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Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic

Overview

What is Sumo Logic?

Sumo Logic is a log management offering from the San Francisco based company of the same name.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Sumo Logic is a versatile tool that is widely used in an enterprise setting by developers, system engineers, management, and InfoSec …
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Sumo Logic

7 out of 10
July 22, 2021
Incentivized
Sumo Logic is used purely within the corporate IT area of the business as a limited access storage location for logs as part of a larger …
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Pricing

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Essentials

$3.00

Cloud
Per GB Logs

Enterprise

$4.00

Cloud
Per GB Logs

Enterprise Security

$4.25

Cloud
Per GB Logs

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Sumo Logic Search Job API

YouTube

Sumo Logic: Unified Logs and Metrics

YouTube

Demo of Sumo Logic Log Reduce - Next Generation Log Analytics

YouTube

Next Generation Log Management & Analytics - Demo of Sumo Logic

YouTube
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Product Details

What is Sumo Logic?

Sumo Logic is a cloud-native SaaS analytics platform powered by logs that helps customers deliver reliable and secure cloud-native applications. Sumo Logic helps practitioners and developers to ensure application reliability and security against modern threats and gain insights into their cloud infrastructures. The scalable platform also offers real-time analytics and insights across observability and security solutions for their cloud-native applications.

Sumo Logic Video

Sumo Logic platform intro

Sumo Logic Competitors

Sumo Logic Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Sumo Logic is a log management offering from the San Francisco based company of the same name.

Datadog, Splunk Cloud, and New Relic are common alternatives for Sumo Logic.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.7.

The most common users of Sumo Logic are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(71)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Sumo Logic is a versatile tool that is widely used in an enterprise setting by developers, system engineers, management, and InfoSec professionals. Its primary use case is as a log aggregation tool, allowing users to ingest large amounts of logs and gain visibility into their systems. By centralizing application logs, Sumo Logic aids in troubleshooting, development assistance, security, and compliance efforts. It serves as a reliable troubleshooting tool for technical users and provides valuable insights for analysis and support.

OneLogin, a platform that relies on Sumo Logic, utilizes it to gain advanced visibility into transactions within their platform and extends a limited version to their customers. Users find Sumo Logic's customizable heuristics invaluable for identifying specific event information. The tool enables proactive monitoring and root cause analysis of application problems, offering comprehensive exploration of logs across clusters of machines. Its ability to generate alerts for log errors reduces response time to incidents significantly.

Sumo Logic also fulfills the requests of business users who need simple and quick insights into their IT infrastructure. It empowers them to create customized dashboards to monitor and analyze logs from various environments. The eCommerce department uses Sumo Logic specifically for monitoring application logs, performing ad hoc queries, and setting up alerts for system problems. Overall, Sumo Logic plays an essential role in bringing visibility, improving system performance understanding, aiding troubleshooting efforts, and fulfilling compliance requirements in enterprise settings.

Valuable log ingestion: Many users have found Sumo Logic's ability to ingest logs from their CDN directly, in real-time, to be a valuable feature. This eliminates the need for massive compressed archives that were sent every two hours.

Extensive REST API capabilities: Several reviewers have praised Sumo Logic's REST API for its extensive capabilities in managing log sources, source configurations, dashboard data, searches, and more. They have also noted that the API documentation is consistently updated.

Easy configuration management: Users appreciate the addition of the ability to configure agents via configuration files. This feature allows for easier and more flexible configuration management using tools like Chef, Puppet, or Salt. Some users have specifically mentioned how this has improved their workflow.

Difficult User Management: Many users have expressed difficulty in managing user accounts due to the lack of a User/RBAC API, which made it necessary to manually review user accounts and create spreadsheets.

Limited Collaboration Features: Reviewers have mentioned that the user who creates saved search queries, alerts, reports, or dashboards is the only one who can edit them. This creates difficulties in a collaborative environment or larger enterprise where multiple users may need to collaborate on and modify these assets.

Unpublished Work on User Deletion: Deleting a user account in Sumo Logic causes all the work created by that user to become unpublished and unscheduled. This includes dashboards, scheduled searches, alerting, reporting, and other related assets.

Users commonly recommend the following for Sumo Logic:

  • Use Sumo Logic for log file analysis and other big data projects. It is considered the best solution available in the market for log management and machine data analytics platform.

  • Configure alerts for anomalies/failures and keep logs of different parts of the system to ensure comprehensive monitoring.

