Our annual conference, TIBCO NOW, recently drew to a close. It was an exciting event with more than 100 educational sessions, including dozens of customers presenting how they use TIBCO software to achieve their business goals. For the TIBCO LogLogic team, it was an even more momentous occasion because the next generation of our product, LogLogic 6, was announced.
Breaking Down Roadblocks
LogLogic 6 is vital to our customers because it addresses the roadblocks that have prevented or slowed businesses from achieving great value from their machine data. A critical driver of this new generation of products was ease of use—and I am not just talking about prettier fonts and better organized menus. While LogLogic 6 does mightily deliver in those areas, the key factor for businesses is that we’ve changed who can analyze machine data.
At TIBCO NOW, Jon Ramsey, CTO for Dell Secureworks, estimated that there were 25 openings for every qualified security engineer. That’s because the bar for these professionals is so high. Not only do you need to know security issues, you must also have crackerjack technical skills. With LogLogic 6 we’ve done a couple things that change the game. One example is ingesting custom data sources. We automatically identify and extract key value pairs from any source —no coding or RegEx required. That largely eliminates arcane skills such as RegEx from the list of required admin skills.
Pulling Knowledge Out of Methodologies
We’ve also introduced a key concept—Bloks. Bloks are designed to make it very easy to create and share re-usable snippets of code. Senior admins can create Bloks that institutionalize knowledge often hidden in methodologies. For example, many of our customers have a standard for assigning IP addresses to servers to identify production versus staging and test devices. That knowledge can now be captured in Bloks, ensuring that all queries and correlations use data from the correct servers.
Along with being a more visually appealing product, LogLogic 6 has made the process of managing and analyzing machine data much easier and given that capability to a much wider range of users. By eliminating the need for Ninja-level technical skills, the focus can move away from “How do I extract that piece of data?” to “What is that data telling me about my business?”
