The open-source ecosystem has a wealth of free monitoring tools that companies can use to track the health and security of their infrastructure. But deploying those tools at scale is sometimes complex to the point of being a barrier to adoption, an issue Logz.io Inc. is trying to solve. 

The recently funded startup today debuted the Cloud Observability Platform, which provides the popular ELK stack of open-source monitoring technologies and several complementary features as a managed service. The fact that they come pre-integrated spares companies the hassle of setting things up manually. The fact that the service is managed, in turn, means customers don’t have to worry about hardware administration.

The ELK stack is comprised of the Elasticsearch search engine, Logstash data collector and Kibana visualization tool. Administrators can collect infrastructure logs with Logstash, search the data for abnormal events such as server outages using Elasticsearch and then visualize the issue in Kibana to gain a better understanding of the situation.

Logz.io has added in a number of proprietary capabilities to stand out from the pack. They include an artificial intelligence engine that can look at an issue such as a server outage and give administrators tips on how to fix it.

In addition to the infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting features, the Cloud Observability Platform enables companies to look for data breaches. The service has built-in dashboards that highlight potential threat indicators and an alerting engine that can notify administrators about suspicious events.

Lastly, Logz.io has thrown in the open-source Grafana data visualization tool for additional dashboard features.

The Cloud Observability Platform represents an evolution of the startup’s product strategy. The offering’s infrastructure monitoring features come from Logz.io’s existing managed ELK service, while the security features are powered by a module it released in May. Bringing it all together in an integrated solution that can monitor infrastructure health, performance and security, while also shipping with Grafana, could help Logz.io better compete with bigger rivals such as Splunk Corp.

The startup furthermore sees the platform as a way to boost the use of open-source monitoring tools in the enterprise. “We built the Logz.io Cloud Observability Platform because we want every software engineer in every company to have access to tools like ELK and Grafana without being bogged down by maintenance or scale,” said Logz.io Chief Executive Officer Tomer Levy. 

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