Sumo Logic named a challenger in 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability

As the applications we support evolve, so too must the services that keep them reliable and secure.

And, evolve they have!

Sumo Logic started life over a decade ago by solving the difficult problem of log management. Our cloud-native architecture eliminated the hassle of managing on-premise log management solutions while scaling on-demand to handle a significant volume of high-cardinality data. Powerful search made exploratory investigation fast and efficient for customers. This was a game changer!

Soon after, we added metrics monitoring, which helped customers get an even better view of their IT infrastructure. Our disruptive cloud economics helped customers whose data ingest was growing faster than their budgets.

Fast forward to last year, when we delivered our product roadmap with the strategy to build—and not buy—the key capabilities required to be considered for the APM and Observability Magic Quadrant™. Some of our key investments included:

• Support for modern distributed tracing and real user monitoring, table stakes for any APM vendor.

• A query-less search experience to give teams simple, exploratory access to interrogate raw APM data at 100% fidelity (no sampling).

• Single-step setup approach to monitoring AWS Lambda with our open-source and OpenTelemetry-powered Lambda layers.

• Releasing our distribution of OpenTelemetry — a standard that we are leaning into heavily, contributing to and leveraging as our core go-forward collection strategy.

• Coverage for more components in the modern application stack, including Kubernetes, Fargate tasks, AWS Lambda, databases, web front-end and more…

• Leveraging domain-agnostic analytics in our Advanced Alert Analytics experience to surface anomalies in telemetry or behavior from all related entities, problems that can’t be seen when only able to observe a single domain.

With that wave of innovation released to market and daily usage by our worldwide customers, we felt ready to present ourselves for consideration in this year’s APM and Observability Magic Quadrant.

How did we do on our first submission to the APM and Observability Magic Quadrant?

We were gratified to be one of the nineteen vendors selected for inclusion, and even more proud to announce that Sumo Logic was named a Challenger in our first placement to this Magic Quadrant. We see the Challenger status as a reflection of the need for new approaches to application monitoring to keep up with the pace of innovation. In fact, the Challenger title feels fitting to us as we continue to challenge the status quo and advance our unique approach to solving modern reliability and security challenges.

Customers are increasingly demanding “future proof” APM and observability solutions to be able to stay agile enough to tackle the challenges of rapidly evolving technologies and development practices. At Sumo Logic, we are future-proofing our customers' APM and observability strategy by taking a vendor-agnostic approach to how data is collected and investing in domain-agnostic analytics that can analyze, correlate and enrich all application telemetry in a single data lake for both reliability and security use cases.

From APM → APM & Observability?

As Sumo Logic evolved, so too did Gartner® requirements for placement in the APM Magic Quadrant.

So much so that Gartner now refers to it as the APM and Observability Magic Quadrant. This is a big switch for Gartner—the last time they made a change was in 2015 when they added “Suites” to the name because many vendors needed to submit multiple products to solve APM challenges.

By adding the term “Observability” to the title, we believe Gartner is stating that the value of APM&O telemetry (tracing and real user monitoring (RUM)) increases when exploratory, analytics-driven workflows are enabled to uncover the “unknown unknowns.”

From APM&O → APM&O + Security?

Another change in this year’s APM&O Magic Quadrant is that Gartner now discusses the growing integration of security. In most organizations, security and IT operations are siloed, even when the teams are collecting and leveraging the same telemetry (e.g., logs). We agree with Gartner’s assessment that “the growing overlap and similarity of the IT operations and security operations toolchains, cohorts and strategies suggest that more collaboration is inevitable.”*

The convergence of the security and application performance domains aligns with our strengths, as evidenced by the fact that Sumo Logic was placed as a Visionary in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM, thanks to our highly regarded cloud security solutions. Our strengths here helped us achieve the second-highest score in the Security Operations use case in the Gartner 2022 Critical Capabilities for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability**.

A big “thank you” to our customers

One of the most gratifying aspects of evaluation process is collecting and seeing the objective customer feedback given during anonymous surveys. We continue to be thankful for all of the customers who took the time to answer Gartner’s questions on their Peer Insight™ property (a publicly available resource that anyone can view. Go and check these posts yourself!)

Gartner Peer Insight Review

Gartner Peer Insight Review

Our evolution is not over yet. Future investments align with customer needs.

For a visionary to become a leader they need to execute better like sales and system processes to capture more market share. For a challenger to become a leader, they need to work on completeness of vision by bringing more capabilities to the platform (native RUM, Synthetics, etc) since execution is on par with a leader.

Looking forward, we are committed to making continuous improvements across four broad areas:

1. Ease of use and ease of setup, to make it even simpler for users to onboard and gain insights.

2. Application and user monitoring capabilities, to ensure that all required data is collected.

3. Analytics, to take advantage of telemetry across all domains.

4. Disruptive economics, so users can continue to ingest the data they need without breaking their budget.

As we mentioned, we are very excited to be recognized by Gartner as a Challenger in the APM and Observability Magic Quadrant. We are eager to continue helping our customers manage the reliability and security of their cloud-native apps with these and other investments throughout our organization.

Finally, we want to congratulate the other participants in the Gartner 2022 Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability, all of whom contribute to the overall community of learning and tooling that make this ecosystem more diverse, innovative and competitive.

Learn more: Get your complimentary copy of the Gartner 2022 Critical Capabilities for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability.

*Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability
Published 7 June 2022 — ID G00750730 — 50 min read
By Analyst(s): Padraig Byrne, Gregg Siegfried, Mrudula Bangera

**Critical Capabilities for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability
Published 8 June 2022 — ID G00750993 — 33 min read
By Analyst(s): Gregg Siegfried, Mrudula Bangera, Padraig Byrne