Guest post by Humio
We’re proud to have Humio on board as the exclusive training sponsor for ZeekWeek 2019. As a thought leader in the observability space, Humio has a deep understanding of making observability accessible, comprehensive, and affordable.
Humio shares their thoughts about how the need for comprehensive observability is driving a cultural shift.
Our industry is moving at lightning speed towards distributed service-driven architectures, and engineers are on a quest to improve how they observe their systems as a whole. Adoption of microservices and containerized architectures has elevated the need for developers and operations teams to use observability solutions to correlate events, identify threats, and troubleshoot problems. From a business value point of view, managers want observability solutions that allow them to keep calm when their software infrastructure and services are hit with incidents or failures.
Many organizations adopt a combination of log management, metrics, and tracing solutions for observability across their infrastructure. We have found that just having these tools isn’t enough to ensure that engineering teams are able to reap value from them. A cultural shift is required.
Excerpt from O’Reilly’s Distributed Systems and Observability Book by CindySridharan
“As my friend Brian Knox, who manages the Observability team at DigitalOcean,
said,
“The goal of an Observability team is not to collect logs, metrics, or traces. It is to
build a culture of engineering based on facts and feedback, and then spread that
culture within the broader organization.
“The same can be said about observability itself, in that it’s not about logs, metrics,
or traces, but about being data-driven during debugging and using the feedback to
iterate on and improve the product.”
As Brian Knox and Cindy Sridharan mention in the excerpt above, observability is about having an engineering culture that values facts and feedback, “being data driven” during debugging, and using this mindset to iterate, improve, and solve problems.
At Humio, we meet many teams that have yet to access the full value they could get from their log data. This isn’t because they don’t have or want a “data driven” observability engineering culture, but rather that their current log solution restricts them from being able to.
Commonly, teams encounter three restrictions with their log solutions:
1. Volume: Modern organizations generate large amounts of unstructured log data — a lot of time is spent on limiting or deciding what data to send to the system.
2. Speed: Slow queries and latency between index and search phases take too long. Ultimately, the data isn’t available fast enough.
3. Simplicity: Logging solutions that are not easy to use, query, deploy, or manage result in limited use or frustration using them.
Data-driven Log Management
Our approach at Humio is to remove these restrictions, so data-driven observability teams can gain more value from their log data. We encourage engineers to send all relevant log data, and for all the data to be accessible. Limiting data based on what a logging solution can handle is restrictive, and often it is the logs that were left out that create frustrating debugging scenarios.
Humio is built to scale linearly, and efficiently store data so users aren’t wasting their compute resources. These days, speed matters, and by using real-time streaming capabilities for querying and dashboards, Humio superpowers live system visibility for engineers. Our CTO, Kresten Krab Thorup, wrote a blog post to explain how Humio scales and handles data.
For data-driven logging to succeed, engineering teams should use it for the value it provides. Humio’s query language and ease of use speeds adoption past just the Ops team to the developer organizations, making it a shared solution for everyone. For example,Lunar Way’s developer-driven ops uses Humio across both its development and operations team.
Observability Site License
Humio’s approach to logging is valuable for both small- and large-volume users. For teams with large logging volumes (multi TB/day), Humio software is available On-Premises at a fixed annual site license price. This enables companies to access large log volumes without volume-based licensing costs or extra manpower required in running complicated cluster logging environments. With this model, organizations can add instances and scale up as their data volumes grow or burst. For observability or infrastructure teams who want to deploy multi-tenant logging infrastructures across teams within an organization, Humio can provide simple pricing.
At Humio, we believe in the value of data-driven logging, and the benefits companies derive from this in their observability stack. With a unique product and simple pricing, Humio is on a mission to bring this value to engineering teams who’ve been struggling until now.
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