What to expect from Sumo Logic Illuminate

Sumo Logic defined

Sumo Logic is a cloud-based service for logs & metrics management that uses machine-generated data for real-time analytics. The petabyte scale technology is built around a distributed ‘data retention’ architecture that keeps all log data available for instant analysis, eliminating the need for (and complexity of) of data archiving.

Although many people think the company is called Sumo [Logic] to signify weight, strength and muscle in the face of massive log file management tasks, the name actually comes from one of the founder’s dogs.

Sumo Logic’s initial market-facing statement (as detailed on eWeek) made in 2012 claimed that:

“Until now, enterprise log management solutions have consisted of expensive, complex deployments that are difficult to scale and have been unable to deliver on their promise of true analysis and insights.”

The above quote is attributed to Kumar Saurabh, who was acting CEO and vice president of analytics at Sumo Logic at the time — current president and CEO Ramin Sayar appears to be carrying that original thought process and mission forward directly.

Continuous Intelligence

Today Sumo Logic is focused on what it likes to call Continuous Intelligence (CI) in cloud-native application deployment scenarios.

Likely areas of discussion at the show itself may include further details on the firm’s 2018 acquisition of FactorChain, an early stage ‘security threat investigation software’ company.

Now firmly embedded within the Sumo Logic stack, this forms part of the company’s mission to create a technology proposition that offers a more converged take on IT ops and security for modern application delivery in the cloud.

CEO Sayar suggests that there is a ‘crack’ in the current models governing the adoption of cloud technologies and that, as a result, customers are struggling to adapt traditional security models to cloud applications.

The company says that there are fundamental challenges associated in terms of understanding application and cloud data with existing tools and skill sets, resolving IT vs. security symptoms and root causes and quickly triangulating across cloud-scale data sets to resolve threats are preventing the natural extension of traditional methods to the cloud.

Lighting up for Illuminate

Most industry vendors like to name their events after something relatively logical if they don’t go for the standard TechEd label. Sumo Logic obviously chose to call this gathering Illuminate in order to try and show how it will work to provide knowledge ‘inside application execution structures’ in the real world.

Alongside sessions devoted to certification, Sumo Logic has also lined up a speaker selection where 60% of the sessions being delivered will come from Sumo customers highlighting success stories, use cases and best practices.

Among the stars of the show is renowned economist and future thinker, Jeremy Rifkin. Author of The Third Industrial Revolution, How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. Mr. Rifkin is an adviser to the European Union and to heads of state around.

Looking back at other news from 2019, Sumo Logic used its time in the ring at DockerCon 2019 to announce support for Docker Enterprise… an area the company will surely touch on throughout Illuminate. Sumo Logic’s intention is to provide not only a view of the health of a customer’s applications running on the Docker platform, but also the health of the Docker platform itself for more complete visibility.

Let’s also make note of the fact that Sumo Logic use the show to announce its Modern App Report for 2019.

If previous years’ reports are anything to go by, expect to see more container and serverless adoption rises. What will be interesting to see is how fast these changes are taking place… and whether the rest of the market will follow the lead that Sumo Logic’s customers are taking here.

There’s obviously a bias towards cloud-native IT in this group, but will more companies follow?”

In the agenda hacienda

For a relatively random dip into the event agenda to wrap up here, some of the stand-out sessions include:

Introduction to logs metadata and fields management — Speakers: Adam Sznajder – Sumo Logic, Frank Reno – Sumo Logic.

How to Protect Your Company from a (Data) Apocalypse — Speaker: Sylwester Oracz – Sage Software Ltd.

Optimizing AWS Cost – Sumo Learnings from Operating a Cloud-Scale ServiceSpeaker: Jacek Migdal – Sumo Logic.

Blurring the Lines between Metrics and Logs — Speakers: Abhinav Khanna – Sumo Logic, Adam Sznajder – Sumo Logic.

… and finally (and remember, this was just a random snapshot of a whole bunch of sessions), the brilliantly titled: I can’t believe its not better – serverless synthetics & Sumo Logic — Speaker: Eddie Thompson – Sumo Logic.

This is a new event for the CWDN team, but Sumo Logic is a company that we have been watching for at least the last half-decade and its developer credentials and devotion to command line level technologies is not in question.