Simplifying log management with logging as a service

Logging as a Service is a simple, highly scalable solution for managing all of your logs in a central, systematic way. With Logging as a Service, a cloud-based log aggregation tool collects log data from across your infrastructure, consolidates it in a central location, and provides the analytics and visualization tools you need to understand the data in your logs.

Why Is Log Management So Challenging?

The conventional approach to log management, which depends on log management tools that run on on-site infrastructure, suffers from several drawbacks:

• Poor reliability: Locally hosted log management tools may crash, or the servers hosting them could fail. Log data that is stored locally could be lost too.
• Minimal support for distributed environments: Conventional logging tools may work well enough if you have just a few applications running on a single server. But if you have dozens of applications that are distributed across clusters of servers, some of which may run on-premises while others are in the cloud, trying to collect log data from all of them using a local logging tool is very challenging.
• Resource usage: Log management tools consume a lot of resources. Not only do they require substantial storage for log data, but they also eat up considerable CPU time collecting and managing logs. If you run logging tools locally, you have to provide the infrastructure to support these activities. This leaves fewer resources available for running your actual applications.
• Lack of scalability: With an on-premises log management solution, the volume of log data that you can manage is limited by the size of your host infrastructure. If you need to double the volume of logs that you manage, you need to double the resources that you devote to your on-site log manager.

Logging as a Service eliminates these issues by moving logging tools into the cloud, where they are more reliable, can achieve broad coverage of distributed environments, and don't consume local hosting resources.

Benefits of Logging as a Service

Logging as a Service offers a range of benefits to organizations that need a scalable, reliable, and easy-to-implement log management solution.

High Reliability and Scalability

Because cloud-based logging tools are less likely to fail than those running on local infrastructure, Logging as a Service offers high reliability. It is also endlessly scalable: whether you need to manage just a few logs or many dozens, the same solution can meet your requirements.

Simpler Log Management

By eliminating the need to install logging agents locally, configure internal firewall rules to accommodate them, set up local storage for logs, and so on, Logging as a Service greatly reduces the burden placed on engineers for managing logs.

Get Higher Efficiency with Logging as a Service

Logging as a Service offloads responsibility for managing logging software, as well as the infrastructure that hosts it, to a third-party vendor. That means your team can spend more time working with log data and less time managing the tools required to understand that data.

Speed Up Troubleshooting with Added Trace Context

Because Logging as a Service makes it easy to collect and analyze log data from across your entire infrastructure, it maximizes your ability to perform distributed traces and correlate events across complex software environments. In turn, your team can find, understand, and resolve problems faster.

Uncover the Information You Need with a Simple Query Language

Modern Logging as a Service tools like Sumo Logic give you access to a simple but powerful query language. With prebuilt expressions and operators, you can pull relevant data from logs with ease.

Visualize Log Data and Uncover Insights

When it comes to understanding trends within log data, a visualization is worth at least a thousand lines of code. Logging as a Service solutions offer built-in visualization tools so that you can make sense of your data without having to install and configure data plotting or graphing tools yourself, or to ingest data into them manually.

Eliminate the Guesswork from Your Monitoring Process

When you're busy troubleshooting problems, you don't want to struggle with logging tools that need to be reconfigured, or to have to install an extension manually in order to meet a specific need.

With Sumo Logic logging as a service platform, all the functionality you need is immediately accessible, with no special configuration effort necessary.

Save Time and Resources

On-site logging solutions consume time and resources. They are complex to set up and maintain. They eat up server resources that would be better spent hosting production applications. They come with limited toolsets and integrations.

Logging as a service avoids these shortcomings by moving your logging toolset to the cloud. There is no installation required beyond deploying log collectors, and your tools are updated automatically. You can also take advantage of a broad range of integrations out-of-the-box.

Aggregate, Store, and Manage Logs Faster

By freeing your team of the burden of installing and maintaining logging tools, Logging as a Service gives them more time to focus on making use of the insights provided by logs. It also allows your organization to use its on-premises hosting resources more efficiently, and it minimizes downtime risks for logging tools.

In all of these ways, Logging as a Service makes log aggregation, storage, and management faster.

How Sumo Logic Enables Logging as a Service

Sumo Logic is a complete log aggregation and management solution that is available through a Logging as a Service architecture. Sumo Logic's fast setup process means you can get started collecting and analyzing log data instantly. Sumo Logic also scales to support environments of any size, and it offers dozens of integrations that seamlessly connect virtually any app or environment to Sumo Logic's log management service.