APM Vision for Open Source and Security

Earlier this month, we shared exciting news with our first placement in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability: we are in the Visionary Quadrant. This research is near to my heart, as I led this research for four years; so, I wanted to reflect on why this is an accurate placement for Logz.io. 

The Visionary Quadrant is designated for those organizations who are pushing the boundaries of a specific market and technology. Visionaries are often poised to move into the Leader Quadrant if the vision aligns with what the market needs and execution follows. 

The reason I joined this company over two years ago was my belief that open source was going to change the way that organizations implement instrumentation and monitoring. Working hard on projects such as OpenTelemetry, OpenSearch, and Jaeger, I have pushed to make this a reality. People are coming around, including Gartner, on the importance of open source in observability and APM:  

“By 2025, 70% of new cloud-native applications will adopt OpenTelemetry for observability,rather than vendor-specific agents and SDKs.” (Predicts 2022: Modernizing Software Development is Key to Digital Transformation Published 3 December 2021 – ID G00758298). 

The technology is much more mature now. The future is open source.

Why We’re Investing in Open Source for APM and Observability

The first tenant of the vision for Logz.io is to create an easy way for engineers to use the best open-source tools for observability in a simple, scalable and global SaaS platform. The platform has expanded from the logging use case the company was founded upon,consistently adding new open-source observability tools to make it a single place for organizations to collect and analyze logs, metrics and tracing data. This is what engineers want to use today, and the vision for the future continues to be around open-source technologies. This is about accessibility and ease of integration.

Our second major area of investment is to build and run these as efficiently as possible, thereby reducing data volumes and increasing the level of insights we can present to the user. This also reduces the cost of the solution, making it more efficient in terms of raw costs to use our services versus running the open-source tooling yourself. 

Finally, the last area of expertise we bring to the table is our ability to incorporate and address security use cases. The second product we built after logging was our Cloud SIEM, using the same highly scalable technology that powers our log analytics capabilities. We’ve also doubled down on security in the last two years. The reason we did this is not only based on accelerated interest and opportunity, but the fundamental belief that security must be embedded everywhere in the organization. 

This year in the Magic Quadrant evaluation, Gartner not only expanded the APM Magic Quadrant to include Observability, a cornerstone of our platform, but also introduced security to the research. In the Critical Capabilities, Logz.io scored very well on these ratings. 

Over time, we will see security not only embedded in continuous integration and continuous release pipelines, but within the workflow of every engineer as they build software or systems to support software all the way through the operational lifecycle. At Logz.io we are focused on the empowerment of engineers to build and operate secure systems. This is an emerging area where we eagerly anticipate the silo between development and security to slowly be broken down. 

We look forward to pushing the market forward and adding new open source technologies along with new temetry types to the platform. We are eagerly anticipating incorporating new OpenTelemetry data from Profiling and adding Collector Management (OpAmp). We are also working hard on OpenSearch Dashboards as a unified analytics interface with the community. Lots more to come this year and in the future.