UPDATED 17:07 EDT / DECEMBER 17 2018

CLOUD

Q&A: How IBM, LogDNA are simplifying portable log data management

Cloud computing environments and the amounts of data they see are only growing as businesses take advantage of modern tools for virtualizing and analyzing that data. But the simultaneous work of software development, machine learning and customer service can create downtime across businesses and leave vulnerable spots throughout data management processes.

To streamline application troubleshooting and enable developers to identify and correct for coding bugs in real time, Norman Hsieh (pictured, right), head of business development at LogDNA Inc., and Daniel Berg (pictured, left), distinguished engineer, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Istio, at IBM Corp., are partnering for easier cloud and container integrations in log data management.

Berg and Hsieh spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed challenges in data processing and how their collaboration is simplifying analysis across IBM Cloud.

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: What do you guys do? What’s different about it?

Hsieh: We were trying to find a logging solution built for developers, and it turned out to be a lot to manage, a lot of configuration, so we decided to build our own. We want to make it as simple as possible. The whole idea, you can go down to some of the integrations that we have; our Kubernetes integration is two lines. Your entire cluster will get directly logged in in seconds.

Back in the day, we had single machines that people got logs off of. Then you went to VMware where you’re taking a single machine and splitting up to multiple different things. And now you have containers and Kubernetes — thousands of nodes running and large production service. We wanted to build for that scale for Kubernetes, automatically tag all your logs coming through with all the metadata you need to find exactly what you want. You can go to LogDNA, find the container that you’re looking for, know exactly where [an] error’s coming from.

Furrier: You built on Kubernetes. Why is that so important?

Hsieh: Kubernetes brought a lot of opportunities for us. We could deploy this package anywhere. We didn’t have to just run as a multi-tenant [software-as-a-service] product anymore. We’re actually running on IBM Cloud, so their customers can be sure that the data doesn’t actually move anywhere else.

Berg: Because they’re on the Kubernetes service, they’re going to be able to put LogDNA in each of the major regions so customers will be able to keep their logged data in the regions that they want it to stay.

Furrier: Where does the IBM relationship fit in? What are you guys doing together?

Hsieh: IBM’s brought us a great opportunity [to] take our product and help benefit their own customers — and also IBM [itself] with the logging that we do. They saw that we [have a] very simplistic way of thinking about logs, and when you think about IBM Cloud and the shift that they’re moving towards, which is developer-focused, it was a good match for us. It brought us the visibility into the upmarket with larger customers and gives us the ability to deploy globally across IBM Cloud.

Berg: We were looking for a logging solution that fit really well with IKS, our Kubernetes service. It’s cloud-native, high scale, large number of cluster — that’s what our customers are building. The integration is directly in the catalog. You go and select it and provision it very easily. We wanted to have that integration directly with the Kubernetes services as well, so there’s one button, two lines of code that you just have to execute. All your logs are now streaming for the entire cluster with the index and everything.

We’re constantly looking at startups and new business opportunities, but it’s got to be the right fit with the technology, culture, and team dynamics, and this is why it worked with LogDNA.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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