OpenTelemetry-powered infrastructure monitoring: isolate and fix issues in minutes

A new world requires a new approach to infrastructure monitoring

The process of building and maintaining modern, cloud-based applications requires a new approach to infrastructure monitoring.

Traditionally, engineers would try to isolate a specific infrastructure component causing an issue — and fix it alone, without diving into code. Today, DevOps engineers must understand how application performance is related to their infrastructure. Infrastructure, for DevOps engineers, is an enabler to deploy code.

We’ve built Sumo Logic infrastructure monitoring with DevOps engineers and SREs in mind. By building our solution on top of a shared entity model, users can easily pivot from an application view to an infrastructure view to map out how their application runs on their infrastructure and isolate and fix issues before they become problems.

Getting this right means nailing the process of data collection. In an ideal world, the data collection for infrastructure monitoring is powered by the same open source collection process as your application data.

At Sumo Logic, this vision is now a reality. Our new trial onboarding workflow for infrastructure monitoring, powered by Sumo Logic Distribution of OpenTelemetry collector, ensures you don’t have to install and manage different agents, all while creating a common vocabulary (metadata) on entities across your application and infrastructure so you can map their interdependencies. This makes it simple to bring together your metrics and logs and start monitoring your infrastructure in minutes.

Making OTel-native observability a reality

We’ve bet our future on OTel. We were one of the first observability vendors to support trace collection using OTel. Our Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platforms are fully compatible with the OpenTelemetry standard, and we ensure that both spans and logs are transmitted leveraging the OTel Line Protocol (OTLP).

We’re excited to introduce infrastructure monitoring support with Sumo Logic Distribution for OpenTelemetry on Linux, MacOS and Windows platforms. The same OpenTelemetry collector used for bringing in application data can also collect infrastructure data. The distro provides out-of-the-box configuration for 25+ sources, including the most commonly used databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and Redis) and web servers (NGINX and IIS).

This work brings us closer to standardizing collection on OTel. It also relieves organizations that depend on multiple monitoring tools, which often create siloed data and inefficient troubleshooting. Why use one provider for logs and another for monitoring your underlying infrastructure when you can centralize on one observability platform to reduce blindspots and create a uniform monitoring standard?

With Sumo Logic for infrastructure monitoring, you can save time and, if you are juggling multiple monitoring tools, cut costs by consolidating onto our platform.

The goal: Go from “sign up” to insights in minutes

Beyond the efficiencies that OTel collection brings, we made sure that our new trial onboarding process for infrastructure monitoring combines various steps to get started — collection setup, source configuration and dashboard setup — into a single workflow.

We’ve simplified data onboarding by:

• providing a single collector installation command, which takes care of package dependencies on various platforms.

• auto-generating source configuration to collect telemetry, which makes it easier for users to get started with OTel without needing to learn YAML-based configuration.

• reducing the number of actions required of new users to as few as five.

These changes help you get up and running with Sumo Logic infrastructure monitoring fast. For example, our MySQL monitoring takes under five minutes to install.

As you get set started, our onboarding guides you on the fundamentals of our powerful platform, covering areas like log search, dashboard setup and taking advantage of the App Catalog.

Get started with Sumo Logic for infrastructure monitoring today

Looking to cut MTTI/MTTR, avoid outages and optimize capacity? Sign up today for a free trial of Sumo Logic, the best place to get started with OpenTelemetry for your infrastructure monitoring needs. Want to learn more? Read our guide to OpenTelemetry.