There is a famous Russian saying, “trust, but verify”. Here at VMware, we trust that we have a great product in vRealize Log Insight, but we want to verify that our customers agree. In order to do so, we commissioned tech research firm TechValidate to survey Log Insight customers in June. As a result of this survey, we gained a clear picture of why customers are choosing Log Insight and how well our log management system is performing for them.
Here is a summary of the results:
- 74% of respondents chose Log Insight to improve problem resolution time
- 60% of respondents evaluated Splunk before purchasing Log Insight
- 83% of respondents said Log Insight reduced problem resolution time
- 75% of respondents believed Log Insight’s ease of use to be differentiated or very differentiated from competing products
Log Insight: A Log Management Troubleshooting Solution
We asked why customers chose Log Insight(LI) as their log management solution, and the results were overwhelming: seventy-four percent of respondents stated that improving problem resolution time was one of the top reasons they made the decision to purchase LI.
Log Insight: A Better Alternative to Splunk
Sixty percent of respondents indicated that they evaluated Splunk before choosing LI. We found that although customers do believe Splunk is a great product, many have found LI to be lower cost, faster, easier to use, and higher performing than Splunk.
Splunk’s method of pricing per GB of log data ends up penalizing users when they need it the most. LI’s simple pricing method is based on the number of log file sources; costs won’t rise with the high volumes of log data generated when there’s trouble.
Log Insight is a high-performance log analytics platform. In addition to outstanding query performance, tests have shown Log Insight querying is up to six times faster than Splunk for data sets with over 10 million events. Features such as machine learning mean that log analysis can be done quickly.
LI is a lightweight application that can be installed in under five minutes. Content packs add even more value to the product by providing expert troubleshooting knowledge through pre-configured dashboards, queries, and notifications. Furthermore, no log analysis tool is better integrated with VMware products than Log Insight.
Log Insight: A Cost-Saving Operations Solution
We wanted to make sure Log Insight was actually making the lives of Operations teams better and solving real problems instead of just providing a fancy new tool for them to play with. We asked our customers what types of operational challenges LI solved for their organization, and here are the top responses:
- 83% said it reduced problem resolution time
- 40% said it improved management efficiencies of existing infrastructure resources
- 26% said it improved overall system up-time
It is nice to see that our customers have realized the benefits they sought when they purchased Log Insight. Another important aspect is the magnitude of the time savings that IT Managers can realize with Log Insight. Twenty-two of the respondents stated that using Log Insight decreased the time needed to solve difficult data center problems by over 50%!
The time savings on troubleshooting has resulted in increased productivity as well. Many of the respondents said that Log Insight increased the productivity of the IT staff by over 50%. With this kind of cost savings, many of our customers have seen quick payback periods. In fact, twenty-seven respondents told us they experienced a payback period of one year or less!
Enhanced Capabilities
The impact our log management solution has had on our customers’ operations looks great, but we needed to know whether this was due to Log Insight in particular or if any log file analyzer could do the same. Along this vein, we asked the customers to rate how differentiated LI is from the competition, from not differentiated to very differentiated, on four different capabilities. Respondents answered very differentiated or differentiated to the following topics:
- Performance – 53% of the time
- Ease of Use – 75% of the time
- Reliability – 52% of the time
- Scalability – 47% of the time
Suffice it to say, we are pleased to see that our customers agree that we have created a low cost, fast, easy to use, and high performing solution for IT’s log analysis needs. Trust, but verify.
To view selected case studies and customer quotes, please visit the TechValidate vRealize Log Insight Research Portal.
