VP of DevOps Engineering at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
We are able to diagnose problems before our customers
Pros and Cons
  • "We are able to diagnose problems before our customers."
  • "There are some API gaps that are missing."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for logging and alerting for cloud only applications.

We are only use it from the cloud.

How has it helped my organization?

We are able to diagnose problems before our customers.

What is most valuable?

  • It's reliable.
  • The Curry language is easy to use once you get used to it. 
  • The user interface is pretty responsive. 

Therefore, it was a cost value proposition decision.

What needs improvement?

There are some API gaps that are missing.

Buyer's Guide
Sumo Logic Security
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Sumo Logic Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,886 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

Three to five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is usually reliable when we expect it to be. We haven't had too many outages. They announce outrages when they have them; more due to degradations when they have them. They have been more reliable than some other vendors that we are using.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have had no issues with scaling.

How are customer service and support?

We frequently reach out to tech support. We also have a technical account manager (TAM) and a customer success manager assigned to us. We have a fairly large account with them, so we generally get the responses that we need.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have our own logging solution previously.

How was the initial setup?

The integration and configuration in our AWS environment is automated. We automated it so every AMI comes ready with Sumo Logic and New Relic. Therefore, we have no issues.

We integrated with New Relic. Thus, we get alerts sometimes from Sumo Logic's logs as opposed to just native alerts when they are from CloudWatch or New Relic.

What was our ROI?

We look at ROI constantly. We put the amortized cost of Sumo Logic and New Relic right in the console that our service teams can look at. The ROI is good enough for us not to move away from Sumo Logic.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The AWS Marketplace pricing is borderline. Every annual renewal, we always contemplate if we are getting what we think we could out of it or could we do it cheaper with some other product.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I believe that we did look at another cloud-based solution, but I wasn't at the company during the evaluation process.

I would recommend to look at Sumo Logic, but also look at Datadog and Loggly. Look at some of the competitors who are also in this space.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
DevOps Engineer at TO THE NEW
Real User
We can easily search for what is wrong in our application through the logs
Pros and Cons
  • "It helps a lot because we can troubleshoot issues pretty easily."
  • "We would like to have some type of predefined setup for the logs, making the setup easier by default."

What is our primary use case?

Sumo Logic is for logging. You can use it as a centralized logging management system. You can send all your application logs to Sumo Logic, then you will receive a clear dashboard where you can see if there are any issues in you operations. It is pretty easy to troubleshoot any issues on your application using Sumo Logic.

How has it helped my organization?

It helps a lot because we can troubleshoot issues pretty easily. 

We can easily search for what is wrong in our application through the logs. We don't need to go through all of the logs. We just make a search on the basis on some keyword, then we will see the actual problem in Sumo Logic.

What is most valuable?

With the alerting dashboards, you can set up some patterns. Then, on these patterns, you will automatically get alerts.

What needs improvement?

Currently, it has predefined patterns that we need to set up manually. We would like to have some type of predefined setup for the logs, making the setup easier by default, such as:

  • What are the total number of error logs? 
  • What are the total number of hits? 
  • What are the total number of misses? 

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is pretty good. I haven't seen more than two or three times when the dashboard has not been working, the logs are not available on the dashboard, or there is some latency in the logs. I always get the real-time logs on the dashboard.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is good. We have scaled from two servers to 50 servers, and it works well.

If you are enterprise level and your server size is more than ten or 15, then I would recommend to use Sumo Logic.

How is customer service and technical support?

Initially, we used technical support because when we were new to Sumo Logic. So, we had some issues setting up dashboards. However, after a couple of hands on experiences, the product was pretty easy to use. 

The technical team is good and helped us out.

How was the initial setup?

The integration and configuration of Sumo Logic in our AWS environment was easy. If you can read the documentation, then you can easily set it up.

What was our ROI?

