Limelight Networks’ Web Content Management Group Implements Sumo Logic™ to Maximize Service to Customers
Limelight Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: LLNW) is an Internet platform and services provider that helps companies better engage their audiences, optimize advertising, manage and monetize digital assets, and build stronger customer relationships. Limelight’s cloud-based services include a content delivery network and web content management used by more than 1,800 customers worldwide.
The Sumo Logic Approach
“Sumo Logic gives us the ability to act upon things much faster than before.”
Companies come to Limelight Networks so their customers will have an engaging experience with their web properties. So it is essential that Limelight’s services meet the highest standards of reliability, availability and speed. To deliver on these promises, Limelight Networks’ Web Content Management Group turned to Sumo Logic’s log management and analytics service.
With more than 300 servers delivering a wide range of web content and services, Limelight must constantly be alert to any problems that might cause an interruption in service or a degradation in performance. Valuable insights into the causes and prevention of interruptions lie in the significant amount of operational log data generated in Limelight’s infrastructure—as much as 10 gigabytes per day.
“There’s valuable data buried within our log data, so we need to store them centrally and derive insights into our operations infrastructure right away,” says Jan Fernando, platform architect with Limelight Networks.
“Our log files are really, really important sources of data to help understand what’s going on,” Fernando notes. “Being able to aggregate data in the logs provides us with insights into how our services are performing and how something could be improved. It also helps us identify anomalies that might be an early warning sign that we could proactively address.”
Limelight’s IT staff knew they wanted to extract more insight from all their log data, but were confronted with the realities of trying to do so on their own.
“A longstanding challenge for us was that we had looked at commercial and open-source solutions, but the licensing and hardware costs were prohibitively expensive,” Fernando says. “We didn’t want to buy gobs and gobs of hardware to centralize our logs. The cost of implementing and maintaining an on-premise solution was prohibitive.”
Limelight has found Sumo Logic’s service valuable from at least three perspectives.
- As a cloud-based solution, it reduces the high cost of in-house log management.
- By providing a central repository of log data, it greatly simplifies the job of gathering critical information and turning it into actionable insight.
- Sumo Logic’s analytic tools give IT staff the ability to spot trends, identify vulnerabilities and take action sooner than ever before.
Dave Anderson, an operations engineer at Limelight, oversaw implementation of the Sumo Logic solution. “It was incredibly easy to get started,” he says. “We started collecting and aggregating data within 10 minutes.”
“Sumo Logic gives us the ability to do the proactive troubleshooting required to maintain the level of availability and speed our customers expect.”
Two key advantages of the Sumo Logic solution, Anderson notes, are the speed and simplicity of centralizing log data. Before implementing the Sumo Logic solution, Anderson says, “we didn’t have any centralized repository of our application logs. Now, we have a single place to go to search for things we might be interested in.”
An example, he says, involves the process of implementing a new release in a Limelight service. Previously, “we were collecting application logs from all our servers, comparing errors before and after a release to make sure nothing cropped up and that no new errors were introduced. Now, we don’t have to go out to each machine and collect the logs. They are all in one central location, and we don’t have to have someone manually looking for errors. It reduces the time we spend by about 75%. This helps us make sure things are running smoothly and that our customers are getting what they expect from us.”
In addition, Anderson says, Sumo Logic greatly expands the range of analysis that can be performed on log data. “It gives us the ability to really dig down into the log data and see what’s going on without going through the tedious process of going to all the different machines.”
Limelight has service-level agreements (SLAs) with many of its customers, and the Sumo Logic service helps ensure that those commitments are kept. “It gives us proactive, actionable insight into what’s going on in our logs, so we can solve problems more quickly and meet our SLAs,” Anderson says. “Sumo Logic gives us the ability to act upon things much faster than before.”
“.. our log files are really, really important sources of data for us to help understand what’s going on.”
Limelight Networks’ Web Content Management Group has accomplished exactly what it set out to do when it started evaluating the Sumo Logic service. “Our primary product is running the infrastructure for our customer’s websites. So it’s incredibly important for us to make sure that their websites are performing optimally and are always available,” Anderson says. “Using Sumo Logic gives us the ability to do the proactive troubleshooting required to maintain the level of availability and speed our customers demand.”
