A large portion of the data in companies’ possession comes from automated logging mechanisms deployed throughout their infrastructure, which raises the need for a different kind of analytics tool than those used to process information produced by people. Sumo Logic Inc. is one of the providers working to address this requirement.

In a bid to step up the fight against Splunk Inc. and its other deep-pocketed rivals, the company today raised $75 million from a consortium led by Sapphire Ventures. Sumo Logic’s value proposition centers on its namesake cloud platform, which promises to reduce the amount of work involved in processing machine-generated data. One of the ways in which the service achieves that is by centralizing the analysis process.

Sumo Logic can ingest both infrastructure logs and time-series information such as the individual data points generated by Google Analytics as users visit a company’s website. According to the company, pooling the records in one place helps operations professionals gain a complete view of their technology environment.

The visibility that Sumo Logic provides has the potential to come handy in a variety of situations. Infrastructure teams, for instance, can use its platform to look for hardware problems, while cybersecurity personnel could scan application logs for signs of malicious activity. Built-in machine learning helpfully highlight important information to save users the trouble of manually locating every relevant data point.

For cases where the automated recommendations don’t cut it, Sumo Logic offers a set of advanced analysis features that can be used to manually connect the dots. The platform also provides the ability to create visualizations for tracking key metrics such as server performance in real-time.

Sumo Logic will use today’s capital to further expand the feature set. The company among other plans to help customers better analyze data from connected devices, which are emerging as one of the fastest growing sources of machine data. Gartner Inc. forecasts that the number of Internet-enabled devices on the market will reach 20.4 billion by the end of the decade.

Sumo Logic boasts over 1,500 customers including tech titans such as Microsoft Corp. Adobe Systems Inc. and Airbnb Inc. The company claims to have tripled recurring revenue in the past year on the back of strong adoption.

Image: Sumo Logic