Sumo Logic Inc., a well-funded log management and analytics startup, has introduced a new pricing scheme and expanded data ingestion capabilities to its core product, which provides an analytics layer that companies can use to manage applications.

The company said these enhancements, announced Tuesday, add up to the first cloud-native application management platform to provide a unified system for ingesting, analyzing and correlating a combination of structured and semi-structured log data across a variety of cloud systems, containers, third party integration tools, networks, devices and environments.

Sumo Logic, which has raised $155 million from a blue-chip assortment of venture capitalists, is taking on log analytics market leader Splunk Inc. with an approach that uses machine learning to simplify the overwhelming volume of data that organizations gather continually from a variety of applications, platforms and monitors. It said its platform can whittle down mountains of log file data into common groupings in much the same way Google News groups and categorizes new stories gathered from across the web. The platform also enables analytics reports to be shared between teams such as DevOps, security, operations and the business organizations.

The biggest change in this version is a new licensing scheme for large customers that is based on the characteristics of the data being analyzed. “We’re going from volume-based to value-based licensing,” said Kalyan Ramanathan, vice president of product marketing. “This will enable customers to support different retention schemes for their data and different types of analytics based upon the use case.” The company is also adding a seasonal dimension to its pricing schedule, which is useful for companies in cyclical industries like retail.

While the more flexible licensing scheme is primarily oriented toward larger customers, “most customers will get the flexibility to better adapt their machine data needs to their budgets,” Ramanathan said. This doesn’t necessarily add up to an increase or decrease in price, but rather a more flexible approach to matching usage to cost. Among the variables that affect cost are data retention cycles, the type of analytics used, number of users and season or business cycle.

On the input side, Sumo Logic supports more than 50 on-premises applications natively as well as Windows and Linux servers along with most popular web servers, database servers and networking devices. This new release adds support for Pivotal Software Inc.’s Cloud Foundry and the Google Cloud Platform to existing support for cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Heroku Inc.

The company is also brushing up its user interface, adding public dashboards and improving content-sharing features. Collaboration capabilities are currently limited to the Sumo Logic platform, but support for popular collaboration applications like Slack Technologies Inc.’s Slack are planned, Ramanathan said. 

A free edition of the platform can analyze up to 500 megabytes of data per day. The Professional Edition is priced from $90 per month on an annual commitment for 1 gigabyte per day of input data and 50 data points per minute.

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