Log analytics pricing

Your guide to pricing and packaging

I know you’re here to talk money, and I’ll get to pricing in just a moment, I promise! Let’s first look at how we ended up in a situation where log analytics is increasingly important to help set the stage for why transparent pricing is so vital in this arena.

One of the many major impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic was the rapid adoption of cloud and digital strategies across every industry. As businesses increasingly shifted to more online activities, there was an exponential increase in event log data. These increased activities also sparked issues with performance, availability and security. With so much data available—and many businesses lacking a standard log format—leveraging log analytics to troubleshoot and resolve security and reliability issues became increasingly difficult.

To combat these challenges, many businesses turned to cloud-based log management and analytics solutions. Platforms like Sumo Logic give organizations a single source of truth to centrally manage log data for multiple cloud resources, pulling together their information and standardizing it so that log analysis is streamlined and effective. Cloud-based log management and analytics solutions can be highly beneficial if they include scalability and cost-effective pricing models.

How can log analytics reduce cost?

Log analytics reduce costs in many areas:

• Log analytics leads to better root cause analysis, troubleshooting and reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR). Minimizing downtime and performance issues helps your business provide an excellent customer experience, contributing to reduced customer churn.

• Log analytics allows organizations to monitor their cybersecurity posture better and make their assets more secure. In today’s day and age, cyber threats are an increasing risk, and logs can be one of your best defenses. They can signal that bad actors are at work, providing information like IP addresses, HTTP status codes, client/server requests, etc. Using log analytics, DevSecOps teams can detect threats and potential security anomalies in real time.

• Log analytics can help organizations maintain compliance with audits, security policies or regulatory requirements. PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, FISMA, SOC, ISO, COBIT – the list is long and encompasses many different industries. Collecting and analyzing log data in a regular cadence helps businesses comply with the regulations they are subject to, doing the right thing and avoiding fines and fees.

• Log analytics powers product and user analytics, enabling business and adoption insights. Information from log analytics can be proactively leveraged in so many different ways—from improving website performance to the ideal timing for releasing a new version and beyond. These insights can help you understand product pricing, licensing models, usage tiers and more, harnessing the power of analytics to boost your bottom line.

What is the best way to reduce log analytics costs?

Sumo Logic developed our Cloud Flex Credits and tiered analytics to deliver maximum value, choice and flexibility for operating and securing your digital applications. For a real-world example of how we’ve reduced log analytics costs, let’s take a look at one of our customers.

Infor, a leading provider of enterprise resource planning systems, trusted Sumo Logic to help them become a cloud-first company while supporting Infor’s more than 58 million users. This migration vastly increased the amount of log data being created - doubling in 2021. With Sumo Logic data tiering, this 100% increase in data ingest translated into a mere 10% increase in cost. This saved Infor an estimated $1M in one year.

In addition to saving budget, Infor also found other benefits - including eliminating 3,300 hours of wasted developer time with accelerated identification and resolution for complex issues and reducing the overall time spent on incidents by more than 5,000 hours in one year. Read the case study about how Sumo Logic saved Infor time and money on log management and analytics.

Do log analytics cost money?

Yes, log analytics does cost money. When dealing with a large amount of log data, any “free” tool most likely won’t be able to handle it. Limited performance, caps on data volume, limited storage options — most enterprises will quickly discover that free limits won’t meet their business requirements. Plus, would you trust a free tool with your business-critical information? The insights you garner from log analytics are vital, and using the right tool makes a huge difference.

Another approach some companies take to save money on log analytics is training their own algorithms and creating an in-house solution. It may seem cheaper to use your own team and avoid purchasing a tool, but let’s be realistic here — by the time you’ve dedicated development time and purchased data for training your own algorithm, the cost-savings just might not be there. Not to mention the fact that it probably won’t be as good as a purpose-built platform.

Is a log analytics solution expensive?

It depends on your definition of expensive — while log analytics platforms cost money, they also help reduce costs in other areas. Another way to think about this is that a breach or an outage is guaranteed to be expensive, hitting your business bank account and your brand’s reputation. It’s important to evaluate your log analytics platforms to ensure it’s the right fit and that it is enabling you to reduce costs elsewhere and avoid breaches or outages.

For example, with Sumo Logic, you’ll find a log analytics platform that gives you log management and analytics for observability and security use cases in one platform. You can reduce your tech stack and consolidate your tools, saving costs.

Log analytics pricing

So, how much does a log analytics solution cost? You’ll see several different variations in pricing depending on the provider. Before we look at Sumo Logic pricing, let’s explore common licensing models. With traditional monitoring and analytics vendor licensing models, you’ll often find that you’re forced into making a trade-off as your data grows. You must choose between paying exorbitant license costs or having to delete data, creating blind spots in an attempt to control costs. You may encounter three log analytics pricing models:

• Antiquated licensing models force customers to trade off performance for cost, no matter their usage patterns. Charging based on the CPU capacity or memory of the machine that processes the data is common. Another limiting licensing model is pricing by bucket, which arbitrarily fits customers into a pricing model based solely on their company size, not their actual log management and analytics needs.

• Logging without analytics is another tactic some vendors use for “affordable” pricing. This model only provides a stop-gap solution that stores your data without analytics. These vendors often charge up to $0.10/GB to archive data into your own cloud storage (which you also pay for).

• Watch out for the retention trap. Vendors use retention tactics to hide the true cost of log analytics, hooking people with perceived low prices. For example, some vendors limit your retention to seven days and then have you send those logs to offsite storage to help cut costs. If and when you need to analyze that data, they charge you to bring it back into the system.

Sumo Logic offers a better way.

Simple, streamlined pricing with Sumo Logic

At Sumo Logic, we’ve done away with the antiquated, strict pricing models of other log management and analytics vendors. Our pricing is designed to be flexible and customizable for your unique needs—helping you save costs with our Cloud Flex Credits and tiered analytics pricing model.

• Cloud Flex Credits

  To maximize value and flexibility, we’ve developed a unique value-based licensing model. Purchase a bucket of capacity credits and use them as you wish throughout your contract term based on how you use our platform. They offer:

  • Flexibility - no penalties or overages for using more than your original estimated data size.

  • Choice - no need to license every product and functionality since you can choose which products you need (logs, metrics, SIEM, data tiers and more).

  • Value - credits apply to what you use, driving costs lower and reducing license waste.

  Learn more about Cloud Flex Credits.

• Tiered analytics

  With Sumo Logic, you can segment your data and tailor the analytics dynamically with our unique Data Tiers that align cost based on the value of the analytics the logs provide.

  1. Continuous - designed for data that need constant visibility to ensure continuous, real-time observability and security. This tier is useful for troubleshooting or threat investigations in apps and infrastructure.

  2. Frequent - designed for high-usage ad-hoc analysis like code deployments, testing, product analysis, etc. The Frequent tier is approximately half the cost of Continuous.

  3. Infrequent - designed for low usage ad-hoc analysis throughout the year, specifically long-term compliance data, audit records and other similar use cases. The offer is built on a unique variable search concept that uses credits separately on ingest and search. This allows for cost efficiencies not offered in bundled ingest models. Cost efficiencies can be 80%+ compared to real time options.

See how Data Tiering saves companies money, even as data ingest increases. Contact us to learn more today!