The zettabyte era of data is alive and well. Every tool in your tech stack now has some sort of AI functionality, while middleware sprawl and feature wars between vendors become daily battles.
According to the Gartner 2025 Market Guide for Log Monitoring and Analysis Solutions, “Nearly every element involved with today’s technology delivery platforms generates some form of log telemetry (logs),” meaning telemetry data is being produced faster, in more formats, and from more sources than ever before. It’s estimated that by the end of this year, worldwide data will grow to more than 180 zettabytes of data.
Not only do your teams need to have a pulse on your organization’s infrastructure at all times, but when something does go awry (and let’s be honest, this could be at any moment), your teams will need a resolution quickly.
Gartner notes that “log monitoring and analysis solutions [are] crucial for understanding system and service health and accelerating problem diagnosis.”
However, as organizations race to modernize their infrastructure, maintaining system resilience while managing this data explosion puts log management strategies under pressure. Log monitoring solutions need to be flexible enough to handle a variety of data types and sources, scalable to match the velocity and volume of daily data, and have cost-effective management options. This is no small feat.
But with Sumo Logic’s log analytics platform, it’s achievable. Over 4.5 exabytes of data is analyzed in our platform daily, or over 1 zettabyte within a year.
To us, Sumo Logic aligns perfectly with the report’s analysis and recommendations, giving your team the capability to turn overwhelming data into meaningful insights.
Market definition and solution foundation
The Gartner Market Guide defines log monitoring solutions as tools that enable organizations to collect, analyze, and act on log telemetry.
The product must:
- Ingest and store structured and unstructured data from a variety of sources.
- Allow teams to observe and understand behavior from applications, services, and infrastructure.
- Enable users to aggregate and analyze data, either by human operation or machine intelligence, and effectively identify or explain system changes or performance.
- Support multiple teams across the organization, ranging from DevOps, I&O, cybersecurity, and product management.
We feel Sumo Logic’s capabilities check every box. Our powerful log analytics platform supports cloud-scale ingestion of both structured and unstructured logs, ranging from JSON to free-form error messages. With built-in OpenTelemetry support, hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations, and a Universal Connector, your team can collect data from any source, including custom systems. By delivering a single source of truth across DevOps and security, Sumo Logic accelerates detection, resolution, and collaboration around both reliability and risk.
Key use cases for log monitoring and analysis solutions
A strong foundation is important; however, the intricacies of how a tool meets or exceeds your organization’s needs are where we start to see solutions break out from the fray. Use cases can be as specific as explaining anomalies versus leveraging anomaly detection to inform and create events and alerts.
Gartner has identified three essential use cases for Log Monitoring and Analysis: log aggregation, log analytics, and monitoring and observability.
Log aggregation
Why is this important? Log aggregation supports short-term activities such as root cause analysis and reporting, and long-term use cases such as compliance with regulatory requirements. Aggregation can be costly, but without the full context from all systems, anomalies or threats can be misunderstood, leading to teams being leery of overzealous alerts or missing key information in data visualizations.
Our strengths:
Sumo Logic simplifies log aggregation by offering flexible ingestion and cost-effective scalability:
- Supports open-source technologies such as OpenTelemetry collectors and OTLP, Telegraf and Fluent Bit for data integrations.
- Ingests unstructured data with schema on-demand, eliminating the need to pre-structure data and providing more flexibility.
- Converts all data into a common format with parsing options to keep everything centralized and normalized.
- $0 ingest with Sumo Logic Flex Licensing, where you pay only for insights, not for storage.
Log analytics
Why is this important? Connecting logs from every individual source can generate petabytes of log data for some organizations, which can feel overwhelming. Practitioners need effective, trustworthy tools to help them target what needs attention and understand their next move, both in real time and offline, to improve user experience, business outcomes, and performance.
Our strengths:
Sumo Logic offers multiple options for you to analyze your data for actionable insights:
- Log Search allows you to manually query and analyze any ingested log data.
- If you need to parse, index, or search keywords, LogCompare and LogReduce help you capitalize on our “pipeline” concept search log syntax to surface key patterns or highlight changes between time periods to quickly pinpoint anomalies and uncover root causes.
- Mobot, our AI-powered assistant, accelerates investigations and troubleshooting, helping you go from alert to root cause fast without any query language expertise. You can ask questions in plain English and receive contextual suggestions or automatically generated charts, across all log types.
Monitoring and observability
Why is this important? Understanding system performance, business operations, and risk is paramount for your team. Using log data, you can achieve this. With an effective log management solution in place, organizations can easily source alerts to IT, optimize user experience, and even demonstrate compliance, among other security use cases.
Our strengths:
Sumo Logic brings the philosophy of DevSecOps into reality by creating a visible telemetry pipeline across the entire organization:
- Your teams can collaborate around a common language and truly align security within each step of the DevOps lifecycle.
- OOTB dashboards provide immediate visibility, while custom alerts allow you to prioritize what matters most.
With a unified system, root cause analysis, mean time to resolution, and delivery time move faster.
Vendor selection and Gartner recommendations
Finding the best solution for your team is still a challenge. The log management and analysis market is competitive and morphing by the minute, similar to other cloud-based data management markets. Cloud-based solutions have changed the economics of traditional data storage while also driving SaaS-savvy feature sets.
Gartner expects to see the use of stand-alone log monitoring and analysis solutions slow as organizations realize the benefits of correlating log data with other types of telemetry stored in a data lake. A dual-sided trend is emerging: log monitoring and analysis vendors now offer observability features and capabilities, while observability vendors do the opposite. Depending on your team’s goals, it’s “becoming abundantly clear that it is not necessary to maintain disparate observability and log monitoring solutions.”
Below, you can see how the market for log monitoring and analysis is both adjacent to and overlaps with the observability platforms,among others, with the largest overlap in SIEM.
For those on a mission to better understand and act on log telemetry, Gartner outlines a few key recommendations to aid in vendor selection. First, leaders need to be cognizant of all log data sources, volume, and whether a telemetry pipeline will be impactful. Solutions should support multiple use cases, including data exchange between multiple teams, and optimize query performance with reduced infrastructure costs for effective governance.
Read the Market Guide and decide for yourself
In a market flooded with platforms claiming to do it all, it’s easy to end up with a bundle of stitched-together tools disguised as a unified solution. Sumo Logic was built differently, as its cloud-native to deliver scale, speed, and clarity across the full spectrum of log telemetry. Whether you’re aggregating data for compliance, troubleshooting an incident in real time, or correlating logs with other signals for deeper observability, our platform enables teams to work from a shared source of truth.
The Gartner Market Guide offers a clear-eyed view of how the market is adapting and what capabilities matter most when evaluating vendors. If you’re rethinking your log management strategy or exploring ways to bring greater alignment between DevOps, Security, and IT operations, this guide is a must-read.
Download the full report to learn what sets leading platforms apart and how Sumo Logic delivers.
Gartner, Market Guide for Log Monitoring and Analysis Solutions, By Gregg Siegfried, Pankaj Prasad, 8 April 2025
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This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Sumo Logic.
