Stanley Black & Decker transforms work with support from Loggly

I know from practical experience that the type of performance I get from Loggly would require a $1-2 million Splunk infrastructure. We have no capital expenditures, low recurring costs, and the ability to grow quickly.

Jorge De La Torre DevOps Engineer, Stanley Black & Decker

Highlights:

• Provides team with troubleshooting capabilities for mobile and IoT applications running on traditional and serverless architectures
• Supports performance monitoring, security, and PCI compliance needs
• Enables quick scalability as new innovations are launched

Tools Will Build a Foundation for the Smart Factory and Workplace

In 2015, Stanley Black & Decker established its Digital Accelerator Group, now more than two dozen strong. This group of world-class technologists, software engineers, and digital product managers launched a breakthrough home improvement mobile app called DIYZ later that year and is finding new ways to transform work by developing Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that combine real-time data, integrated enterprise or manufacturing systems, and powerful analytics.

Jorge De La Torre, one of two DevOps engineers in the Digital Accelerator Group, must bring in technology projects from many parts of the company and ensure that they can be put in production securely and with reliable performance. Being former Splunk users, he and his team recognized that a centralized log analysis capability would play an important role in meeting their goals.

Amazon Web Services Facilitate Innovation

The Digital Accelerator Group has deployed all of its applications on AWS. The DIYZ app runs as a traditional three-tier architecture on AWS EC2, but the company is taking advantage of serverless architectures for some of the newer services. “People want to believe that serverless fixes everything,” De La Torre comments. “But no! Your code is still running somewhere, and you need to be able to troubleshoot it.”

Why Loggly?

With Loggly, Stanley Black & Decker found a log management solution that aligned with its business and technical needs:

• Compared to Splunk, Loggly offered low expenditures and the ability to grow seamlessly. According to De La Torre, “We know how wonderful Splunk can be, and how expensive. Loggly gives us ninety-five percent of the goodness at a fraction of the cost. And if we grow, Loggly grows with us.”
• Compared to the Elastic stack, Loggly offered lower and more predictable costs. “There is no such thing as free. Open source software often ends up being more time-consuming to manage.”

Solution

De La Torre’s team began using Loggly for production troubleshooting on the DIYZ app. “Within 24 hours, we were able to bring Loggly live and solve the problems in front of us,” De La Torre reports. “We couldn’t have done that with Splunk even if we had paid them in gold.”

Loggly manages both system logs — including Linux auth logs — and application logs. “I like that Loggly can collect completely custom logs with a couple of turns of knobs,” De La Torre says. “In addition, there’s no care and feeding of agents.”

Handy Tools for Troubleshooting

All of the developers and DevOps engineers in the Digital Accelerator Group have access to Loggly and regularly use it for troubleshooting purposes. “I was surprised that the Loggly query language is an established language, not something with a thick manual to read,” De La Torre says. “And search results are pretty fast and responsive.”

Going forward, the team is looking at ways to custom parse their logs using Loggly Derived Fields so they can create precise alerts.

Gaining Visibility over the Horizon

An additional benefit of Loggly is that it helps the Digital Accelerator Group find issues that it didn’t know to look for. “Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer™ gives us an over-the-horizon radar by providing us with a view of what’s in our log data,” De La Torre notes.

Security and PCI Compliance

Finally, the team uses Loggly to look for potential security issues and to manage the logs required for PCI compliance. “We live in times when security can’t be taken for granted,” De La Torre concludes.

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