Loggly Riding High On Funding News

Analytics startup Loggly Inc. has raised another $15 million from a group of top investors to beat Splunk Inc. at its own game with a higher-level approach to uncovering useful patterns in the vast amounts of data coming off of technology infrastructure and applications. At the center of the ambitious effort is Dynamic Field Explorer, a new overlay designed to make it easier for engineers to glean insights from the firm’s namesake cloud service.

Like Splunk, Loggly provides a centralized environment for ingesting and integrating large volumes of machine-generated transmissions from a variety of sources, including network devices, email services and everything in between. Where the startup sets itself apart is in the data access layer, where it outdoes its bigger rival with an expansive suite of capabilities for digging into that information in a visual manner.

Dynamic Field Explorer takes Loggly’s focus on usability to a whole new level with an experience that the startup describes as similar to filtering for products in an online catalog. But instead of books or gadgets, the overlay displays continuously updated summaries of data fields designed to provide a more straightforward approach to finding analogies than the usual combination of luck and repetition. With an internal Loggly study finding that the majority of DevOps practitioners spend 70 percent of looking for issues, that has the potential to significantly reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot problems.

An engineer could use Dynamic Field Explorer to specify a type of log – say, from their organization’s database – and isolate a particular subset such as “error status” to view the kind and frequency of issues affecting the system as they come in. To make things even simpler, the most common values, anomalies and unexpected events are automatically displayed for every field.

Dynamic Field Explorer is available for no additional charge with every subscription, which should go over well by the more than 5,000 organizations that are using Loggly to track their infrastructure. The launch also puts the startup in a better position against Splunk, which claims to have seen monthly revenues more than quadruple on the back of a 300 percent growth in the number of paying customers over the last 12 months alone.

The round, Loggly’s third, was led by early comScore Inc. backer Harmony Partners with participation from existing investors Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, Cisco Systems Inc., Data Collective and True Ventures. The funding brings the startup’s total raised to $33.4 million.