JFrog Artifactory Users Gain Real-time Continuous Intelligence with New Partnership

As software development teams move from waterfall development to continuous delivery, the artifact repository has become core to the delivery process where every change you submit to the repository is a potential release candidate. The ability to capture test results and then apply advanced analytics enables you to make decisions based on metadata and logs collected to prove that a release candidate is fit for production. That information can be fed into the automation process. Having a clear real-time view of those commits can also be invaluable in determining things like the overall health of your release process.

So this week at swampUP, Sumo Logic and JFrog jointly announced a partnership that will deliver industry-first technology that gives software developers and DevOps teams unprecedented insights into their software development operations as they build, run and secure their modern applications. As part of the partnership, the companies introduced a new solution that will allow JFrog users to access advanced analytics and metrics with out-of the box dashboards directly from JFrog Artifactory, and analyze all data Artifactory generates. Now JFrog developers and DevOps teams using Artifactory, the universal artifact repository, will be able to leverage Sumo Logic’s expertise in machine learning and predictive analytics to make decisions on an automated basis.

Both companies have been customers of the other, each gaining value and benefits of their respective tools. Sumo Logic adopted JFrog Artifactory as a way to improve continuous integration and build process for their own cloud-native SaaS service, and subsequently built the Sumo Logic App for Artifactory to enable its customers to leverage similar benefits. JFrog, using Sumo Logic’s continuous intelligence, has received unprecedented insights to track and manage the activity and loads of the Artifactory SaaS services. Together, the two companies have decided to invest in providing a complete automated solution to all JFrog Artifactory users.

The new solution is available, free, to all Artifactory users including open-source users. Leveraging Sumo Logic App for JFrog Artifactory, the solution will allow customers to analyze all data JFrog Artifactory generates. Sumo application for Artifactory is pre-enabled with out-of-the box analytics dashboards, delivering instant value to users. Specifically, the Sumo Logic App for JFrog Artifactory provides several dashboards, where users will benefit from:

• Complete overview and system visibility. Users will gain a centralized overview of the artifact repositories with the ability to drill down on repositories to quickly identify recent changes, check application dependencies and identify potential issues. The Sumo Logic App for JFrog Artifactory provides a view of all the build information about how development teams are working.
• Monitor deployment health. With Sumo Logic, customers will gain insights into deployments by geolocation, IP address or repository. Additionally, users can view traffic, requests and download activity, in addition to monitoring cached and non-cached deployment activity.
• Secure intellectual property. Users will be able to identify patterns and trends, and create a “normal” baseline of access and usage – a feature that security teams do not have visibility into today.

The integration for JFrog Artifactory, including a free version of Sumo Logic, will be available by July 14. With the free solution, users can retain up to 500 MB of data, stored for 14 days. Users can easily upgrade to Sumo Professional directly on the Sumo Logic platform.

How Does it Work?

JFrog Artifactory users can access their dashboards, powered by Sumo Logic, from the Admin panel under Advanced. The first time a user clicks on the button, Artifactory sets up a collector and launches a “specialized” version of Sumo Free preconfigured with the Artifactory App. Once the connection is established, data will begin to populate on the dashboards.

The collector gathers data from the following logs:

• artifactory.log. The main Artifactory log file containing data on Artifactory server activity.
• access.log. The security log containing important information about accepted and denied requests, configuration changes, and password reset requests. The originating IP address for each event is also recorded.
• request.log. Generic HTTP traffic information similar to the Apache HTTPd request log.
• traffic.log. A log that contains information about site traffic and file sizes.

Once the data begins to populate, JFrog users will then have access to dashboards showing:

• Overview of your system.
• Traffic – Overall traffic by geolocation, data transfer, most active IPs, etc.
• Requests and Access – Requests by repo, status codes, denied requests, etc.
• Download Activity – Accepted and denied downloads by geolocation, IP, etc.
• Cache Activity – Accepted and Denied Deploys.
• Non-Cached Deployment Activity – Accepted and Denied Deploys.

Enabling the Future

Both companies plan to explore providing customers and the industry with usage statistics and analytics from across the massive combined data sets. Sumo Logic will also extend its support of Unified Logs and Metrics to JFrog Artifactory so developers using using metrics tools like Grafana will be able to combine time series-based metrics data to get a complete 360-degree view at the application, system and network levels. Sumo Logic also intends to extend this integration effort from JFrog Artifactory to JFrog Bintray in the coming quarters.