Thought leader in the anomaly detection software space, Ariel dives into Coralogix’s roadmap for the year and related tech bytes
1. Tell us about your role as co-founder and CEO of Coralogix and your journey into the tech domain?
We started Coralogix after years of having to deal with unmanageable log data. It seemed like other solutions in the space were too focused on helping you slice and dice log data, and no one was focused on providing insights out of the box.
Prior to launching Coralogix and after completing my military service commitment, I started working for a multinational corporation with huge software projects in more than 120 countries. The pain of identifying bugs / problems, fixing them, and delivering new versions was a huge challenge. Since there were very few well-established tools for this market, me and my business partner (and friend) decided to leave that company and start Coralogix. My roommate at the time, who had just graduated with an MSc in Neuroscience and Machine Learning, joined us as a data scientist and Yoni Farin, presently our CTO, joined us to form our core team.
2. How has the log management / analytics market changed in the last decade?
When we originally launched Coralogix back in 2015, the market was not mature and companies were mainly concerned with aggregating their logs under a single solution. Our pitch about Machine Learning and anomaly detection sounded like a pipe dream and not something that companies were concerned with at that time. Fast forward to five years later and we are seeing unprecedented demand for anomaly detection, CI/CD (continuous integration / continuous delivery) into existing systems, and synergy with metrics.
3. What are the current challenges in this space?
As companies scaled and built their logging and monitoring stacks, they found themselves aggregating huge amounts of data, which is extremely expensive. Today, we’re seeing more customers having to tradeoff coverage for pricing or trying to rely solely on metrics, which can never be enough.
4. How has AI and ML changed log management / analytics?
ML is not broadly implemented in log analytics tools yet. It has the potential of identifying issues in log data long before they reflect in lagging indicators such as metrics and traces. ML can also play a valuable role in reducing the amount of log data that needs to be kept in order for a company to achieve coverage.
5. Do you think the rise of cloud-native technologies and microservices has made logging more difficult?
It has actually made it more essential. Microservices, not to mention serverless computing, have made software more flexible and scalable, but also more complex and “chatty”. This calls for a new approach in logging to emerge. We definitely see it affecting the market and pushing it to innovate.
6. CI / CD is a huge trend right now. Can you tell us Coralogix’s role in this?
Three years ago, we decided CI/CD will not only give automatic insights, but it will also provide them in a contextual way. In the CI/CD era, any insight had to be tied to a specific version or deployment. That’s why, Coralogix can be integrated with any CI/CD platform to understand new version upgrades and create an automatic benchmark on each deployment.
7. We recently saw Coralogix partnering with Instana. How did that come about and what does it mean for the industry?
The monitoring market is going through some major consolidation. There are products offering full platforms that are far from being the best in their field, but rather offer a complete set. We decided to partner with Instana, which in our opinion is the best of breed in its space. We are offering it together with Coralogix, so that people can choose the best of breed products and still have them working together. There is much more to come on this front, by the way.
8. What do you think will be the next big breakthrough in technology?
With 5G coming, we will be seeing more technology companies getting into telecom now that it’s all about software. There are many opportunities there for SaaS and cloud providers, especially for monitoring and security companies.
9. What advice would have for a company or an individual starting out in your space?
It’s a very mature space with professionals who know exactly what they want. It’s not enough to build an MVP anymore. Companies are expecting a wide coverage of use cases, so make sure you build a solid platform to begin with.
For DevOps professionals in general, my recommendation is to learn about the organization you want to work for thoroughly, identify, and understand its pain points, and then determine how technology can address them. Always keep in mind that DevOps is the link between business operations and engineering. When it is performed well, DevOps plays a mission-critical and impactful role within a company.
Ariel Assaraf
A veteran of the Israeli Intelligence Corps Unit 8200, Ariel Assaraf founded log analysis software solution company Coralogix in 2014 following his stint at Verint. In his own words, he wanted “to change how people analyze their operations, applications, infrastructure, and security data – one log at a time.”
