Meeting the Challenge of Big Data Log Management

A Sumo Logic White Paper
Meeting the
Challenge of Big Data
Log Management:
Sumo Logic’s
Real-Time Forensics
and Push Analytics™

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Executive Summary
The huge volume of log data generated by today’s enterprises
presents IT professionals with both a challenge and an opportuni-ty.
The challenge is managing large amounts of unstructured data.
The opportunity is turning that data into actionable insights that
can have a meaningful impact on the business or organization.
Sumo Logic’s log management service employs several tech-nologies
that meet the challenge and capture the opportunity.
Two of the most business-critical are Real-Time Forensics,
which offers an unprecedented level of flexibility and respon-siveness
in pinpointing potential or emerging problems; and
Push Analytics, which provides new insights into operational,
security and compliance issues, including answers to questions
that previously may not have even been asked.
Real-Time Forensics: From “If only...” to “What if...”
Organizations that rely on systems and applications running 24/7 maintain a
healthy paranoia about the potential for unplanned service interruptions, slow
response times, security breaches and other problems that can affect revenue
streams and/or customer satisfaction. The ability to fix problems quickly is
essential. Avoiding problems in the first place is even more desirable.
Machine-generated logs—the diagnostic and runtime data produced by
services, applications and –devices--contain information that can potentially
hasten resolution of problems or prevent them altogether. But because
the data sets produced by these logs are so large and unwieldy, many
organizations don’t even bother to try to understand what the data can offer.
Those that do try expend considerable amounts of time, money and resources,
and often don’t see a very satisfactory return on these investments.
“Sumo Logic ... is in a
unique position to make
observations that no person
or in-house system could
hope to make.”

305 Main Street
Int’l 1 650 810 8700 +
www.sumologic.com +
The result is that most of the time and effort spent on operational, security and
compliance problem solving is backward-looking. It tries to understand where,
when and how a problem occurred. Finding the answer, if in fact it is found,
often takes hours or days, when an earlier diagnosis could have minimized its
impact and prevented its recurrence.
Two of the biggest barriers to timely problem resolution are managing the
volume of log data and knowing the right questions to ask. The Sumo Logic
service resolves both these issues through a three-part approach:
+ Scalability. Because it is a cloud-based service, Sumo Logic does not impose
limits on the amount of processing power a customer can apply to a prob-lem.
If a company suddenly faces a problem on a previously unmatched
scale, it can add resources from Sumo Logic in as little as 15 minutes. If it
were trying to tackle the same problem with an in-house approach, it would
take days or weeks to add servers, software and personnel to increase pro-cessing
capability.
+ Access to all data. Sumo Logic gathers and looks at all of a customer’s log
data. On-premise or in-house solutions have to limit the data set they are
analyzing, because they have finite resources at their disposal. Sumo Logic
can look at all a customer’s data, increasing the chance that a diagnosis will
be made quickly. In addition, Sumo Logic does not limit log data analysis to
a particular set of equipment vendors. If a data set is not familiar, the Sumo
Logic service will automatically mine the structure out of the logs and start
building parsers without having to involve the customer. Sumo Logic then
remembers the structure and applies it if another customer has logs from
the same source, saving both time and resources and leading to faster, more
accurate solutions.
+ Improved query options. The Sumo Logic combination of elastic processing
power and a complete set of data means that more questions can be posed
more quickly. Instead of following hunches and making educated guesses, IT
teams can quickly scour massive amounts of data in search of the anomalies,
error reports or patterns that will pinpoint the source of a problem.
“Fixing problems quickly is
essential. Avoiding problems
in the first place is even more
desirable.” “Sumo Logic ... is
in a unique position to make
observations that no person
or in-house system could
hope to make.”

305 Main Street
Int’l 1 650 810 8700 +
www.sumologic.com +
Sumo Logic elastic log processing enables customer to scale their storage and data processing
requirements on demand while providing applications, user and network trend through push
analytics.
Sumo Logic’s Real-Time Forensics capability changes and increases the
business value of the IT department by giving IT managers immediate insights
into key operational issues that demand immediate attention. Instead of
always looking backwards, IT staff can ask more complex, “what if...” questions
that will produce insights leading to operational improvements.
Consider the following examples where real-time operational insights can
be critical:
An application service provider that provides service-level agreements
(SLAs) with its customers suffers financially and in reputation if there is
any degradation in the service it provides. If a customer reports a problem
or the IT staff sees a drop in performance, it’s critical that the source be
identified quickly. But with 50 or 100 nodes involved, each generating streams
of operational log data, an on-premise or in-house solution is reduced to
essentially playing a guess game, making its best guess at the problem and
then looking for supporting evidence in the log data. With Sumo Logic’s service,
all of the log data from all the servers is collected in one place, where forensics
can be run very quickly. Starting with what a user sees at the front end, the
problem can be traced back through different nodes in the cluster such as
databases, applications and/or servers. The result is a complete picture of

