Organizations nowadays use various forms of software that eventually leads to an increase in data and logs, which are extremely critical to monitor. Because of this, organizations end up paying high prices for licensing fees and ongoing operational inefficiencies. To tackle these prevalent issues – a globally distributed organization – Sematext enters the fray with its innovative cloud and on-premise solutions. They offer infrastructure and application performance monitoring and log management solutions – Sematext Cloud and Sematext Enterprise. In addition to the above, Sematext goes the distance to provide Search and Big Data consulting services. They also offer 24/7 production support and training for Apache Solr and Elasticsearch to their worldwide clients.
A Visionary who Led Sematext to Glory
Otis Gospodnetić, Founder and President of Sematext group, is the visionary who led the company to its current glory. He is the author of several published books, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and a proficient speaker at several industry events. As an active participant of Apache Software Foundation, he has significantly contributed to Apache Solr and Apache Lucene – a software library positioned at the core of Solr and Elasticsearch.
Prior to Sematext, Otis served at Thomson Reuters as a manager and held the chair of Senior Engineer of Search at Technorati and Wireless Generation. His educational resume includes a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Middlebury College.
Helping Clients with Performance-Related Issues
A decade ago, Sematext was started as a professional service organization. Their service back then included consulting, support and training for Elasticsearch and Apache Solr. While dealing with massive clusters, and helping clients with performance-related issues, the company found itself in a dire need of tools that were imperative with regards to Solr and Elasticsearch performance metrics. But due to a shortage of tools back then, they could only provide unified monitoring and log management solutions. This prompted Sematext to build its very own tools.
Eventually, Elasticsearch and ELK (aka Elastic Stack) became immensely popular among the DevOps circuit for building log indexing and searching functionality. Their Elastic Stack was seen and preferred by the masses as a cheaper alternative of Splunk. Sematext already possessed a deep Elastic Stack expertise, and adding log management to the already existing infrastructure and application performance monitoring was the obvious next step for them. This was the cause behind Sematext ending up with Sematext Cloud, thereby offering an all-in-one unified monitoring and log management.
The Past is Always Tense; It’s about Making the Future Perfect
DevOps teams of different organization tend to invest a lot of time and energy to automate the whole workflow, such as CI pipelines and automated deployment, as well as in monitoring operations. Improvements in applications require a consistent need to learn from past failures and strategies, to avoid any repetition of the same.
Sematext provides logging and monitoring tools to gain operational intelligence from development, staging and production environments. They realize that visibility of application and infrastructure metrics combined with logs is what helps an enterprise identify pre-existing and potential issues. It serves as the first step in each of its iteration to solve identified technical problems.
Helping DevOps Team Spend Less Time on Troubleshooting
Sematext’s Cloud integration enables their customers to collect metrics, logs, and events across their entire stack. They go beyond collecting metrics and detecting anomalies by uncovering applications’ slowest transactions, tracing communication between servers and applications, and others. Sematext includes a fully-integrated Kibana and exposes the Elasticsearch API. It works smoothly with all standard logging facilities and agents – such as Logstash, Fluentd, Flume, Filebeat, etc. – and integrates the same within minutes. By enabling businesses to collect metrics, logs and events easily – their solution provides a full-stack of visibility through a single pane of glass and helps businesses to extract value from those accumulated data.
Sematext’s unified all-in-one monitoring and logging solution eliminates costly context-switching, which a person is forced into while using separate monitoring and log management tools. This switch is not only tiresome for the person undertaking it but also leads to inefficiency as it slows down troubleshooting and increases the time of recovery. Organizations engaged with Sematext and its services reap its unparalleled benefits such as reduction in downtime and revenue loss. The company enables the DevOps teams from different organizations to spend less time on troubleshooting and more time on doing work that helps move the organization further.
Standing Tall Among the Competition
Organizations nowadays firmly depend upon software; and with the presence of software, metrics and logs are bound to stay, making it highly imperative for enterprises to monitor these vital types of data. While vendors like Splunk or New Relic focus solely either on logs or performance monitoring, Sematext offers an efficient platform that eliminates the chasm between performance monitoring and logs.
Organizations that use multiple tools from multiple vendors ultimately have to pay a high price, both in licensing and in-ongoing operational inefficiencies. Sematext Cloud (SaaS) and Sematext Enterprise (on-premises) provide Infrastructure Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and Log Management in a single, unified solution. This enables the DevOps teams using Sematext to work more efficiently and troubleshoot faster than the traditional log management and monitoring software.
Where Employees are the Pillars of Success
Sematext owes its proliferating success in transitioning from just a service business to a product and service business, to its team of experts and professionals. Unlike other firms that started building products without any revenue behind its back, Sematext already had a very healthy professional service business in place, enabling them to choose the bootstrap route.
Otis Gospodnetić mentions that “For me as a founder, transitioning Sematext from a pure service business to a well-balanced products and services business was very interesting. It was a multi-year process that required a lot of focus, planning, patience, and juggling.”
This transition occurred at an individual level as well, with Sematext’s engineers who previously worked with only their consulting clientele, gradually adapting the roles of product engineers. This unique flexibility to simultaneously play multiple roles made it a possibility for them to shift towards a successful products and services company, without a hitch or a hurdle blocking their way.
Planning a Future that Brings-forward Success
According to the company, organizations nowadays are beginning to realize the value of a unified log management, infrastructure, and application performance monitoring. This is one of the main differentiators that Sematext brings to the table. With each passing day, the company is seeing an increase in adaption by smart organizations, which now realize the potential advantages of working with Sematext. With advantages such as faster troubleshooting, shorter downtimes and making the lives easier for their customer’s DevOps teams, the company is destined to rise-up the ladder in the coming years.
In addition to their deployment in North America, the company has recently initiated Sematext Cloud in Europe and is expecting to see further increase in adaption across Europe by organizations that prefer or need to keep their data within the European Union.
