hybrid cloud environments.As part of the updates and to support more robust observability, Sumo Logic said that it was releasing 38 out-of-the-box integrations for databases, data formats, and DevOps tools. The supported tools and databases include: Cassandra, Kafka, Azure WebApp, Windows JSON, Tomcat, MS SQL Server, MongoDB, Apache, PostgreSQL, Nginx, Nginx Ingress, MySQL, Kubernetes, Azure Event Hub Collection, and AWS CloudTrail DevOps.While enterprise interest in observability is growing, according to the New Relic report, the survey results also suggest that it may take a while before observability tools are widely deployed. The survey reported that only half of the polled organizations are in the process of implementing observability technology, and that the respondents list lack of resources (38%), skills (29%), understanding of the benefits (27%), and strategy (26%) as top barriers to successful implementation.
Copyright © 2021 IDG Communications, Inc.
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