305 Main Street
Int’l 1 650 810 8700 +
www.sumologic.com +
that particular incident, what happened and why. And once that is known,
the organization can take action to rectify the problem and prevent it from
happening again.
A security example might involve IT managers noticing or suspecting an attack
from an unauthorized outside party. With traditional responses, the process
of identifying the specific target of the attack might involve a lengthy iterative
process, depending on the number and location of servers. But with the Sumo
Logic service, all logs from all servers are collected centrally, making it easy
to reduce hundreds or thousands of logs to quickly determine exactly who
tried to log in, when, and from what IP address. If, for example, a password
cracker were being used, that would generate a log detailing a large number of
failures from a particular host. Sumo Logic’s Real-Time Forensics would detect
the anomalous activity instantly and report it, allowing the IT staff to pinpoint
the source and respond appropriately. Queries against that log could then be
turned into alerts, where the staff would be notified in real time should the
same, or similar attack occur.
Another security example: managers suspect that a recently departed
employee may have made unauthorized downloads during his/her last hours
of employment. IT managers may be asked to identify all of that employee’s
computer activity for the last 12 to 24 hours of employment. But because the
request comes after the employee left, the IT staff now has to go back through
logs of past activity. Sumo Logic’s service greatly simplifies the process by
centralizing log data from all possible relevant sources –server logs, operating
system logs, proxy logs, etc.—and filtering it by a single user name. The result:
a full report on the employee’s activity within an hour.
With Sumo Logic’s Real-Time Forensics, the combination of processing power,
completeness of data and flexibility of queries reduces the mean-time-to-investigation
and mean-time-to-resolution.
Push Analytics™: Answering the Questions. Asked and Unasked
While Sumo Logic’s unique forensic capability enables customers to process the
huge volume of log data to detect and diagnose problems, it’s equally important
to be able to wade through that same volume of data and emerge with valuable
operational insights. Sumo Logic’s Push Analytics can extract interesting and
important events from mountains of log data and proactively alert IT staff.
Push Analytics works in two dimensions. First, it analyzes all the log data
collected, looking for anomalies and unfamiliar patterns--events that IT
“When looking at log
management alternatives,
including on-premise and
managed solutions, we came
to the conclusion that Sumo
Logic is the right fit for us.”
– Imperva

305 Main Street
Int’l 1 650 810 8700 +
www.sumologic.com +
managers might never think to make inquiries about. Then, out of all that data
it will make a summary list of the most compelling and business-critical events
and present those findings to an IT manager, who can select those items of
greatest interest and drill down to investigate further.
Sumo Logic’s near-zero latency Real-Time Forensics engine delivers real-time search results from
terabytes of logs making critical new events occurring within IT infrastructure instantly available
for analysis.
A second dimension to Push Analytics is that it learns from not only the
experience of a single customer but learns from the experience of all its
customers. That aggregated knowledge is applied in helping IT staff make
sense of anomalies and previously unseen patterns.
An example of Push Analytics at work would be a business offering storage
and processing services to large numbers of users. As a server runs out of
disk space, it will generate a log entry somewhere that says “no space left on
this device.” Typically, there may be hundreds of such alerts from that server
in a day. But they may not come to the attention of IT staff until a threshold
is crossed. As more and more devices run out of disk space, performance will
gradually degrade, and at some point customers will notice and complain. If,

305 Main Street
Int’l 1 650 810 8700 +
www.sumologic.com +
on the other hand, the IT staff had a report of the full-disk message on the first
day, they would know to address the issue days in advance of when they might
otherwise have noticed.
On the security front, consider the example of a server that normally gets a
steady amount of traffic. At some point, a change is made in a firewall rule,
and suddenly that particular port is exposed to a new service. An outside
party who scans the network figures this out and starts hitting the service. This
triggers a new type of alert that starts showing up in the logs. Sumo Logic’s
Push Analytics would alert the IT staff to this anomalous condition long before
they might otherwise notice.
As important as it is to diagnose critical events as they occur, it can be equally
important to know when something is not occurring. For example, a particular
server may routinely generate an “I’m running” message every hour. But if that
message hasn’t been seen in the last six hours, that’s important to know—and
it could easily get buried amid all the operational log data generated every
minute. An IT staff can write hundreds of monitoring rules to detect cases
such as this, but still might be blind to dozens or hundreds of others that they
don’t know they could write. Sumo Logic’s Push Analytics finds the answers
to these unasked questions, both for what is happening that shouldn’t be and
what isn’t happening that should be
Summary
Combining our highly scalable processing power, access to all log data, and
highly flexible query capability—the Sumo Logic service provides IT managers
invaluable assistance in maintaining uptime, meeting SLAs, preventing security
breaches, and improving operating efficiency. Real-Time Forensics quickly
gets to the root of problems, sometimes before they even become evident,
while Push Analytics proactively notifies IT staff of trends and anomalies that
otherwise could be invisible. Together they deliver unique capabilities and
insights that improve customers’ IT operations and bottom line.
“Sumo Logic’s intelligent
parsing of structured and
unstructured log data,
coupled with the ability to
run real-time queries, provide
us with new insights into our
platform’s key performance
trends and behaviors.”
– Limelight

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