Building better software faster - the key to successful digital transformation

I feel the need, the need for speed!

As digital transformation accelerates across all industries, it has become increasingly important for businesses to get better, much better at the development and delivery of new software to drive revenue and engage customers in new ways. Ironically, most businesses are flying blind in how they track, benchmark and optimize their software development.

Teams that consistently innovate and deliver new, high quality software quickly generate significant competitive advantage for their companies. According to DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), the research program behind the influential State of DevOps annual reports, software delivery performance is a predictor for:

• Increased organizational productivity and profit
• Higher customer satisfaction
• Improved team collaboration and culture
• Healthier work/life balance and reductions in burnout

Elite software teams have 208 times more frequent code deployments and are 106 times faster in their lead times from commit to deploy. Their deployments are also more reliable, experiencing seven times lower levels of deployments breaking changes in their environments, according to the Accelerate State of DevOps Report for 2019.

That’s why we’re excited to formally announce the general availability of Sumo Logic’s Software Development Optimization (SDO) solution. SDO provides DevOps and engineering organizations the ability to benchmark and optimize their software development and delivery performance in real time by automatically enriching, normalizing and correlating data across the entire DevOps lifecycle. Sumo Logic’s new solution makes it easier than ever to unify fragmented data generated by tools used to build and deliver software, resulting in a single source of truth that enables better team collaboration and data-driven decisions around how best to improve performance.

“When you’re running a modern app-based start-up, real-time is the lifeblood of the business. Every day we are thinking about scale and do we have the right tools in place to speed the delivery of features and mature our model. We are all in on observability and Sumo Logic is providing the real-time insights and intelligence across our business to operate like a bank and protect our customer data.”

Jem Walters, Co-founder and CTO, Snoop

The Challenge

Companies have multiple software delivery pipelines, so many engineering teams find it hard to get the right level of insight for their overall pipelines without a lot of manual work. This leads to an intelligence gap for developers and makes it more difficult to use observability data effectively across all the components that make up today’s modern applications. SDO helps customers automate the process to gather data across multiple software development tools and platforms, and provide benchmark data for comparison. Using this data, developers can get the continuous intelligence needed to remediate issues in the pipeline and in production faster, and concentrate on making their software delivery more performant, reliable and efficient. With automatic benchmarking of the DORA metrics, SDO can help teams spot opportunities for improvements across individual CI/CD pipelines, quickly resolve issues and increase overall software quality.

SDO is a free addition to the Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Platform™. The solution provides dashboards for fast visual insight as well as direct access to log data, allowing developers to take a data-driven approach to identifying bottlenecks, optimizing processes and minimizing developer time spent on root cause analysis. SDO can provide micro and macro-level insights - it can filter data down to specific microservices component implementations, or provide aggregate data for the whole organization across multiple pipelines.

“Every day we go to great lengths to ensure the accuracy, availability, and timeliness of the information that is shared across our entire network. To achieve this, real-time access and visibility to data flowing through the system is paramount. With Sumo Logic we are able to continuously monitor all the moving parts from idea inception to production deployment and back again. We can have honest conversations about how we deliver, monitor, and improve quality software. Using these insights, we can make decisions to ensure our millions of daily active users have the best experience, whether they’re looking for local headlines, national news or engaging entertainment.”

Mike Millgate, Technical Quality Architect, Gannett

SDO comes with out of the box integrations to Jira, GitHub, Jenkins, Bitbucket, PagerDuty and OpsGenie and can also be easily extended to other popular tools like Azure DevOps, GitLab, CircleCI and more, including custom home grown tools. The solution is also easily deployed and configured in minutes with Terraform.

In conclusion, Sumo Logic makes it easy to benchmark and optimize software development and delivery performance across the entire DevOps lifecycle. Build better software faster with Sumo Logic Software Development Optimization.

To learn more about SDO, please attend Illuminate 2020 user conference where we will be showcasing this new solution with presentations by customers, demonstrations of the solution in action and joint sessions with partners highlighting the value SDO provides. You can also find more information about SDO on our solution page SDO Solution at www.sumologic.com.