Erik Cassel, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of ROBLOX, was kind enough to take the time to explain why his company selected log management and analysis tools from Sumo Logic.
Please introduce yourself and your organization
I’m Erik Cassel, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder at ROBLOX. ROBLOX is one of the most popular children’s entertainment sites on the Internet, providing a multi-player 3D game environment for nearly 7 million users. We emphasize user-generated content, allowing players to use core components to create online games that simulate the real world. They also build places for friends to meet, and create virtual goods to sell in the ROBLOX virtual economy.
What are you doing that needed this type of technology?
ROBLOX has more than a billion page views per month and is no ordinary online gaming site. Instead of offering a predetermined menu of games, we provide a set of basic programming tools with which our users create their own games. This presents some interesting challenges for our IT staff, which not only has to provide a stable platform for the games to run on, but also has to be careful not to interfere with the user-created games.
Concurrently, ROBLOX has hundreds and hundreds of servers running at any one time. We have a rich amount of data for the taking, but we didn’t have a system in place that could handle all the data that we wanted to collect and analyze.
To help achieve these objectives, we turned to Sumo Logic’s log management and analytics service to help turn large amounts of log data into actionable operational insights.
What products did you consider before making a selection?
We looked at numerous solutions for our log management needs, including on-premise solution. We concluded those solutions did not offer either the operational ease of Sumo Logic nor the analytic capabilities of Sumo Logic. After we concluded all of our evaluations, Sumo Logic was the obvious choice.
Why did you select this product?
We had three primary criteria for selecting a solution to manage and analyze our large volumes of operational log data:
- Cloud-based: We didn’t want to burden our storage infrastructure with such a high volume of log data.
- Scalable: We needed architecture that we were confident would scale as our log volume grows, without any additional complexity.
- Strong analytics: The kinds of queries we wanted to do are very complex and require a quick response so we can implement appropriate measures.
Sumo Logic met all three criteria better than any of the vendors on the market. Sumo Logic enables ROBLOX to get insight into how games are performing and provides ways to analyze how to make those games work better.
What tangible benefits have you gotten through the use of this product?
As a gaming company, one of our big challenges is making sure games run smoothly. In order to do that, we need to analyze games running the ROBLOX platform and understand how they work. We started out, as many people do, with on-premise log management tools. Those were complicated, hard to use and not well documented. We needed a sophisticated, managed solution that had robust querying capabilities. Sumo Logic provides us with all of these things, and allows us to watch how our games work, analyze them deeply, and make them better for our customers.
With Sumo Logic, getting the data collection, management and analysis to start working took just a few minutes, instead of hours or days. However, the impact of Sumo Logic’s service on ROBLOX goes beyond operational efficiency. We’re using Sumo Logic to be able to improve our products and new features, be confident that when we introduce a new feature or make some significant change to the system, it’s going to behave the way we want it to. It’s truly improving our ability to innovate as a company.
What advice would you offer others?
I would strongly recommend to all others in my position to include a cloud-based service as part of any log management evaluation process. While there are several well-known on-premise solutions, the evaluation process will make the advantages of a cloud-based approach very clear.
