Datadog Brings in More Data Visibility with Log Management Acquisition

An increasing number of vendors in the monitoring and operational analytics market look to harness artificial intelligence, combining data from servers, databases, tools and services.

Datadog’s latest acquisition, of French log-management startup Logmatic.io, rounds out its portfolio, with the company touting its ability to offer infrastructure metrics, application performance monitoring (APM), and log management within a single platform.

“Integrating logs with the APM and Infrastructure monitoring we already provide is an important step in the evolution of the monitoring and analytics category. Our new integrated platform will simplify the monitoring of modern applications that often span clouds, containers, IoT and mobile devices,” Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel said, adding that it also provides new AI- and machine-learning-based capabilities to help customers better manage their infrastructure and applications.

In a blog post, Pomel explained the New York City-based company’s view that adding this new piece to its portfolio will provide new insights forming the “three pillars of observability”: metrics, traces and logs — and all in one place.

“…The greatest value will come from the ability to seamlessly pivot between them and easily derive true understanding of the infrastructure, applications, and businesses they represent,” he said.

Billions of Data Points

“Many, if not most, commercial APM tools [a previously-added Datadog capability] do not have the ability to collect hundreds of data points on potentially thousands of microservices at high rates of frequency in order to ‘paint a picture’ of the environment in total,” Cameron Haight, Gartner’s former vice president with the IT Systems, Security and Risk research group, wrote in a June 2016 report

The acquisition of Logmatic should help address that problem.

The Paris-based company was founded in 2014 by Emmanuel Gueidan, Renaud Boutet, and Amirhossein Malekzadeh. Its log management and visualization tools analyze billions of data points daily for customers such as Accenture, long-distance carpool app BlaBlaCar, French premium TV channel Canal+, video-sharing site DailyMotion, and luxury goods vendor LVMH.

It took part in Microsoft’s accelerator program in Paris last year.

Logmatic centralizes logs and metrics in the browser, whatever the language or stack, without the need for agents. “Think of grep with a show-me-splendid-dashboards option,” its website states.

Pomel describes it as visual, intuitive, and fast, as well as “eerily aligned” with Datadog’s core design principles. The company says it was attracted to Logmatic’s hyperfocus on UX and simplicity, as well as the shared mission of improving visibility into cloud and hybrid environments. The two companies already had a number of customers in common.

Logmatic enables users to:

• Do real-time faceted and full-text searches.
• Use interactive analytics to navigate data and pinpoint root causes.
• Craft dashboards in minutes, either custom or pre-defined ones.
• Filter dashboards and investigate events with just a click.
• Create on-the-go threshold, inactivity or matching alerts over any filters and metrics.
• Receive notifications with direct analysis link via email, Slack, PagerDuty or custom webhooks.
• Automatically parse in most common languages, JSON, or write your own custom parsers.
• Retrieve data from any moment in time with automated log file archives.

It has more than 30 integrations, including Docker, HAproxy, Java, PHP, Apache, Amazon Web Services and more.

Datadog plans to unveil its fully integrated product later this fall. You can apply to join the private beta here.

Targeting Splunk

Datadog makes no bones about its intention to take on Splunk with its acquisitions. Splunk led the worldwide IT event and log management software market last year, according to IDC.

Earlier this year, Datadog made its application performance monitoring offering generally available, putting it in competition with New Relic, AppDynamics and others.

Logmatic also competes with a crowded field including SumoLogic, Logz.io and others increasingly applying AI and machine learning to log management.

Earlier this year, Nancy Gohring of 451 Research spoke with The New Stack about the APM, log-management and infrastructure-monitoring market.

In her “Application and Infrastructure Performance Market Map 2017” report, Gohring noted vendors adding analytics capabilities that in some cases address a common set of problems are resulting in new competitive battlefields. Areas of innovation include anomaly detection, automatic baselining, predictive analytics, sophisticated querying capabilities and innovative backend data management techniques.

Datadog has excelled in particular if offering a meta-dashboard for everything going on in a software delivery chain, though the company is at the mercy of the integrations that it creates, noted analyst Chris Riley of the acquisition.

“So acquiring a tool that is also a source of data does a few things. It gives them more flexibility when it comes to working with companies that may not already have robust log analysis. It makes the solution more sticky,” he said.

“I also hope it allows them to do even more interesting things with their roadmap tying log data into more robust and smarter analytics, notifications, and correlation to related data. My concern, I guess, would be how the other integration partners view it and is this part of a longer term strategy of owning all data-collection sources.”

Feature Image: “Dog Days [Explored]” by Matthew, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.