Why use sumologic over aws cloudwatch?

Question

We have our applications (Map Reduce Jobs, microservices) completely running out of AWS.

We intend to use a single service for viewing (for debug purposes), monitoring and alarms (notifications based on a threshold) on logs.

Is there any specific benefits of using external service providers like sumo logic over the one provided by AWS itself (cloudwatch in this case)

Answer 1

In full disclosure, I'm an engineer at Sumo Logic. But here is an analysis done by one of my colleagues a few months ago as to why you would want to use Sumo Logic specifically over AWS Cloudwatch itself:

1. You can’t easily search across multiple Cloudwatch Log Groups in Cloudwatch. In Sumo, you can define metadata to easily query across log groups, and even log sources outside of AWS within the same query.
2. Cloudwatch does not include any pre-built apps (out of the box queries, dashboards, and alerts). Sumo Logic provides a wide variety of apps and integrations, all included with your subscription: https://www.sumologic.com/applications/
3. With Cloudwatch, you pay for dashboards, you pay to query your data, and you pay to use its query API. These are all included in your Sumo Logic subscription (depending on the subscription level you choose).
4. Sumo provides 30 days of log retention out of the box. Data retention is another a la carte cost when using CloudWatch. Sumo Logic also provides you with the ability to forward your logs off to S3 for long-term storage outside of our platform.
5. Cloudwatch does not include advanced analytics operators. Sumo Logic includes operators like Outlier, Log Reduce, and Log Compare, which are all part of the Sumo Logic platform.
6. Regarding search time, Sumo Logic vs AWS CloudWatch Insights (AWS CloudWatch log search): Here is a quote from a customer with 100 AWS accounts worth of CloudTrail logs: "We can search all 100 of our accounts in Sumo in the same amount of time it takes us to search 1 account with AWS's CloudWatch.”
7. Sumo Logic provides Threat Intelligence as part of your subscription as well, to be able to check all of your logs against Crowdstrike’s threat database of known IoC’s.
8. Sumo training and certification is included with your subscription.

On a personal note, I can also say that Sumo Logic's post-sales support is top-notch, as we put a huge emphasis on customer success.

Please keep in mind that this analysis by my colleague is a few months old, so some of these items may have been addressed by AWS since then.