Log innovations across eras, From on-prem to cloud to AI

Early Inventions in Logging

Bronto comprises a very special team of engineering folk with over a century and a half of log-specific domain expertise. We built our first log management solution for IBM's WebSphere product back in the 'on-prem' world of the late 00's.

In 2011 we took our learnings to the cloud and designed, developed and brought to market one of the first true SaaS log management solutions. We were backed by several US venture capital firms like RRE, Polaris and Floodgate. Focused on the DevOps user, we built a truly great product that pioneered many features that are commonplace today. We invented livetail, were the first to leverage bloom filtering indexing and we created tagging for log visualisations.

For context, we grew up in a world where Splunk was the 800lb gorilla in the room, New Relic and other APM companies such as a twenty person company called Datadog were very much focused on metrics and dashboards. We witnessed the birth of the full-stack observability model as the Traces and Metrics spaces on their own weren't sufficiently large enough to build stand-alone companies.

Reinventing Log Management for Scale

We were acquired in late 2015 by a Nasdaq listed SEIM and MSSP. From 2016 on, we expanded the team with a mandate to re-build our logging platform for petabyte scale. We had the opportunity to correct decisions that we knew were short-sighted and were driven by limited capital and or a need for speed….the hallmarks of a venture-backed startup. Specifically we thought about scale requirements like separation of storage and compute, multi-indexing and dynamic search technology, distributed search for scale and cost optimization.

Fast forward to 2023 and much to our own surprise, we realized that as the wider world was barrelling into an AI-first era, logging was - and still is - fundamentally broken.

The logging landscape within the enterprise is unwieldy as … It's made up of disparate stores and databases. It's discriminatory based on use cases, user types, volumes, retention periods, and user expertise. Logging has categorically not been democratised. In fact, most organisations today have a complex web of log infrastructure combining expensive enterprise solutions, cloud provider add-ons, repurposed database technologies, antiquated open source technologies and object storage. In short, it is absolutely not Fit for purpose.

The Future of Logging: Bronto's Vision

At Bronto, we, more than most, understand that a log is not a log is not a log. Infact, the very quintessence of a log is its uniqueness, but we believe all logs should be treated equal. We believe that all users across the enterprise should be able to access all log types, for any and all use cases, over any time period with sub-second search speeds. And we believe it should cost a fraction of the price of today's 'leading' solutions. To achieve this, we believe that a logging layer for the internet should exist. And that's what Bronto is… the lowest-cost, easiest to use, fastest, enterprise logstore for the internet.

Welcome to the Bronto-verse!


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