  • Take advantage of Sumo Logic's ease of use and advanced features, such as parsing, dashboarding, and alerting. Users should consider taking training provided by Sumo Logic to effectively navigate the platform.

  • Utilize the very responsive support team and benefit from frequent updates provided by Sumo Logic.

  • Set up Sumo Logic properly for future time-saving benefits.

  • Consider Sumo Logic for IT teams as it provides sophisticated analytics and improves security in the cloud.

  • Optimize log writing of applications for cheaper and better log management with Sumo Logic.

  • Use Sumo Logic for monitoring APIs, network monitoring issues, and infrastructure monitoring to make it more efficient.

  • Explore more ways to view and aggregate data in Sumo Logic for better monitoring of systems.

  • Consider the total cost of ownership before choosing a monitoring analytics solution, including capacity planning, data ingest costs, support contracts, time to build out an MVP, familiarity with the data, and cycle time.

  • Work with vendor services for any issues related to search API and dashboard problems.

  • Try Sumo Logic as a good alternative to Splunk if it is not in the budget or if extreme needs are not present. Users also have access to free product certification and training.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-14 of 14)
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July 22, 2021

Sumo Logic

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sumo Logic is used purely within the corporate IT area of the business as a limited access storage location for logs as part of a larger solution to help with ISO 27001 certification.
  • Extremely versatile
  • Good user management
  • Helpful support
  • Quite complex set up
  • Steep learning curve
Sumo Logic can deal with large amounts of data very well and has incredible processing power to give you real meaningful interpretations of the data you give it. It requires some time to get the best out of it and will only be as good as the data you feed into it.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sumologic for analyzing and checking logs. Mostly if any issues or customer-reported errors we rely on sumologic logs. We use [it] in all our environments. It helps my day-to-day work in troubleshooting issues. We also have graphs, charts for regular monitors. It is used across all departments in our organization.
  • Using Live logs are helpful during testing and debugging issue areas.
  • Graphs and charts are used for identifying spike areas during any time period
  • Querying for particular error or failure messages gives the frequency and how often or how relevant the issue is.
  • Can SumoLogic logs be integrated as part of Browser extension. Just a thought, so as we are running the application in UI we can see the live logs.
  • In the world of AI, can SumoLogic use some kind of AI to suggest queries or provide some ready-to-use queries. Or also, in addition, can suggest improvements to the existing queries.
For checking and analyzing logs, particularly live logs too. The queries are easy to use and help in filtering the logs for a specific search.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
OneLogin utilizes Sumo Logic for an advanced look into transactions that occur within the OneLogin platform for all of its customers. As a valued partner of OneLogin, Sumo Logic extends a limited version of its cloud-based offering. OneLogin customers can use Sumo Logic in the same way that we at OneLogin utilize it with restrictions. The limited users without a paid subscription can only view seven days of log history and a limited amount of logs. Sumo Logic is a go-to troubleshooting tool for technical folks like myself at OneLogin. It just works, and the information is there for us to review.
  • Streams logs in near-real-time to the platform
  • Allows email alerts based upon log information
  • Allows users to create dashboards based upon events
  • Searchable event history from logs
  • Could possibly place events in more human-readable form
  • Could display errors with descriptions instead of just the code
  • Probably other areas for improvement on the dashboard functionality
Many products have built-in visibility to events like when a user logs in. What they don't have is visibility into failed login events, for instance. Sumo Logic provides incredible insight for troubleshooting when things don't go as expected. Based upon the logs, key people could also be alerted based upon event details. This is a very powerful platform.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SumoLogic across all IT as a way of monitoring and analyzing application logs as well as some auditing. We use it to proactively monitor applications looking for new or potential problems. We also use it to analyze the root causes of problems. It is the best way we have to explore logs across clusters of machines.
  • Searching is powerful and fast and does not require you to pre-filter/pre-parse your data in order to extract fields, filter messages, or run analytics
  • User data can be private or shared with the organization, allowing developers to create searches and share them with Support folks.
  • It's easy to create email alerts when certain conditions are detected.
  • Pricing is per ingested byte, so it forces you to pick and choose what you log, rather than ingesting everything and figuring it out later
