In my experience Sumo is a mid to large solution. A startup can get by with their own stack to start. Then they might use something managed as they get big, and once they’re big enough to have dedicated teams, they can run something themselves again. Minus storage and data transfer (the bulk of expense) the hardware to run your own stack probably runs $20 a day or less on a cloud provider, and with a small team where communication about standards is easier it takes less engineering time. My professional opinion is that they should then switch to a managed solution like Sumo when the number of services they are supporting grows. Everyone, myself included, underestimates how many full time people you’re going to need to dedicate to running a serious OpenTel/Elk/Prometheus/Jaeger stack yourself. The pain of migration and upgrading, managing indexes and proper whitelists, even just working with teams to get onboarded and get their dashboards/alerts setup right, using spot instances to desperately claw back every dollar…at my current workplace our custom stack was supposed to be cheaper and ended up costing magnitudes more (under control now) during this learning curve. When I start at a new company I’m probably going to suggest we use Sumo, and this is coming from someone who used to say “we don’t buy solutions we build solutions”.
Lately I am leaning into managed more and more - I want to spend my time building great dashboards, or analyzing my data, or writing some code for something else entirely. If you run your own stack you are always keeping up not doing the really useful stuff. Getting a working baseline is hard enough, let alone shiny extras. You’ll watch the talks at whatever conference, you’ll read the single line “quick start docs”, it will sound amazing. Then you’ll find yourself deep in months later with a giant data transfer or storage bill and hours of painstaking tuning ahead of you.
If you’re really large, then you can go back to running it yourself.
Lately I am leaning into managed more and more - I want to spend my time building great dashboards, or analyzing my data, or writing some code for something else entirely. If you run your own stack you are always keeping up not doing the really useful stuff. Getting a working baseline is hard enough, let alone shiny extras. You’ll watch the talks at whatever conference, you’ll read the single line “quick start docs”, it will sound amazing. Then you’ll find yourself deep in months later with a giant data transfer or storage bill and hours of painstaking tuning ahead of you.
If you’re really large, then you can go back to running it yourself.