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Company: LogDNA (centralized log management for DevOps teams)
Company Description: LogDNA is a centralized log-management solution that helps modern engineering teams be more productive in a DevOps world. The product gives users instant access to, and control over, their logs so that they can understand, debug and troubleshoot their applications with ease. LogDNA’s intuitive user interface fits seamlessly into developers’ workflows so that they can get the information they need where they work.
Teams are drowning in alerts, and massive volumes of logs are difficult to parse through. Countless hours are wasted investigating and resolving issues instead of building new products and capabilities that deliver business value. LogDNA is disrupting the log management market with a modern approach that arms DevOps teams with actionable insights to more efficiently develop and debug their applications.
As a provider of centralized log management for DevOps teams, LogDNA supports modern microservices orchestration technology. Features like LogDNA’s Kubernetes Enrichment enable teams to debug deployment problems without separate tools or deep specialized knowledge. With Kubernetes Enrichment, events and resource metrics related to a specific service show alongside existing application logs, giving developers access to pertinent information without leaving their workflow. Whether it’s a simple misconfiguration, application bug or underlying infrastructure issue, all can be surfaced in a single view for seamless troubleshooting.
Founded in 2015, LogDNA is a privately held company headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. Tucker Callaway is the CEO.
Markets: All verticals, but it has seen accelerated growth in health care, financial services and Internet of Things (IoT).
International Operations: LogDNA has remote employees in the European Union and Canada.
Product and Services
The LogDNA log management platform provides detailed insights into production environments, enabling developers and DevOps teams to quickly and easily gather all systems and application logs into one intuitive platform. Users can search and parse through large amounts of data from disparate locations (public or private cloud, on-premise and IoT); segment their logs by namespace, pod or container; and then quickly identify patterns within those segments to troubleshoot and debug their applications.
Insight and Analysis
From a professional reviewer on G2 (February 2021):
What do you like best? “Simplicity. We send logs (via Aptible). We go and search for those logs when we need to. We had to do minimal setup to make it work. Setting up archiving to S3 was a breeze. (We used to do our own Elasticsearch thing. It was horrible.)
“Oh, alerts! It is very useful to get alerted when we have certain types of errors in volume. It has helped us be aware of problems very, very quickly! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.”
What do you dislike? “There are times when there’s an ingestion delay (or an indexing delay), and it can be hard to tell where the problem is. It isn’t always LogDNA, but sometimes it is. Sometimes it is in our logging system before it gets to LogDNA. But there’s no easy way of seeing that.
“Because we have a HIPAA-enabled account, support and account management is a little…different. I have access to usage data that the account and support teams don’t, even though the aggregate usage data isn’t PHI.”
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From a reviewer on IT Central Station (September 2020):
What is our primary use case? “It is our sole cross-correlation logging backend for some IBM services. We have a combination of LogDNA and Sysdig for root cause analysis and customer events.
“LogDNA is related to the operations of the service. Sysdig is somewhat nice in the sense that it also gives us some backdrop when there are any issues with respect to resources and other types of metrics-based constraints.”
What is most valuable? “LogDNA consolidates all logs into one place, which is super valuable.”
What needs improvement? “Every once in a while, our IBM cloud operational implementation gets behind. Sometimes, when we have a customer event, we do not get access to the latest logs for about 30 minutes, particularly for the sites that are heavily utilized. This is clearly not good. It is impossible to do RCA when you can’t look at the logs that pertain to the time period in which the event occurred. It could be more of an operational problem than a feature problem. I don’t have visibility about whether it is a LogDNA issue or just an operational issue.”
For how long have I used the solution? “We have been using this solution for about a year.”
What do I think about the stability of the solution? “It has decent stability. We’re heavily dependent on it. All RCA, customer support issues, and site reliability studies go to LogDNA. It is something we depend on ten times a day. It has much better stability than Elastic.”
What do I think about the scalability of the solution? “Its scalability is fine. We are running significant throughputs on it. It is significantly better than Elastic in scalability.”
How are customer service and technical support? “We do not directly interact with them. We tend to go through the customer support of the services team that manages LogDNA.”
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? “We were using Elastic. The reason for going with LogDNA was that Elastic was just not able to keep up with the throughput of what our services go through. LogDNA is more stable and scalable than Elastic.”
“Elastic also could not give us the performance for looking at 30 days in arrears. That was another reason for moving away from Elastic.”
What other advice do I have? “We haven’t had anything yet that we couldn’t do through LogDNA. Feature-wise, it is solid for us. From a functionality point of view, that is, finding stuff and doing RCA and other things, we’re able to find what we’re looking for. We don’t have any constraints at this point.
“I would rate LogDNA an eight out of 10.”
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List of current customers: 6 River Systems, Asics, Better.com, IBM Cloud, Intellect, Lifesize, Lime, Mantl, Relatient, Sysdig
Delivery: SaaS
Pricing
LogDNA offers self-service SaaS and contract plans starting at $1.50 per GB per month. For more information or to start a fully-featured, 14-day free trial, go here: https://logdna.com/pricing/.
Other key players in this market: Splunk, Datadog, Sumo Logic, Elastic Stack, SolarWinds Loggly
Contact information for potential customers: For contact information, visit https://logdna.com/contact-us/.
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