Loggly, Funding Rounds and the Need for Closed Loops

One just in from the “boring but important” file. Loggly, a startup n the log management space, is rolling out some new products and news of a funding round. Log management is a pretty boring area but one which is getting ever more critical as the world moves to a much more distributed model of IT. With enterprises interacting with a multitude of different systems, application, infrastructure providers and other components, taking all the meta data around those interactions and deriving insights from them is ever more important.

Loggly’s investors certainly believe so and they’re stumping up another $10.5M to almost double the venture funding the company has picked up to date. An interesting sidenote to the funding is that it includes Cisco, a company that has been strongly articulating the proposition of the internet of things and connected devices, log data is an important part of making sense of all of that accumulated data and it’s interesting to see the company involved in this funding.

Founded in 2009, Loggly has been posting some impressive results with 5* growth over the past 12 months and some 3500 customers including tech stalwarts such as Intuit, Salesforce and Electronic Arts – all organizations that see the value to be gained from the insights that can be drawn from log data – application performance management is an obvious first port-of-call for vendors like Loggly, but speeding up iteration of applications through a tighter feedback loop is another compelling proposition.

Alongside the funding announcement, Loggly is introducing its new service, a so-called “second generation log management service”. The new platform, dubbed Responsive Log Management, introduces a new user interface but, more importantly some new analytical tools to run assessments on log data – features like instant trend graphs across log data, integrated alerting and customizable dashboards help to make sense of the noise.

MyPOV

The new product looks good, and the roster of customers that Loggly has attracted is stellar, that said, it is my feeling that these cloud logging applications are really only a stop gap measure until some time when products offer a closed loop measure-analyze-react solution.

In the same way that cloud monitoring is a very useful tool, but less useful than a combined monitoring/management solution, I’d like to see log vendors either build or partner with others to create highly specific vertical offerings that combine monitoring and action-taking functions for specific use cases. While it’s de rigueur for cloud vendors to point to a broad ecosystem of integration partners, the enterprises I speak to are keen to find solutions that offer monitoring and management from one vendor – an integration is good, but not as good as broad out of the box functionality.

As such I see a mid term acquisition exit for Loggly and its competitors – some of the bigger IT management vendors from the old era will acquire specific businesses to package into their existing solutions. Watch this space.