Illuminate 2021 - embracing open standards for big picture observability

We just wrapped up a fantastic fifth Illuminate, Sumo Logic’s user conference, filled with amazing customer speakers, partners, and Sumo Logic experts all sharing their insights and expertise. The level of engagement during presentations, workshops, and executive meetings showed a high level of interest in OpenTelemetry, unified analytics, and full-stack observability to solve the challenges inherent in application modernization and cloud migration.

Our customers and partners shared their powerful stories about application modernization and how leveraging normalized data with analytics at scale provided clear visibility into their systems to help them succeed. A few I’d like to highlight are:

• From Chaos to Optimization: Alaska Airlines’ Observability Journey shows us how breaking things on purpose can be good. Bryce Lindsay, Sr. Site Reliability Engineer at Alaska Airlines demonstrated how he and his SRE team combined observability and optimization with chaos engineering tools and practice to analyze the intricacies of Kubernetes, learn how their systems handle chaos and fix the issues before they happen.

• Improving the Observability Experience at SAP is a healthy discussion between Dan Dycus and Michael Basil from SAP, and Bruno Kurtic, Founding VP of Strategy & Solutions at Sumo Logic, on the practices SAP uses to keep their systems reliable and performant.

• Full-stack Observability for a Successful Cloud Migration demonstrates how collecting and correlating data from across cloud instances in different regions, and viewing it in one place helped Shruthi Anantharamu at Tokio Marine HCC successfully migrate applications to the cloud, resulting in increased innovation and improved reliability.

• Delivering Reliable Digital Experiences with Full-stack Tracing at Pitney Bowes brings to life the challenges of observing a modern application stack. Derek DeGenaro and Kulwant Mor at Pitney Bowes, alongside our own Pawel Brzoska, shared how they are using OpenTelemetry to gain visibility into their microservices-based applications that use service mesh as well as best practices they learned along the way.

Learning is a big part of Illuminate, and this year was no different! We offered over 20 different workshops and certification sessions across two time zones for our community of global users. From basic observability fundamentals to master classes, the goal was to empower practitioners of all levels with knowledge of how to use Sumo Logic solutions to their fullest. These were hugely popular, with many attendees participating in multiple sessions!

We also shared some important announcements around new feature and solution releases to enable our community further to embrace observability.

Open Telemetry Distro (Beta)

We constantly hear from SREs that data collection for visibility and analytics is really hard and complex, particularly with proprietary, siloed systems. This is why we want to ease that complexity by providing a universal data collection capability. Frank Reno, Principal Product Manager at Sumo Logic, talked about the move from proprietary data collection to leveraging OpenTelemetry to make data capture simple and seamless. Sumo Logic is doing just that to help you analyze and correlate all machine data to ensure you can meet reliability objectives.

Advanced Analytics for Alert Response

Talking to numerous on-call engineers, we learned that alerts, in general, lack real context into the actual issue, which can exacerbate the time to troubleshoot and remedy the underlying problem. Angad Singh, Principal Product Manager at Sumo Logic talked about how we’re helping on-call teams reduce MTTR with a new capability called Alert Response. By leveraging powerful AI/ML, advanced analytics are applied across a unified repository of telemetry data to deliver insights that quickly guide on-call teams to the root cause.

I do want to thank our customer speakers, partners and attendees from around the world who helped make Illuminate 2021 a great event. If you missed a presentation or want to go back to a discussion, go directly to our observability highlights page and find the recordings you want to watch.