Sumo Logic

Like New Relic, Sumo Logic is another company offering an important DevOps tool needed by businesses to help manage and operate what they are doing with their cloud environments.

Sumo Logic provides analysis of log data across a business’s apps, severs, network and other IT infrastructure, and regardless of whether it runs on Amazon AWS, a private cloud, or comes from a customer app, or a mobile phone: “As long as it has a time stamp on it, it doesn’t matter to us,” said Sanjay Sarathy, the company’s head of marketing.

Sumo Logic helps administrators tracks that log data in real time, and helps them get digestible and actionable information about their whole environment, from Cisco network switch logs on up the stack.

The company’s LogReduce sorting system uses machine learning to filter log file data into patterns. That way, it can find sources of problems you may not even know to look for. For example, if you’re an IT manager and see some errors in a java application running across your system, it might take you hours to find the source of the problem. You might have to wade through 50,000 log messages from just a two-minute period. Sumo Logic, by contrast, can look through messages it sees across your infrastructure, instantly, including those coming from the Apache application server and the Linux OS it runs on top of. It might find the problem is not actually from the Java application, but from a faulty process in a linux server that affects the app.

Sumo Logic can also aggregate log data from all of its customers to locate security or performance problems.

The heritage of its founders has won it credibility within enterprise circles. Co-founders Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen previously both held key positions at log management and security company Arcsight. Founded in 2010, Sumo Logic’s director of security was one of the first five employees.

Sumo Logic is the youngest company on this list, and it’s very early in developing its roadmap. It competes against companies like Splunk, Loggly, and VMware. IBM has also recently come out with a beta product in this area. Sumo says its advantage is in the speed of its analytics.

Sumo Logic has now raised $50.5M from investors.

It hasn’t released data on revenue, but the company’s first quarter brought in more revenue than the full previous year combined, according to Sumo Logic’s Sarathy. The company has 130 customers, including Netflix, Tableau, McGraw Hill and GoGo Inflight.

The company’s immediate targetable market is about $8-10 billion, but as machine-to-machine communications grow over time, the market could eventually double or triple, said Sarathy.

If you’ve used Sumo Logic, please let us know what you think, and get our free full report when it is released next month.