The troubleshooting part of Sumo Logic has solved a lot, e.g., if there is any downtime on the website. So, we have reduce our downtime by a lot with Sumo Logic because we can easily troubleshoot issues.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is a little high, but for the features that we receive from Sumo Logic, it suits the price. For some small organizations, the price might be a little high.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We have used other products, like Loggly and ELK Stack.

Our log sites are huge, and Sumo Logic was a good option for the large volumes. ELK and the other options were not working well with the large volumes.

What other advice do I have?

If you want to do a PoC with Sumo Logic, their documentation is very good.

The product is only on AWS. We using it on our production environment.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Sumo Logic Security
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Sumo Logic Security. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,886 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Software Architect at Solink
Real User
We don't have to provide credentials for everybody to look at individual systems to find their logs, but the product's interface is a bit cumbersome to use
Pros and Cons
  • "I have no concerns about the stability of the product. I feel it handles the stress we put on it very well."
  • "It took a bit of trial and error to get it set up correctly based on everything we had to do. In the end, we had to send everything over HTTP, which was sort of a stop-gap."

What is our primary use case?

The primary use is incident alerting.

How has it helped my organization?

We use it to do cash, voids, reports, and find any number of abnormal errors in our APIs.

What is most valuable?

  • The search
  • Email alerts

What needs improvement?

It took a bit of trial and error to get it set up correctly based on everything we had to do.  In the end, we had to send everything over HTTP, which was sort of a stop-gap. It was very hard to install the agents on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which was disappointing. 

The product's interface is a bit slow and cumbersome to use.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have no concerns about the stability of the product. I feel it handles the stress we put on it very well.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The only limit to the scalability of the product for us is how much we are willing to pay. It should handle any size of our environment that we want scale up to.

How is customer service and technical support?

Technical support has been great. If I have any issues, I have somebody I can talk to.

What was our ROI?

We have seen ROI. The product saves time. Because of it, we don't have to provide credentials for everybody to look at individual systems to find their logs.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price scaling comes in a bit expensive. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We also evaluated Splunk. We chose Sumo Logic because we needed something to get logs off of individual sites.

What other advice do I have?

The product integrates well with our websites.

We have been using only the on-premise versions of this product, so we have not used the AWS versions.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Cloud Lead Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
It is simple to use and our developers can make error queries using it
Pros and Cons
  • "With this tool, we provide access to every developer team the ability to find errors, then they come to us and ask for specific help."
  • "The dashboard has room for improvement, because sometimes it is a difficult to create a specific dashboard or query. This would be a nice place to correct problems."

What is our primary use case?

We use it to send our devices logs. It looks for application errors during the development, QA, and production. We also use it for troubleshooting in a production environment.

We use only the AWS version.

How has it helped my organization?

Before Sumo Logic, we had to login to every server and verify each error log to determine the problem. With this tool, we provide access to every developer team the ability to find errors, then they come to us and ask for specific help.

What needs improvement?

The dashboard has room for improvement, because sometimes it is a difficult to create a specific dashboard or query. This would be a nice place to correct problems.

For how long have I used the solution?

Less than one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is 100 percent stable. I have never had a problem.

We put a lot of stress on it, because all our servers (3000 to 4000) send information to Sumo from development to production environment.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

They can store terabytes of data. We just need to create an agent to send information to them, and they take care of the rest of it.

Currently, we have a small environment. My biggest worry when using Sumo Logic is that we will pass 3000 to 4000 servers. That many servers isn't so impressive.

How is customer service and technical support?

We have used the technical support twice and have received good answers from them.

What about the implementation team?

The integration of AWS was really easy for us into the environment.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Purchasing Sumo Logic through the AWS Marketplace was a simple step. I think the company decided to purchase on the AWS Marketplace to consolidate the purchasing onto one bill. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did evaluate other products. We chose Sumo Logic for its simplicity of use and our developers could make error queries using it.

What other advice do I have?

