ScaleUP 2020 Recap: Introducing Distributed Tracing & More

Today was a monumental day for Logz.io and our entire community. There is nothing more inspiring than seeing how people use the technology we’ve built to enhance their businesses.

At ScaleUP 2020, our first ever global user conference, we hosted an exciting day of technical, customer-led sessions with our community. We also had the privilege of unveiling some ground-breaking new solutions and enhancements to our end-to-end cloud-native observability platform.

It was fun to share the virtual stage today with the rest of our team, customers, partners and the open source observability community, and I want to thank everyone who made the event possible and successful. Especially our amazing customer speakers! Thank you for supporting and motivating us with your evolving uses and ideas for Logz.io. We are here because of you.

What we announced at ScaleUP

Now, about the actual event. On the product front, if you have been a customer of Logz.io for some time, then you are familiar with our mission to deliver the best open source tools for logs, metrics, and tracing analytics on a single platform. We believe in choice. The choice to scale open source observability was limited, and from today on, will become more accessible.

Here is a rundown of our main announcements:

Logz.io Distributed Tracing

Up first, I had the privilege to announce the milestone launch of Logz.io Distributed Tracing, which delivers Jaeger as-a-service. Jaeger is an open source CNCF project that traces applications so teams can more easily pinpoint issues in their microservices. By offering Jaeger-as-a-service, engineers can use their cloud-native preference for tracing, without managing it themselves.

This now makes Logz.io the only place where engineers can use the best open source for logs, metrics, and traces – which are of course based on ELK, Prometheus, and Jaeger, respectively – together on a scalable platform.

Like our log and metrics analytics products, our new tracing product offers much more than just the managed open source. Logz.io Distributed Tracing has alerting and log-trace correlation built on top of Jaeger. This way, teams can identify and resolve production issues faster.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the Logz.io team and our beta customers who put blood, sweat and tiers into this release.  Thank you for making this release a reality!  There are some very cool enhancements coming out shortly, stay tuned.

Logz.io Smart Tiering and Alert Correlation

The next big announcement is Logz.io Smart Tiering, which will help our customers reduce costs by providing the flexibility to divide data across different tiers based on the desired balance between cost and availability.

Customers can keep their recent production logs in the Real-Time Tier and move the logs to the Smart Tier as they age and aren’t needed as often. The Smart Tier contains less data replicas than the Real-Time Tier, so it stores logs at a cheaper price.

For logs that need longer retention — usually for security and compliance reasons — there is the Historical Tier. The Historical Tier offloads log retention to cheap cloud storage services (AWS S3 or Azure Blob). It can then re-ingest logs into the Real-Time Tier on demand if needed.

And lastly, we’re excited to announce Alert Correlation to complement our Cloud SIEM offering. This feature can notify users when specific sequences of security events are taking place to indicate critical attacks. For example, you can get a brute force attack alert followed by a malware download by the same actor, rather than viewing the two events in isolation.

Logz.io Application Insights – Exceptions

We’ve also announced our new Exceptions tab in Kibana’s Discover, which is a new addition to our Application Insights feature. This brings our AI/ML capabilities – which automatically surfaces critical application exceptions and errors in logs – front and center in Kibana. We’ve made significant investments into our ML engine and have integrated it into the Kibana workflow. At Logz.io, we believe that ML/AI are the key to making progress in observability. We expect this release to enable more people to enjoy our Insights technology, reduce time to resolution of production issues, and improve users productivity.

Thank you again for making today a success and motivating our team on a daily basis. Thanks again to the amazing Logz.io team who made it all possible.

Stay tuned to the blog over the next week for deeper technical dives into Distributed Tracing, Smart Data Tiering, and the other product updates, and keep your eyes open for more highlights from ScaleUP 2020. We are already looking forward to the next event!