Loggly: Log management tool tells what broke -- and why

Charlie Oppenheimer, CEO Loggly, and Dave Ewart, VP of Marketing, visited to introduce me to version two of the company's operational management tool. This version is a complete re-write of the product, with the goal being to increase scalability and offer "responsive log management."

The key differences between their product and the other performance management and monitoring tools, Loggly points out, are:

• No agents must be installed for the tool to work.
• Incoming data is parsed and indexed as it comes in so administrators and DevOps can immediately begin to find the root cause when system behavior isn't what was expected.
• The company's Dynamic Field Explorer assists administrators and DevOps in the task of finding out what they're looking for when performance anomalies occur.

I asked them to explain how their offering is different and better than what is being offered by the twenty or so competitors I've spoken to over the last year. They summed it up this way: While New Relic, Splunk and Sumo Logic are great for helping administrators discover what happened — we quickly tell them why it happened.

I was impressed with how quickly issues could be found and I think you will be too. If you frequently dive into machine or operational data to discover why performance problems or outages happened, it would be worth the time to see a demonstration of Loggly or try it out for yourself.