Sumo Logic provide a specific solution for logging. If you cannot handle every server or centralized system, it can provide specific access for your developers. This is helpful for an infrastructure or DevOps team.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Reviewer32109 - PeerSpot reviewer
Contracting Automation Engineer at Craigslist
User
Top 20
Out of the box applications were very useful for us. We also use the Threat Intelligence integration for our security monitoring.

What is our primary use case?

Logging all operational and security events in our enterprise environment. We use Sumo Logic to monitor all the applications that we run in the Amazon AWS cloud; we use Sumo Logic to monitor the security posture of our AWS IaaS with CloudTrail, VPC flow, S3 audit, GuardDuty, and EKS services. 

How has it helped my organization?

Sumo Logic is a single place to retrieve intelligence without worrying about architecture and performance.

What is most valuable?

The out of the box applications were very useful for us. We also use the Threat Intelligence integration for our security monitoring.

What needs improvement?

Automation is open to user's implementation, in my case, we used to use API to correlate and orchestrate events from Sumo Logic with other platforms, and now we are using an automation platform to centralize the various integrations.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Associate Director - Database & DevOps at Medlife
Real User
Good log aggregation, reliable technical support and offers lots of features
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution is quite stable."
  • "If you look at some of the other offerings right now that are available in the market, they do offer APM as well as the product they're offering. I believe Sumo Logic is not there yet. So that's something which I would love to see."

What is our primary use case?

We mainly use the solution to take advantage of the debugging logs and application logs, which are the production systems that we have. All of these are running these Sumo Logic agents. They keep communicating with the logs and are pushing to the Sumo Logic servers. Basically, we use it for our application debugging. 

We also push the balance of our logs to Sumo Logic. That is for our workarounds. It helps us to get to know the health of our application from the load balancer point of view. We pull for certain error messages within the logs, let's say, for example, exceptions, or errors, etc. We use certain patterns that we want to be highlighted for notification purposes. These are running continuously and whenever certain text patterns are found and are beyond a certain threshold, we get notified so that we can take some corrective actions.

What is most valuable?

There are a lot of things we like about this product. 

One is the log aggregation. It basically gives a list of matching patterns on most of the logs. When dealing with something like live error messages etc., you can group by similarities.  That way it is very easy to know where things are in real-time. It has helped us in terms of doing a top-down debugging. If, for example, you see a certain error message or an exception, then you double click to see where exactly it has affected the system. That way, at every stage you are able to go one level deeper until you find the root cause, through the logs or by other means. This is something which I find it really helpful. There are other ways within a window you can search as well. You can find out what happened one or two days before or one or two minutes before this message. It helps you follow a trail of events that will lead you to a particular state.

Users can also do a comparison with regard to the filing. Let's say, for example, you see a certain error come up today, and if you are interested in how was it yesterday or the day before, or maybe 17 days ago, you can take a look. This is one of the features that I found really helpful. 

The solution offers capture host metrics as well. Basically it could be the RAM utilization, CPU, or pretty much everything around the host, including the health of the host. That also comes in handy when we are debugging.

What needs improvement?

There isn't anything in particular that stands out that I would say is lacking or needs adjustments. For us, the solution offers everything we need.

If you look at some of the other offerings right now that are available in the market, they do offer APM as well as the product they're offering. I believe Sumo Logic is not there yet. So that's something which I would love to see. If Sumo could come up with the feature and then make it as a part of the offering that would be ideal.

The pricing could be more competitive. Sumo Logic bills based on the amount of data that you ingest into their platform. There are times that some of the data is not critical. You don't want to be charged at the same level for the extra data that isn't critical, but you will be.

For how long have I used the solution?

We recently started using the solution. We started originally sometime in October or November of 2019. It's been maybe eight to ten months since we began.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is quite stable. 

We have had barely any occasions where we witnessed delays. This may have happened once or twice. That is, of course, over a period of months. We started evaluating them in October, but we signed to use them sometime in January. Since January we have been developing customers for them. In the past four or five months that we've been using the solution, only once or twice did we see some kind of a lag in the logs getting pushed. I believe that is an understandable and typical amount of time. If we have had to reach out to their support only two times in about five months, I don't think that's bad.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We've never had any issues with developing scalability. Whatever that we were pushing, in terms of logs, they're all getting pushed and we haven't seen any scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

We've had no issues whatsoever with the level of service we've been given.

