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Tag: Era Software

  • ServiceNow Acquires Era Software to Unify Observability

    ServiceNow Acquires Era Software to Unify Observability

    ServiceNow today announced it has agreed to acquire Era Software as part of an effort to add support for log data to the Lightstep observability platform the company acquired last year.

    Ben Sigelman, general manager for the Lightstep business unit at ServiceNow, said rather than reinventing the same log management capability that Era Software already has, it makes more sense to integrate that capability with the Lightstep platform that collects metrics and traces.

    The integration of those two platforms will then make it possible to unify observability rather than requiring DevOps teams to navigate two separate silos, he added.

    As observability continues to evolve and mature, the most immediate goal is to make it simpler to navigate the alert storm that inevitably ensues any time there is a disruption, said Sigelman. The alert storms generally occur after there has been a change made, but unraveling how exactly that change impacted an IT environment is challenging, he noted.

    An observability platform reduces the time and effort necessary to achieve that goal by surfacing a set of statistics that guide DevOps teams through that process, added Sigelman. The challenge, of course, has always been finding an efficient means of storing all the telemetry data that’s generated. In fact, as organizations start to deploy microservices-based cloud-native applications, many of them are starting to see the amount of telemetry data increase exponentially.

    Era Software uses an object storage system to index and analyze log data collected from cloud applications, Kubernetes and IT infrastructure platforms. The company has also made available in beta an Era Streams tool that reduces the volume of observability data collected without sacrificing fidelity by dynamically reconfiguring data pipelines in real-time.

    Once the acquisition is completed, log data analytics will then be shared with the IT service management (ITSM) tools that ServiceNow provides alongside the Lightstep observability platform. The goal is to make it easier to correlate those IT events with their potential impact on the business, said Sigelman.

    Era Software CEO Todd Persen said the long-term 10-year goal is to get to the point where issues are both automatically detected and remediated. In the meantime, the amount of context switching that IT teams encounter can be sharply reduced via a unified observability platform.

    There is, of course, no shortage of unified observability platforms these days. DevOps teams have also been relying on legacy monitoring tools that track specific metrics for years. The issue is that those legacy monitoring tools only track a narrow range of pre-determined metrics. As IT environments become more complex, the need to launch more open-ended queries to determine the root cause of IT disruption has become more pronounced.

    It may be some time before observability platforms are widely adopted, but the need for them is generally apparent to anyone managing a modern IT environment. Less clear is the degree to which observability platforms will remove the need for legacy monitoring tools; however, right now the focus should be on gaining as much visibility and transparency as possible into what are still opaque IT environments.

  • Era Software Introduces EraStreams for Scalable and Cost-Effective Observability Data Management

    Company continues observability data management innovation to help IT reduce costs and gain real-time analytics

    Seattle, WA, May 17, 2022 – Era Software, the observability data management company, today announced the private beta version of EraStreams, a no-code data pipeline that lets users integrate, transform, and route observability data to EraSearch, the company’s petabyte-scale log management platform, and third-party monitoring tools. 

    Era Software is broadening the scope of its log management solution and fitting into more of the observability stack. With a time series database and object storage under the hood, the company’s approach to observability data management resolves scale, performance, and cost issues associated with running applications on modern architectures, including cloud, containers, and microservices. 

    EraStreams complements EraSearch to optimize cost-performance and is flexible to integrate into existing DevOps workflows and tools. For IT teams, including DevOps and SRE, this means managing log data costs confidently by filtering less relevant data for faster troubleshooting while extracting useful data automatically or through powerful filters.

    “Our vision is to be the observability data management choice for organizations dealing with massive volumes of observability data,” said Todd Persen, co-founder and chief executive officer, Era Software. “The unveiling of EraStreams today advances this vision with a data pipeline to help you manage observability costs and improve troubleshooting effectiveness. It gives you real-time insights into application and system performance and adds another component to our scalable, cost-effective observability data management.” 

    For security teams with high log management costs and performance challenges using expensive SIEM solutions, EraStreams transforms and routes optimized datasets to a SIEM for security analytics and offers an option to send raw data to EraSearch for cost-efficient log management. If personally identifiable information (PII) poses a security risk, teams can protect sensitive data by masking PII before writing to disk. Data managed in EraSearch can be efficiently retrieved through its observability data rehydration capability when needed for investigations or threat hunting. 

    With EraStreams, IT and security teams can optimize raw data into insights and send only a subset of data to expensive monitoring systems while routing the full datasets to EraSearch, other tools, or storage to keep costs low. When used with EraSearch, EraStreams reduces the total cost of ownership for existing log management solutions while preserving historical information in EraSearch for low-cost object storage and fast search and query.

    “Today, some companies may generate over 100 terabytes of log data per day, and scale and pricing prevents many organizations from ingesting more data,” added Persen. “With EraSearch and EraStreams, we can help you manage high volumes of data at a lower cost per GB ingested – we give you the ability to ingest and make the data queryable in real time. You should be able to find a needle in the haystack. With EraSearch and EraStreams, you can economically ingest a petabyte of log data daily with an average response time of less than 500 milliseconds.”

    Era Software is offering early access to EraStreams for a limited number of customers through its beta program. To join the waitlist, visit here.  

