Splunk second thoughts? It’s time for the cloud-native alternative

Back in September when Cisco announced they were acquiring Splunk, we explained how the market was consolidating with Sumo Logic ahead of the pack, challenging traditional vendors with our cloud-native platform. Now that the deal is complete and Splunk is officially a Cisco company, we’re hearing from more Splunk customers who are considering their options.

For Splunk customers who are looking for a scalable, centralized log analytics solution that can handle real-time structured and unstructured data, the only true alternative is Sumo Logic. When organizations make the switch from Splunk to Sumo, they’re impressed by how much easier Sumo Logic is to use, and the way that a reliable product frees up time for other innovation, particularly for security teams. Plus, with our recent announcement of $0 log ingest, price comparisons are now a no-brainer.

Why Sumo Logic is the only true alternative to Splunk

According to Joe Kim, Sumo Logic’s CEO, there are only two options on the market that can handle structured and unstructured data at cloud scale.

Companies are generating their most valuable data at scale, but much of it is in the form of unstructured data. That’s why it’s vital to work with technology that natively supports structured AND unstructured data, and is scalable as your business need grows.

Just imagine what happens if your most important logs aren’t available, customers don’t realize it, but there’s simply only a short list of solutions that can provide that today. The same goes for cloud-native scalability. Alternatives can’t offer the performance needed as your log volumes spike, at least, not without preparing for your budget to spike, too.

Good data begins and ends with logs

Sumo Logic is committed to a unified DevSecOps process. This goes beyond offering great security and observability solutions, to building a reliable single source of truth based on logs that teams can rely on as a foundation for their operations.

Today that comes with table-stakes capabilities like real-time structured and unstructured log analytics, always available data, no dropped logs and cloud scalability. And when users look to the technical solutions available on the market, they generally arrive quickly at a short list of Splunk or Sumo Logic. But customers are rapidly realizing that there are critical differences between us, and some — like cost, complexity and performance can be business killers.

Modern log management and analytics are vital for monitoring and troubleshooting business-critical applications. But they also become vital during security incidents, when security teams, platform teams, and developers collaborate to investigate the logs and narrow down the indicators of compromise. Crucially, those same logs can be used to power a next-generation security information and event management (SIEM) solution. With a truly cloud-native solution built on enterprise wide log data, your security posture can evolve past the legacy approach offered by Splunk.

Predictable cost

The first requirement today for log analytics is to ensure it’s economically viable. The ranks of Splunk customers feeling the pricing pain are growing quickly. That’s because Splunk customers grapple with multiple pricing plans based on ingestion volume, compute, license length and more. All of this makes for unclear, unpredictable costs that are difficult to predict.

So customers are forced to decide what data, how fast, and who in the organization can leverage the platform. As use of Splunk becomes restricted by budget, the impact of the platform is severely limited, requiring the customer to make trade-offs in what to store, reprovision more resources, and ultimately reach into their pocketbooks time and time again when they need to access logs for troubleshooting. At Sumo Logic we believe logs are the atomic level of your operations teams. They need to be instantly accessible and available enterprise-wide. Most importantly — there can’t be data gaps, and that’s why we have unlimited zero-dollar log ingest so you get enterprise-wide log ingest without data gaps.

Cloud scale matters

The second is to ensure it’s cloud-native. That means deep support for today’s cloud providers and built-in cloud scale. Take the complexity out of requiring sizing and resizing or platform management so your teams can instead focus on predicting and preventing issues before they happen.

Sumo Logic supports more than 2300 customers simultaneously and dynamically scales daily to fluctuations of petabyte scale; you can’t provide enterprise-wide log analytics if you can’t scale with the peaks and valleys of log traffic. All those logs are instantly queryable, and always online, and with our schema-on-demand technology you get unmatched analytics performance.

Other options aren’t real alternatives

So why is Sumo Logic the only real log analytics alternative for Splunk customers? What about other log analytics solutions, why aren’t they up to the task? Some teams are looking into open source and less-featured solutions as Splunk replacements. But most of these aren’t up to the task.

For example, many customers may be looking into Elastic as a Splunk alternative, but the drawback with using Elastic Cloud to replace your Splunk solution is… it’s not so elastic after all.

• Platform-as-a-service. Whereas you’re locked into one performance class with Splunk and that’s certainly a show stopper, with Elastic you’ll still need to maintain the platform yourself, adding even more resource and staffing requirements for your team.

• Elastic drops logs. When you need the data, it must be there. Modern applications and infrastructure are changing constantly, and so can the shape of their telemetry. If your logs change structure and can’t be mapped to ECS, Elastic drops these critical logs right on the floor. Further, if you’ve underprovisioned your PaaS solution for your workload type, dropping logs or storing them unindexed and offline is the natural fallout. The last thing you need is missing log data when you need it most and when you hit performance limits, Elastic drops critical log data on the floor.

• Scalability concerns. Contrary to what you might think with a name like Elastic, it can’t stretch to cloud scale, so as your apps and digital world grow, it can’t grow with you and requires your team to manage the scaling it can provide.

• At that cloud scale, you need advanced AI and ML to accurately surface insights in real time, and troubleshoot them quickly before your customers are impacted. And that’s why Sumo’s customers love our ML tools like LogReduce, LogCompare, and AI-driven alerting — which cut through massive amounts of information to get teams to the signal and its root cause, fast.

• It’s not enough to predict there’s a problem or threat. That insight must be paired with powerful automation across the entire DevSecOps lifecycle, which Splunk and Elastic can’t provide, because their automation is siloed. Here customers can natively integrate Sumo Logic’s SOAR and also our new platform-wide automation service to design and execute automated diagnosis and resolution to solve both reliability and security problems fast and efficiently.

Sumo Logic has the unified platform you need

If you’re currently looking to move away from your legacy solution, Sumo Logic has a wide range of next-generation features and upgrades that will help you through your migration and success thereafter.

• Migrate from Splunk faster and more easily with professional services support. The Sumo Logic team has helped numerous former Splunk users. Our team is fully equipped to make your transition as seamless as possible, with AI-powered translation tools and curated training available to help your whole team hit the ground running. Learn how Zyston partnered with Sumo Logic to help a Fortune 100 company migrate from Splunk.

• Flex licensing powers unlimited log collection. When you no longer need to pay for ingest, you unlock more than unlimited logs, you unlock innovation. These can power your DevSecOps practice and build for an AI world. All with flexible, transparent and predictable pricing.

• Cloud-native so you can dynamically scale up and down. Whether you’re running additional queries to troubleshoot or investigate an issue, or simply seeing a spike due to seasonality or major events, Sumo Logic is multi-tenant – we’re built to account for change and stay performant.

• Unified platform for true DevSecOps. We know that for a long time you could only use the term DevSecOps with quotes around it. Too often, teams can’t agree or get along. But with a unified platform built on the atomic level of logs, teams can unite on a single source of truth for collaboration and innovation.

If you’ve been using Splunk and are ready to make the change, learn more about why our Flex pricing model is ideal for logging everything and building DevSecOps for an AI world.