The following is a guest post from Mike Cook, Director of Technical Operations at TuneIn.
Introduction
TuneIn is a rapidly growing service that allows consumers to listen to over 100,000 radio stations and more than four million podcasts from every continent. During the recently held Soccer World Cup, over 10.5 million people listened live to the games on radio stations streamed via TuneIn, one of the biggest events in our company’s history.
The State of Machine Data Analytics, pre-Sumo Logic
We had no consolidated strategy to analyze our logs, across our systems and applications alike. As a result and especially because of our rapid growth, troubleshooting and event correlation became manual and increasingly painful affairs that involved looking at individual server and application logs. We tried internal tools including syslog-ng and rsyslog, but the maintenance and overhead costs on a lean IT team were too high.
Why Sumo Logic?
There were a number of reasons why Sumo Logic was appealing to us:
- As a cloud-based service, Sumo Logic immediately offloaded the maintenance issues we had to deal with running our own home-grown log management infrastructure.
- With pre-built support for a number of infrastructure components that TuneIn runs on, including AWS, Cisco, VMware, Windows/IIS and Linux, we were confident that we could get insights around our logs far faster than other options.
- In addition, the Sumo Logic LogReduce technology provided a more robust investigation tool to find root causes of issues that traditional monitoring tools just can’t detect.
- Finally, Sumo Logic provides a compelling business value for what we are trying to accomplish
Internal Adoption of Sumo Logic
We started with creating basic dashboards and alerts around our key operating system logs. As the application development teams realized the value of what Sumo Logic could provide them, we added additional log sources and launched a series of lunch-and-learns to demonstrate the value of the service. These lunch-and-learns have rapidly broadened the adoption of Sumo Logic across TuneIn. We’re now seeing support teams using it to get customer statistics; different development teams using it to analyze API performance; and the executive team getting overall visibility through real-time dashboards.
Business Benefits
It didn’t take us long to see the benefit of Sumo Logic. Since TuneIn is a distributed PaaS, it was frequently difficult to correspond and troubleshoot issues in a particular API. Time to resolution began to drop from several hours to several minutes as developer and operations staff can search and pinpoint issues. Our development teams were quick to create custom searches and alerts for errors and exceptions in the logs, allowing us to reduce overall error rates by close to 20%. Without Sumo Logic we wouldn’t have even known most of those errors were even occurring. We’re just scratching the surface with Sumo Logic. We’re continue to expand our usage and gain critical insight into API performance, what our most popular user activities are, and where our application bottlenecks are. Sumo Logic isn’t just a log consolidation tool, it also serves as a critical tool in our Business Intelligence toolbox.