SumoLogic is a fantastic log aggregator and analysis tool, a fine alternative to Splunk. Searching is powerful and mostly intuitive and results come fast. If you have application logs in clusters or Kubernetes pods that lose their logs every time they're restarted, Sumo is the solution for you.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SumoLogic is being used by our eCommerce department to monitor the logs from our applications. We use it for both ad hoc queries, as well as using it on a frequent basis for setting up alerts. It helps us to quickly be alerted if there are any problems with our systems.
  • Alerts
  • Ad hoc queries
  • Reports
  • Training
  • Cost
  • UI
It is appropriate for ad hoc queries and for alerting.
M Phillip Yogore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sumo Logic to pull data from other systems we use. Once we have all the data in a centralized location, we use it to help us analyze our services. From an IT perspective, it helps us support our end users in the best way possible. I would say that our IT team is quite new and green with Sumo Logic, and some would like more information on what Sumo Logic can do for us.
  • It helps our track down laptops that touch our systems
  • It helps us decipher laptops that have self-named hostnames
  • It helps us track down mac addresses
  • I like the help center, but I think if it had more GUI tools, it could help new users.
  • Pulling out data is sometimes hard to read, (Maybe if I knew how to export data better, this would not be an issue for me).
  • I would like better know-how on how to create reports that will help our business.
I love using Sumo Logic when it comes to it finding a laptop on our system. Sometimes we always don't have the right documentation on a system or no documentation on a system at all. In these scenarios, we might have the name of the user, their user ID, or the mac address. What Sumo Logic has provided us when pulling reports from the various systems it allows us to find these machines.
David Tanner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sumo Logic is being used across our company. Our logs are first published to CloudWatch, and then pushed over to Sumo Logic for analysis and debugging. Each log is tagged with a session id that we can use to track API calls across services. We use the logs to verify customer issues, and it lets us see which APIs, and therefore which team to reach out to so we can solve a given issue.
  • The UI is simple and intuitive
  • Data can be searched using simple terms or more complex queries
  • We can ingest all of our logs and not lose anything
  • There isn't an option to do constant refreshes on a query
  • The query language doesn't allow for search by field value automatically
  • Automatic tabs is a little clunky
Sumo Logic appears to be well designed for a small operation to get started with a small amount of logs. As a company grows, I am not sure that the tool will keep up with the demand of massive amounts of logs. This seems to be the case with most of the hosted log services I have worked with at least.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently, SumoLogic is being used to track ALL activity, error, usage, warning, data, and debug logs, that are logged by any user action, or any messages that a service my company uses communicates between other services. Anytime a button is clicked, a page is accessed, workflow is done, or process is completed by an end-user, we log the action in Sumo. Anytime a service or ec2 is running and completes a process or sends/receives a service message, we log that interaction between services. This robust logging allows us to pinpoint specific areas where we need to get more information or want to track specific metrics. We have set up our implementation with Sumo to log anything we tell it to log. If we want a message logged every time an end-user logs in and clicks a certain button, we can log that specific of information down to the second they did it and which browser version they were on. The level of logging is all up to how much you build into your service logging.
  • Activity Tracking
  • Realtime/interactive Dashboard
  • Aggregation of data into tables and graphs
  • Exporting information to be imported into other programs
  • Integrates well with our other internal services
  • Accessibility of information
  • Sumo is very slow compared to other programs like Splunk
  • Sumo only holds data for a certain amount of time, so if you want to reference an entry that was logged 6-months ago, you better have saved your logs in an external database somewhere because Sumo no longer has that information
  • Automatic parsing of data is not set up in Sumo as opposed to Splunk where it automatically parsed ALL logs
It's great for logging all interactions you tell it to log and it's great for sharing information found in queries made by individuals because specific queries can be shared via links that Sumo creates. It's not great for holding information for longer than 30 days or for accessing information over a long period of time.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sumo Logic is used mostly for analysis in gaps where other monitoring tools fall short. Specifically, log aggregation and even more importantly than the aggregation is that it uses intelligent (and customizable) heuristics to analyze logs for specific event information and sorting.

We use sumo logic primarily for historical analysis but it is very reliable and customizable. For example, for errors that show symptoms directly in their log files (which we already piped to sumo logic for historical analysis) we have used this to generate alerts. This is ideal as log errors often occur before a service fully crashes and has reduced our response time to these types of incidents.

