Sumo Logic: Solution Overview, Limitations and Alternatives

What Is Sumo Logic?

Sumo Logic is a cloud-native platform providing intelligence to help organizations monitor, manage, and secure their applications and infrastructure. It aggregates data from a number of sources, including logs, metrics, and events, allowing users to derive insights in real time. 

By transforming raw data into actionable intelligence, Sumo Logic supports operations, security, and compliance use cases. It uses analytics and machine learning to automate the detection of anomalies and predict potential issues. This should improve the efficiency of IT operations and strengthens security postures by identifying threats early, enabling faster troubleshooting and incident response.

Sumo Logic Platform Overview 

Sumo Logic is a cloud-native, distributed platform providing a unified approach to log analytics, observability, and security. It supports collaboration among development, security, and operations teams.

The platform’s architecture emphasizes scalability in a multi-tenant design.

With machine learning and analytics capabilities, Sumo Logic intends to improve issue detection and resolution with features that enable the platform to identify patterns, investigate anomalies, and provide actionable insights faster.

Solutions provided by Sumo Logic:

• Cloud SIEM: Integrates threat intelligence and automates detection and response to security incidents, enabling teams to address threats.
• Cloud infrastructure security: Provides tools to secure cloud infrastructure, ensuring continuous monitoring and protection of cloud-native services. 
• Compliance and audit: It offers logs, audit trails, and customizable reports. Organizations can demonstrate adherence to standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS through automated compliance checks.
• Log analytics: Aggregates logs from diverse sources, providing centralized visibility into system activities. This helps teams to investigate and resolve operational or security issues.
• Infrastructure monitoring: Supports infrastructure monitoring, allowing teams to track system performance, detect anomalies, and resource utilization. By correlating logs and metrics, the platform provides insights into system health.
• Application observability: By integrating application-level metrics, traces, and logs, it provides deep insights into application performance. This observability helps teams diagnose issues and ensure optimal user experiences.

This is part of a series of articles about information security.

Sumo Logic Pricing Model

Sumo Logic’s pricing model offers the following four tiers. Pricing for the Free, Essentials, and Enterprise plans is available upon request.

Free Plan

1. Log capacity: Limited to 1 GB/day
2. Metrics capacity: Up to 3,000 data points per minute (DPM)
3. Tracing capacity: Up to 1.5 GB/day
4. Log data retention: 7 days
5. Support: Community support

Essentials Plan

6. Log capacity: Unlimited
7. Metrics capacity: Up to 50,000 DPM/day
8. Tracing capacity: Up to 5 GB/day
9. Log data retention: Up to 365 days
10. Support: Standard (8×5) support

Enterprise Suite

1. Log, metrics, and tracing capacity: Unlimited
2. Log data retention: Customer-defined, based on business requirements
3. Real-time alerts: 1,000 monitors for logs and 500 for metrics
4. Support: Enterprise-grade 24/7 support (P1 incidents)

Flex Plan

1. Log, metrics, and tracing capacity: Unlimited
2. Log data retention: Customer-defined
3. $0 data ingestion: Decouples ingestion from budget limits to eliminate data gaps
4. Support: Enterprise-grade 24/7 support (P1 incidents)
5. Allows flexible usage and pricing based on actual data scanned, starting at $2.05 per TB for high-scale use cases.

Flex pricing estimate:

The Flex Plan provides customized pricing based on the organization’s analytics usage profile. The following estimated pricing is quoted on the official pricing page:

• Low usage ($3.14 per TB scanned): Suitable for organizations focusing on ad-hoc troubleshooting, compliance, and DevOps teams.
• Medium usage ($2.57 per TB scanned): Suitable for cloud-wide application reliability and real-time infrastructure monitoring.
• High usage ($2.05 per TB scanned): Suitable for enterprise-wide analytics with AI-driven diagnostics, 100% visibility, and DevSecOps workflows.

Sumo Logic Limitations 

Sumo Logic is useful for log analytics, observability, and security, but it also has some limitations. The following limitations were reported by users on the G2 platform:

1. Steep learning curve: For new users, Sumo Logic has a steep learning curve, especially when it comes to advanced features and complex queries. Beginners often find it challenging to set up and use the platform effectively.
2. Integration challenges: The platform offers fewer integrations compared to some competitors. While it does support a range of systems, the available integrations sometimes lack critical features, requiring custom development to ingest data into the platform. This adds complexity and can delay implementation.
3. Real-time performance limitations: With large data sets, the platform can struggle to update in real time, impacting the ability to derive immediate insights.
4. Disconnected features: Some users have noted that the implementation of features like metrics, real user monitoring (RUM), and tracing feels fragmented. These components often function like separate products rather than a unified solution.
5. Cost management complexity: While Sumo Logic offers flexible pricing, managing costs can become a challenge if data ingestion isn’t carefully planned. Overusing higher-cost data tiers without proper planning can lead to unnecessary expenses.
6. Scaling limitations for larger organizations: Certain features, such as root cause analysis and service diagrams, do not scale effectively for large organizations with complex systems. These tools may become less useful as data volumes and organizational complexity grow.
7. Data discovery and preprocessing: Users have reported difficulties discovering available data within the platform. Additionally, preprocessing data can be tedious, as the user interface does not offer sufficient out-of-the-box structuring and preprocessing methods.