    Some of the common use cases EraStreams supports include:

    • Log management cost reduction
    • Troubleshooting
    • Compliance and risk management
    • Data integration

    Additional Resources

    Connect with Era Software

    About Era Software

    Era Software observability data management offers modern IT and security organizations the ability to route, ingest, store, and analyze massive amounts of data to get actionable insights in seconds. With the company’s observability and analytics platform, EraSearch, teams eliminate complexity and manage all their log data in real-time at up to 90% lower cost than alternatives. As data volumes grow exponentially, enterprises are often forced to make hard choices about what data to collect, creating critical visibility gaps. Era Software enables IT teams to collaborate and innovate faster with unified access to data. Find out more at www.era.co. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

    Contact
    Lori Bertelli
    916-216-2968
    lori@era.co

  • Log Management Challenges Grow With Observability Adoption

    Log Management Challenges Grow With Observability Adoption

    It appears that, in many IT environments, observability is becoming too much of a good thing. A global survey of more than 315 IT executives, cloud application architects, DevOps professionals and site reliability engineers (SRE) conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of log data management platform provider Era Software, found 96% are witnessing an explosion of log data.

    The survey also found 79% of respondents reported the overall cost of observability and log management will skyrocket in 2022 if current tools don’t evolve.

    More than three-quarters of respondents (78%) also noted attempts to manage volumes of log data have had mixed or unwanted results such as an inability to access data. Nearly two-thirds (65%) are also evaluating their observability options while the other 41% are considering it.

    Stela Udovicic, senior vice president of marketing for Era Software, said the survey makes it clear that as organizations rely more on logs to analyze IT events, the cost of storing all that log data is becoming a significant challenge. Overall, the survey finds usage of observability tools and platforms has jumped by 180% as IT teams struggle to manage increasingly complex IT environments.

    On the plus side, more business users are benefiting from log data. A full 83% of respondents report that business stakeholders outside of IT use insights from log data, with 96% reporting log data is being used to solve business problems.

    Observability has always been a core tenet of DevOps best practices, but achieving it has always been a challenge. Monitoring tools are designed to consume predefined metrics to identify when a specific platform or application is performing within expectations. The metrics tracked generally focus on, for example, resource utilization. However, whenever there is an issue, it can still take days, sometimes weeks, to discover the root cause of an issue through what amounts to a process of elimination.

    In contrast, observability combines metrics, logs and traces—a specialized form of logging—to instrument applications in a way that makes it simpler to troubleshot issues without relying solely on a limited set of metrics that have been predefined to monitor a specific process or function. DevOps teams can employ queries to interrogate data in a way that makes it easier to discover the root cause of an issue. Observability platforms correlate events in a way that makes it easier for analytics tools to identify anomalous behavior indicative of an IT issue.

    The issue that arises is that IT teams need to find a way to store all the data generated by the logs they need to analyze. Each IT team can, of course, could reduce the amount of log data they retain. However, there is always a concern that in the event of an incident critical log data won’t be available.

    Udovicic said most IT organizations have historically viewed storing log data as a necessary evil. The primary issue most of them encounter is the simple fact that log data is not easy to work with, she noted.

    Regardless of how organizations view log data, the amount of it that needs to be managed will only increase as DevOps workflows become more mature. The issue IT teams need to come to terms with now is finding a way to minimize the cost of storing it all.

  • Era Software Adds SaaS Edition of Log Management Platform

    Era Software Adds SaaS Edition of Log Management Platform

    Era Software has unfurled a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of its platform for collecting and managing log data that is based on a time-series database it built.

    At the same time, the company has revamped the user interface of the underlying EraSearch log management platform that IT teams can deploy themselves to make it simpler to troubleshoot IT issues.

    Stela Udovicic, senior vice president of marketing for Era Software, said the EraCloud edition of the log management platform provides a more accessible way to access a log management platform based on an object storage system that can handle any type of log data.

    There’s also an indexing engine based on machine learning algorithms that enables the platform to scale better than rival platforms, she noted.

    Available via the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace, EraCloud collects, indexes and analyzes log data from cloud applications, Kubernetes and IT infrastructure platforms to provide a centralized means of collecting data at a lower cost. In addition to being able to continuously monitor billing costs, an EraSearch cluster can now be provisioned in minutes.

    Era Software, previously known as EraDB, earlier this year raised an additional $15.25 million in financing to drive development of a log management platform that provides an alternative to open source platforms, such as Elasticsearch, that don’t scale as well. The result is a higher total cost as the volume of log data that is less efficiently managed via Elasticsearch steadily compounds. As part of that effort, the company also supports a subset of the Elasticsearch application programming interface (API) to facilitate transitioning from Elasticsearch.

    Many organizations today already have terabytes of log data they are trying to manage and store, noted Udovicic.

    It’s not quite clear how many IT organizations are considering alternatives to log management platforms. However, as the amount of log data that IT teams want to be able to store over a longer amount of time increases—in part to facilitate greater observability—the pressure to contain the cost of retaining all the data is also rising.

    Observability, in general, requires combing logs, metrics and traces—a specialized form of logging—in a way that makes it easier to identify the root cause of an issue by querying data. It differs from monitoring in that observability is achieved using a predefined set of metrics that track whether a platform or application is performing within expectations.

    It may be a while before most IT teams generally achieve observability, but the journey typically starts with finding a more efficient way to collect log data in both proprietary and open source formats. Rather than having to normalize all that data, Era Software is making a case for analyzing that data in whatever format it happens to be available.

    One way or another, a much larger percentage of the applications deployed by IT teams in production environments will have to be instrumented to achieve observability. The issue now is determining how best to make all the data collected from those applications available to DevOps teams at a reasonable cost.