Finally, we have turned some of these into dashboards for certain business users. I don't think there is much helpful use to technical needs, but it can help quickly satisfy business users by providing simple and quick insights into the IT infrastructure. This is a common type of request for internal IT and it is nice to be able to actually fulfill those tickets instead of declining them (without a good tool, it might not be practical to fulfill such small impact requests).
  • Log Aggregation and uploading. The architecture for Sumo Logic makes a great deal of sense and works very well.
  • Automated analysis. It still impresses me how well a newly uploaded log can be broken into intelligent parts, then searched and sorted using their tools.
  • Dashboards. It might not be what YOU will need as an IT admin, but you can give access to these dashboards easily to business users who love that kind of stuff. Most other types of (monitoring / alerting) tools, for no apparent reason, lack this feature.
  • Reporting, monitoring, and graphing. Given, you need to have useful log generation for an application or service as a prerequisite for sumo logic to be able to gain use, once it has it is an amazingly powerful tool.
  • I do not think, as I remember, Sumo Logic works well with things that don't generate as a 'standard' of log. Therefore, sumo logics natural limitation is that it works best with pre-existing logs and doesn't do well to monitor a system for other types of events that don't reach a flat file or standardized log format. If you develop mostly internal applications and like to rely on sumo logic, you may find yourselves begging the developers for more useful and cleaner logs.
Sumo Logic is great anytime you already have a flat log file that your application uses well, and naturally it does not perform well if your applications or services do not write useful information to their logs. We particularly rely on sumo logic to help with post mortems and root cause analysis as we can look environment wide for log anomalies.
Jason Sievert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sumo Logic to centralize all of our application logs into one easy to use and easy to search interface. This is used not only for production but also our development environments. We use it for troubleshooting issues, development assistance, as well as for security and compliance. Having all of our logs in one place is fantastic.
  • Centralized management, everything can be done from the website.
  • Software upgrades of the collectors, once again all done from the website. Easy to identify out of date collectors
  • Searching and parsing logs. Very easy run a query logs and quantify the data.
  • Changing collectors from web config to local configs could be handled a bit better.
If you have more than one server or application that you generate logs on, Sumo Logic makes the pain of collecting the data and searching it go away. Also with their live tail feature, you can view and parse logs in real time. Sumo Logic makes it easy to collect logs from file based, windows event logs, and network syslog sources.
Tim Mortensen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My department uses Sumo Logic to evaluate problems with our customer's integration. It gives us valuable insight into the issues our customers are running in to and the visuals to determine a fast solution. Without Sumo Logic, we wouldn't be able to properly troubleshoot with the speed and accuracy needed to help our customer's who are looking for quick resolutions over the phone.
  • Detailed insights into API calls.
  • Fast and accurate results to specific search parameters.
  • Easy to use interface.
  • More customizable shortcuts.
  • Better UI for time-based searches.
  • Adaptive learning for user preferences.
Anytime you are in a customer service role that requires support users connect to your system, you could greatly benefit from your reps using Sumo Logic. Without Sumo Logic, it would be very difficult to troubleshoot in a fast and accurate way. It completely removes the need for a back and forth with your customer to ask probing questions, and replaces it with a direct visual of the problem.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sumo logic is being used as a single source of log aggregation for multiple system types from Windows, Linux, Networking, Mainframe, etc. This allows cross OS/cross system searches for specific items. This allows our IT security team to research issues quickly. This also allows us to limit the amount of disk space used to store logs on internal systems. We can build custom reporting to track issues or changes that can be shared with teams and management without allowing direct access to the systems involved.
  • Custom reporting
  • Multiple platform access
  • Easy setup for consuming log data
  • Report engine takes work to create useable info
  • User interface needs improvement
  • Better training options
If you are looking for an internal only system then this may not work for you, but aside from that I cannot see where this would be less appropriate. This system is well suited to bring diverse system info together for cross platform research and auditing. It is really helpful where custom reporting is desired or required.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sumo Logic is used to aggregate our logs from multiple environments and allows us a one stop location to see everything that's happening within our infrastructure. We just log into Sumo Logic and are able to use their query system to easily get at the data we need to make decisions.
  • One stop shop to analyze your data.
  • Great search tool to drill down to issues/problems you might have.
  • Easy interface.
  • Can be daunting at first.
  • Need to educate people on how the categorizing and searching works.
  • Setup can be a bit slow.
For us using Sumo Logic as the centralized location for all of our logs is great. You can either set up custom dashboards to see your data or they have default dashboards/graphs for whatever type of data you're trying to input (web logs, server logs, etc). It makes seeing your data easy.