Notable Sumo Logic Alternatives and Competitors 

1. Exabeam

Exabeam is a leading provider of security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, combining UEBA, SIEM, SOAR, and TDIR to accelerate security operations. Its Security Operations platforms enables security teams to quickly detect, investigate, and respond to threats while enhancing operational efficiency.

Key Features:

• Scalable log collection and management: The open platform accelerates log onboarding by 70%, eliminating the need for advanced engineering skills while ensuring seamless log aggregation across hybrid environments.
• Behavioral analytics: Uses advanced analytics to baseline normal vs. abnormal behavior, detecting insider threats, lateral movement, and advanced attacks missed by signature-based systems. Customers report that Exabeam helps detect and respond to 90% of attacks before other vendors can catch them.
• Automated threat response: Simplifies security operations by automating incident timelines, reducing manual effort by 30%, and accelerating investigation times by 80%.
• Contextual incident investigation: Since Exabeam automates timeline creation and reduces time spent on menial tasks, it cuts the time to detect and respond to threats by over 50%. Pre-built correlation rules, anomaly detection models, and vendor integrations reduce alerts by 60%, minimizing false positives.
• SaaS and cloud-native options: Flexible deployment options provide scalability for cloud-first and hybrid environments, ensuring rapid time to value for customers. For organizations who can’t, or won’t move their SIEM to the cloud, Exabeam provides a market-leading, full featured, and self-hosted SIEM.
• Network visibility with NetMon: Delivers deep insight beyond firewalls and IDS/IPS, detecting threats like data theft and botnet activity while making investigation easier with flexible searching. Deep Packet Analytics (DPA) also builds on the NetMon Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine to interpret key indicators of compromise (IOCs).

Exabeam customers consistently highlight how its real-time visibility, automation, and productivity tools powered by AI, uplevel security talent, transforming overwhelmed analysts into proactive defenders while reducing costs and maintaining industry-leading support.

2. Splunk

Splunk is a platform that combines security and observability into a unified solution, helping organizations detect, investigate, and respond to incidents. It is built to handle analytics across hybrid environments, intending to help IT operations and security teams by providing visibility into system reliability, performance, and protection.

Key features of Splunk:

• Provides a platform for security, observability, and data analytics, ensuring access to insights across hybrid cloud environments.
• Offers Splunk Enterprise Security (SIEM) to detect, investigate, and respond to threats.
• Automates security tasks with Splunk SOAR, with the intention of reducing response times.
• Secures systems against unknown threats through user and entity behavior analytics.
• Billed to detect phishing and malware attacks using Splunk Attack Analyzer with automated analysis.

Learn more in our detailed guide to Sumo Logic vs Splunk

3. LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is a platform for hybrid observability powered by AI, providing actionable insights across IT environments. Its main offering, LM Envision, enables organizations to monitor and manage data centers, networks, public clouds, and containers. 

Key features of LogicMonitor:

• Monitors hybrid, cloud, and on-premises infrastructure with insights and troubleshooting capabilities.
• Uses an AIOps Early Warning System for anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and dynamic thresholds to prevent issues.
• Offers application performance monitoring using OpenTelemetry to ensure vendor independence and provide context.
• Correlates data across the tech stack, enabling faster root cause identification and improved problem resolution.
• Provides visibility into networks, storage, servers, databases, websites, containers, and virtual machines.

4. Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-native platform for monitoring, observability, and security, offering solutions for dynamic IT environments. Its Cloud SIEM helps organizations to detect, investigate, and respond to threats in real time by leveraging log management and integration with existing workflows. 

Key features of Datadog:

• Detects and investigates threats using log management and built-in detection rules.
• Provides over 800 out-of-the-box integrations for visibility into networks, endpoints, SaaS applications, and identity providers.
• Offers graph-based visualizations to analyze security insights and drill down into suspicious activities for root cause identification.
• Supports 15 months of historical data for in-depth analysis and risk assessment.
• Simplifies workflows with an intuitive query language to customize detection rules for security needs.

5. Graylog

Graylog is a SIEM platform that provides SecOps teams with tools to detect, investigate, and respond to threats. It aims to address the limitations of traditional SIEMs by providing scalable solutions for visibility, simplified workflows, and analytics. It helps organizations reduce risk, achieve compliance, and hopefully improve incident resolution.

Key features of Graylog:

• Offers threat detection based on organizational objectives.
• Includes Graylog Illuminate content packs with out-of-the-box dashboards, alerts, and event definitions for security and compliance use cases.
• Maps detections to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework to visualize current threat coverage and identify areas for improvement.
• Uses data routing to optimize storage costs by prioritizing high-value log data and archiving lower-value data for future use.
• Provides flexible data tiering options, including “warm” storage, to balance cost-effectiveness and fast retrieval times for incident investigations.

Conclusion

Sumo Logic provides a platform for log analytics, observability, and security, offering tools to enhance operational efficiency, security postures, and compliance. While it offers scalability, machine learning-driven insights, and flexibility, potential users should consider its learning curve, integration gaps, and cost complexities. By comparing Sumo Logic against alternatives, organizations can make an informed decision in accordance with their needs and goals.