Right now, their customer success team, their version of technical support, will check in to see how we're utilizing the tool. If there's anything we're stuck on they will manage it for us. Whenever we have too many logs, and if we are exceeding our quota, they will personally reach out and check-in. They are really engaged and want to know if things are working as expected or if there at any anomalies. Due to the fact they are so attentive, if they catch anything, they will reduce certain charges so they try to protect our average rates.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is very easy. 

In terms of the initial deployment, it's just a matter of installing the solution. It's sort-of similar to onboarding a server.

What about the implementation team?

We did get help from the pre-sales team from Sumo Logic, who was helping us with the initial onboarding and procedures. We also do have their support team available to us. They're called the Customer Success Team.  

They've given us a lot of insight into the tool and they call maybe once a month to check-in. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution is expensive in terms of usage. New users should be aware of that. However, for some that are worried about down-time on their applications, if you can't target, then it makes sense to invest money in a tool like this, and with Sumo especially,

What other advice do I have?

We're just a customer.

It's a good tool. It has helped us, and there's a whole lot of features included. 

For new businesses considering using the solution, if you are strictly or directly only looking towards the cost then it might not be justified, because stability is something which can't be measured, or rather it's not exactly tangible. You might say that, okay, one hour of downtime results in so much of a loss in the business, and if you're effectively making use of the tool for bringing up the systems really fast, potential damage will be zero.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

To rate it at a perfect ten, maybe if they offered just a few more features I'd rate it higher. 

They would also get a higher rating if they offered differential pricing to focus on super-critical logs instead of all data in aggregate. On a need basis, whenever I do a query on them, I should be charged based on that. So some kind of a differential pricing model is something that I would expect out of this platform.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
AWS Operations Engineer at MR
Real User
The dashboards are great. We use them for monitoring certain events.
Pros and Cons
  • "We use it to ingest Windows domain controller logs. We use this to monitor if anyone is placed in particular administration groups that potentially shouldn't be. It helps us keep track of people."
  • "If you want to up your subscription through the AWS Marketplace, it can be difficult. You can't just go back to the AWS Marketplace, and say, "I want a bigger one now." You have to contact the sales team, then they do it on the back-end. This could definitely be improved."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for ingestion of VPC flow logs, CloudTrail logs, and config logs from AWS.

How has it helped my organization?

We also use it to ingest Windows domain controller logs. We use this to monitor if anyone is placed in particular administration groups that potentially shouldn't be. It helps us keep track of people.

What is most valuable?

The dashboards are great. We use them for monitoring certain events when they happen to see if we want to act upon them. The monitoring pages and the alerting pages are also very handy.

What needs improvement?

If you want to up your subscription through the AWS Marketplace, it can be difficult. You can't just go back to the AWS Marketplace, and say, "I want a bigger one now." You have to contact the sales team, then they do it on the back-end. This could definitely be improved. If they could do something about this, it would be nice.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is very stable. I've never really seen it have bad performance issues. As long as you're using optimized queries, then it always performs very well.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I don't think I have ever had a performance problem with it. The scalability is good.

We have multiple different customers who ingest different amounts based on their workloads and environments. We have ten customers with our biggest customer ingesting around 18G a day. Across all our customers, we might be ingesting around 50G a day.

How is customer service and technical support?

The support team at Sumo Logic is great. They have great people. They give good support when and if we need it.

How was the initial setup?

The integration and configuration of Sumo Logic into our AWS environment was easy and great.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Purchasing the solution through the AWS Marketplace is very easy. We chose to go through the AWS Marketplace because it makes it a lot easier when we bill our customers. Rather than having to get multiple different sources of information then correlate a monthly bill for our customers, it is just included in the AWS usage charges. Thus, it's convenient.