Derek Ardolf | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sumo Logic was being used by developers, system engineers, management, and InfoSec as a primary log aggregation tool. It was replacing the Splunk deployment in our enterprise because it was cheaper, hosted by Sumo Logic, and helped bring larger visibility to the enterprise (as we were able to ingest larger amounts of logs than we had before). As a result, many developer teams that did not initially have the insight into their applications were able to get instant access to how things were running on their systems.
  • Sumo Logic allowed for our InfoSec team to ingest logs from our CDN directly, in real-time, instead of massive compressed archives that were sent every two-hours (the only alternative at the time). Sumo Logic had an app for these logs, that allowed us to easily get an immediate payoff from the data, with canned dashboard and saved searches.
  • Sumo Logic has a fairly extensive REST API when it comes to log sources, source configurations, dashboard data, searches, etc. Their wiki for the API is usually kept up to date.
  • Sumo Logic, during the period of time I had used their product, had added the ability to configure agents via configuration files. This allowed customers to configure their endpoints, and modify the endpoints, with configuration management tools like Chef / Puppet / Salt. Beforehand, the only option was to always make changes either via the web portal or REST API.
  • The solutions engineers were extremely helpful, and easily reachable when issues would occur.
  • Users at our company found it easy to get started, working on new dashboards, scheduled searches, and alerting. The alerting worked well with our third-party paging tool.
  • Sumo Logic, during the period that I used their product (up until at least November 2015), did not have a User / RBAC API. This made it very difficult to manage users (we had about 100 users). Even though they had SAML integration, allowing us to utilize a single-sign on solution, we would have to do manual reviews of user accounts in Sumo Logic on a regular basis. There was no export feature, so it became a matter of copy/pasting all users from the web portal, and creating a spreadsheet out of the data. This was a big pain, as we were all about automation. I had been told that a User / RBAC REST API would be made available sometime during Q1 - Q1 2016.
  • The user who creates any saved search queries, alerts, reports, or dashboards, is the only user that is able to edit them. In a collaborative environment, or larger enterprise, this brings a level of difficulty. For example, if an alert breaks and is spamming an inbox/pager, it cannot be edited or stopped unless done specifically by the user who created it. The RBAC has not been improved enough to allow groups/teams/organizations to have ownership over them (as of November 2015).
  • If you are to delete a user account in Sumo Logic, as your account is setup to allow a specific amount of user accounts in addition to the storage limits agreed in contract, all of the work they had created for teams -- dashboards, scheduled searches, alerting, reporting, etc. -- all become unpublished and unscheduled. They all become inherited by the user that deletes their account. This may create a mess, as this may now completely stop many useful reports/alerts/dashboards that were being taken care of initially. As a result, deletion of a user who is no longer having access to Sumo Logic (due to leaving the company, or leaving a team the needs access), requires a complete review of everything the user has saved in order to see whether anything needs to be rescheduled for alerting/reporting or republished for dashboard viewing. This is all as of November 2015.
  • Purging log data can be extremely difficult. Sumo Logic stores data in a WORM (Write Once, Read Many) type of database. This is done for security reasons, and the database also stores it's data in an encrypted form. If you wish for any data to be removed for any reason, such as PHI / PII / etc. information, you have to wipe out absolutely all data within a time range that Sumo Logic has ever gathered for you. This does not just include the source of the data you are trying to purge, but would include all log data from all sources that you have (even if separately indexed, or partitioned). I am unsure of whether this is still the fact, or if this has at least narrowed down to partition/index, or source.
  • In the web portal, Sumo Logic has icons for agents that are working -- green/yellow if I remember right. Source hosts would always show a big green checkmark for health, even if certain sources were completely failing. If Sumo Logic agents are logging errors that logs can't be collected (permissions, some agent issue, etc.), there wasn't a way to visibly see there was an issue unless you were looking for it in logs. This resulted in periods of time where we did not receive logs from many sources. This is hard to alert on, as we found we would have to create a scheduled search of Sumo Logic agent logs that looked for as many error/warning messages as we could, that we knew about. This was incredibly difficult, and unmanageable.
Sumo Logic is best suited, as of the time of this review, for a smaller-to-medium sized enterprise. Medium may be pushing it, depending on the deployment. The larger the enterprise, user access, and server agent count, the harder Sumo Logic is at scaling and realistically using. I have not managed or deployed other log aggregation solutions, so I'm not aware of whether competitors may suffer from the same setbacks as Sumo Logic. The ease of use, ability to deploy quickly, always having the latest version of the web portal (due to it being hosted), and being able to have data readily available for a critical time of the year were great benefits. Sumo Logic had also shown that they were taking our feedback seriously, and seemed to be working on resolutions to many of these issues for 2016. I'm giving a 7 out of 10 based on the Sumo Logic as it was in November 2015. If one is in talks with the vendor, the cons listed here should be mentioned in order to see if they have been resolved.
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