Data tiering saves Infor $1 million in one year

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  Challenge

  To implement a proactive, business-centric strategy, Infor required a scalable log monitoring and management solution.

  To help its customers achieve business-wide digital transformation, Infor needed the right data and holistic insights to understand how development releases impact experience. With software delivery as a backbone of the business, the company needed fast access to data so support operations could quickly analyze issues as they arise and provide customers with rapid incident response and resolution.

  To implement this proactive, business-centric strategy, Infor required a scalable log monitoring and management solution. “Having good observability and trending data on our development, infrastructure, and operational environment is a vital component to enable fast and intelligent business decisions. This requires a strategic partner for data aggregation and analysis, and for that, we turned to Sumo Logic,” said Iwan Eising, Team Lead of Service Reliability Architecture at Infor.
  

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  Solution

  Sumo Logic stood out among the many options Infor considered because of its robust, cloud-native platform that readily scales to support the company’s 12 TB of daily logging volume. Infor adopted Sumo Logic to deliver on its vision of centralizing log monitoring and telemetry data to gain granular visibility across DevOps, InfoSec, infrastructure, and other teams.

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  Results

  Real-time visibility accelerates troubleshooting and improves software release quality

  With the Sumo Logic platform, Infor’s DevOps team uses data and dashboard analysis to monitor development and release cycle impact on product performance. Using an agile software release cadence, the company introduces monthly product updates, which allows Infor to continuously innovate across the complete enterprise software spectrum. Before adopting Sumo Logic, it was challenging for DevOps teams to investigate newly arising issues and to pinpoint a code change that was introduced three months earlier as the root cause of the problem.

  “Our DevOps teams can now run fast analysis and effectively troubleshoot software issues. Sumo Logic provides us with real-time access to our current and historical data, so our software engineers can quickly run queries to identify the source of a code issue. This makes it easy to correlate an issue occurring today with a code change that was made months earlier,” said Eising.

  The platform’s flexible and fast-performing search capabilities enable the engineers to efficiently troubleshoot and determine the root cause, saving time and enabling the team to deliver fast product fixes. As a result, accelerated analyses mean increased productivity for developers and improved customer experience. Using Sumo Logic to troubleshoot and address development issues, Infor saved more than 3,300 hours in a year, and through these efficiencies, was able to redeploy DevOps resources to other value-added tasks.

  Empowering users with a decentralized governance model

  Using a self-service strategy, Infor empowers employees with a decentralized governance model, allowing users across the organization to easily spin up monitoring in Sumo Logic to access the data and insights they need to make more informed, effective and intelligent business decisions.

  As Infor matured its cloud adoption within the service portfolio, log data analysis also matured and moved to a model of providing operational support at the business level. As a result, the company’s Sumo Logic usage evolved from predominantly product analysis to proactive and holistic analysis of the customer experience, enabling continual improvements to quality and customer satisfaction.

  “Our move to a business-centric data analysis approach required our Sumo Logic users to adopt the same standards and conventions, which ensures that logs created by one team can be processed by other teams,” said Eising, adding that “a centralized approach to defining the standards and evangelizing them gives us an effective way to do this.”

  The company measures the model’s success in terms of user adoption of Sumo Logic as a strategic operational tool. Based on this metric, Infor is experiencing great success. Today, 4,000 users across 120 DevOps, InfoSec, infrastructure, and other teams within the company rely on Sumo Logic’s data analysis and dashboards to perform their job functions.

  Cost efficiency with thoughtful use of Sumo Logic’s data tiering

  As part of the decentralized, self-service model, there was a concern that data ingestion costs could grow exponentially without an oversight process. To manage this, Infor created a collaborative model where each of the 120 department leads is held responsible for analyzing, adjusting, and managing their group’s data ingestion budget.

  Each lead strategically leverages Sumo Logic’s data tiers to optimize costs while maintaining the right level of data access and search capabilities by targeting the continuous tier to drive real-time dashboards and taking advantage of the more cost-effective infrequent tier to store vast amounts of data in an always-available, easily searchable manner. By leveraging Sumo Logic’s tiering capabilities in this way, the company can optimize analytics on a variety of growing data sources without the fear of explosive cost spikes.

  “By empowering our leads to decide what data is most important to them, we’ve seen a 60% reduction in the price per GB in the last 12 months,” said Eising. “We see that the product logs that are re-tiered following our recommendation have a cost reduction of up to 80%. Our approach resulted in a doubling of our log ingestion in 2021 at an ingestion cost increase of only 10%, saving us around $1 million.”

  Visibility that enables rapid incident response to customer issues

  The platform’s simple syntax and fast query responses allow support teams to easily pinpoint relevant data in real time to quickly resolve customer issues, without escalating cases to level two support or to development. Through these efficiencies, the company reduced the time spent on incidents by more than 5,000 hours in one year, equivalent to almost three full-time resources.

  “We reserve continuous logging for atypical events, which gives us great efficiency in managing customer cases. When there’s a customer issue, support can get the answers they need very quickly since they don’t have to wade through data that's not relevant or interesting,” said Eising.

  A trusted collaborative partnership for the future

  In addition to obtaining meaningful data insights, Infor enjoys a high-quality customer experience with Sumo Logic. “The way Sumo Logic works with us instills confidence. In my view, it's a true partnership. We have regular calls, and we can rely on the Sumo team to look out for our needs. When we want to enable a new use case in a way that gives us the most benefit, we know we have a vendor that’s actually a partner who will work with us to implement it,” said Eising.