Loggly, A Splunk Competitor, Raises $10.5M For Cloud-Centric Approach To Log Management

Loggly, the cloud-based log management service, has raised $10.5 million from new investors Cisco and Data Collective. Trinity Ventures, True Ventures and Matrix Partners also participated in the round, bringing the total investment to $20.9 million for the San Francisco company.

The SaaS provider takes log data from any device and reports it in management platform that is designed to help people see real-time and trend data in a visually rich way. Today it is launching its “Generation 2” service that features a new user interface, new analytical tools and a scaled-out architecture to handle the workloads and expanding customer base. Point-and-click trend graphs, automated event parsing and search are some of the new features in this new incarnation. It also has filtering capabilities, a spreadsheet-like grid view option, alerts and new dashboards that can be customized.

Loggly takes a cloud-centric approach, looking for customers that derive their value from using the Internet as their platform for doing business. These are SaaS providers, e-commerce companies, gaming, mobile, advertising and businesses from a host of different market sectors that process tremendous amounts of log data. It’s not unusual for a company to generate 15 billion events in a day.

CEO Charlie Oppenheimer said the company has transformed itself over the past several months to differentiate from the log data search providers like Splunk. The realization came in a meeting with a customer who said it is not primarily search but just knowing what’s going on that’s most important. That’s embodied in the visuals that shows the data in a way that is easy to act upon.

To get that right mix of visualization, Loggly has turned to open-source data analytics initiatives such as Kafka from LinkedIn and Storm from Twitter.

Loggly is modeling itself after New Relic, the application lifecycle management (ALM) company that has funding from Trinity. The two companies have ties that date back several years. Trinity Partner Dan Scholnick and New Relic Co-Founder and CEO Lew Cirne built Wily Technology, an ALM provider, and sold it to CA in 2006. Today, Scholnick is heavily involved in both companies.

For Loggly, the competition comes from companies like Splunk, which has had a lot of success as a publicly traded company. Last Thursday, it announced its second quarter results, posting $66.9 million in revenues, up 50 percent compared to last year. It ended trading last week near its 52-week high.

The Loggly team seems undeterred. Scholnick cited Splunk’s legacy as a software company, which requires maintaining multiple versions of the software. The advantage for Loggly comes with its SaaS architecture, designed for high volume web and mobile usage, combined with automated transactions. That’s a potent combination but it will still be a considerable challenge for loggly as it moves into this next dimension of its business.