The AWS Marketplace pricing is fairly reasonable for what it does. Compared to the other tools that do it as well, it's reasonable. I wouldn't call it expensive, but I wouldn't call it cheap. It is pretty good.

What other advice do I have?

We love the product and haven't had any bad experiences with it.

We integrated it with Windows Active Directory. With one of our customers, we integrated it with some security software. It was some antivirus platform. We worked with their security team to ingest some logs that they used at the time and queried the data that they ingested.

It integrates easily with other products. You just have to install the Collector. Then, as long as you know what the format of your logs are like, you can write your field extraction rules, and away you go. As long as you know what you're doing, and as long as you are familiar with the logs that you're ingesting, then it is easy.

We ultimately use it because we are a managed services partner of Amazon, and we need to do it for our ordering purposes. It's just something that we have to have to be able to look at our logs in a dated manner.

I would tell people to not get Sumo Logic if you are looking for a traditional monitoring software, because that was not the purpose it was written for. They should get it if they are looking for a log ingestion and aggregation system.

We use the AWS version of the product.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Developer Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
We have seen improvement in our operational processes
Pros and Cons
  • "For many of our services, we use Sumo Logic to track errors and send notifications to our Slack channel, if there are issues. Then, we have our support people monitoring this, and they can react quickly."
  • "Scalability has been good for our needs. We haven't run into any scaling issues in regards to size so far."
  • "I would like better UI-driven functionality to create alerts and reports. Now, we have to understand the syntax, so it is a little difficult for someone to pick it up without using the manuals. If there was more of a graphical user interface, it would be beneficial."
  • "It would be nice to have an improved ability to scroll through logs within a time frame. Right now, we can search for specific errors. However, if we want to look for "before and after" within a specific time frame, it's not easy using the tool. This would be an improvement."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is application log tracing and monitoring. It does a good job of meeting our needs, in terms of alert monitoring.

How has it helped my organization?

For many of our services, we use Sumo Logic to track errors and send notifications to our Slack channel, if there are issues. Then, we have our support people monitoring this, and they can react quickly.

What is most valuable?

The key features that we have been using:

  • The ability to troubleshoot production issues.
  • Set up monitoring for errors. 

What needs improvement?

I would like better UI-driven functionality to create alerts and reports. Now, we have to understand the syntax, so it is a little difficult for someone to pick it up without using the manuals. If there was more of a graphical user interface, it would be beneficial.

It would be nice to have an improved ability to scroll through logs within a time frame. Right now, we can search for specific errors. However, if we want to look for "before and after" within a specific time frame, it's not easy using the tool. This would be an improvement.

We are still looking for some functionality to make the alerting and monitoring set up easier and more user-friendly.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We are sending out real-time streaming of logs from multiple applications, and we haven't had any issues with the application.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability has been good for our needs. 

We have applications across the company which are using Sumo Logic. We haven't run into any scaling issues in regards to size so far.

How is customer service and technical support?

We haven't reached out to technical support yet.

What about the implementation team?

The integration was set up by us. What we did was use our deployment automation tools to send logs over to Sumo Logic. Most of this was done on our side. It would have been nice to have some out-of-the-box plugins which could have been used for this purpose.

We integrate with a lot of custom applications, mostly running on a Linux environment. What we do is we send logs from the Linux file systems over to Sumo Logic.

What was our ROI?

We have seen improvement in our operational processes.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Pricing has been cheaper than some of the competing tools, like Splunk. However, if we went to ELK Stack, which is open source, it would have been less costly, but it would have required more development from our side. It is a good balance between price and functionality.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We also looked at Kibana. 

We chose Sumo Logic because it had robust functionality. We also had a licensing agreement with the parent company.

What other advice do I have?

It is a good tool for operational logging and monitoring of applications.

We are using the hosted version.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Sumo Logic Security Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Sumo Logic Security Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.