Stackify's smart error log management targets dev and ops

Stackify VP of Marketing Irit Gillatch reached out to provide an update and to introduce me to her company's newest approach to getting the industry's attention — and teaching the established system management, application performance management and log analytics suppliers a lesson.

I really enjoy our conversations and believe that the plucky company from Kansas City has some really good points.

Developers and operations staff have different needs

In our last conversation (see Stackify - application monitoring for DevOps), the folks from Stackify pointed out that developers and operations folks need different things presented in different ways. The developers need the ability to dive deeply into an application and learn what is happening. Operations staff, on the other hand, are better served by tools that let them quickly visualize the state of the applications and tools they're managing and make it necessary to see details only when there is a problem. Stackify believes that their product addresses both needs quickly and easily.

The company has updated its product technology and now is describing it as SmartELM, a smart unification of both event and log management into one package. It is hoping that this will allow it to jump to the head of the line by unifying the two categories and make the lives of developers and operations staff easier.

Here's what the company has to say about the newest edition of its product

Stackify SmartELM transforms this market by bringing several very unique capabilities:

• Context - the product provides developers with the information about everything that happened before, during and after an error was generated, providing them with a complete picture and making it easier to reproduce and resolve the issue.
• Error-aware logs - the product not only brings log statements to a central location for all apps and environments, but the solution is error-aware and allows developers to easily identify and investigate errors.
• Proactivity - with this product developers can immediately identify which application or environment is generating errors as they are trending, so failures will not go unnoticed, and fixed before it affect the business
• Application performance monitoring integration - the solution is fully integrated with the company’s monitoring solution. Providing an elaborated set of tools for application support in one platform.

Stackify SmartELM is part of Stackify’s all-in-one comprehensive solution that provides application developers, operations and support teams with the tools they need to support today's complex web applications. The product can work as a stand-alone solution or in combination with the company’s monitoring solution providing a complete view of application health and improving application support, shortening time to resolution thereby improving their users’ experience. The solution is cross-platform and works both on all Windows servers as well as all major Linux distributions.

Quick analysis

There are at least 20 competitors attempting to help companies monitor their systems, operating systems, networking environment, storage, database engines, application frameworks, applications or the more generic "user experience management." They all hope to make the lives of developers, administrators and operations staff easier and make sense of today's highly complex, distributed, multi-tier, multi-site applications environment.

Some — such as Stackify, Splunk, Loggly, LogLogic, Nastel, and Sumo Logic — focus on quickly being able to wander through log files; make sense of the operational and machine data found within; and make it simple for someone using their tools to find patterns, learn from past failures and, it is hoped, make life shiny.

Stackify has focused its attention on DevOps and has put together a tool that is easy to understand (for the target audience), does something useful, and can reduce the time to find the root cause of a problem and either fix it or know that it isn't an issue worth the time and effort to resolve.

It would be worth the time to learn more about what they're offering and see a demo. It's pretty impressive.