Loggly, which recently raised $5.7 million in new funding, makes cloud-based, cross-platform log management and analysis a reality for web-based businesses

A Q&A with Loggly CEO Charlie Oppenheimer. The San Francisco–based company was founded in 2009 and raised $5.7 million in new funding in mid-July from True Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Matrix Partners.

SUB: Please describe Loggly, and the value proposition you offer to the enterprise.

Oppenheimer: With over 2,500 customers, Loggly is the world’s most popular online log management service. Offered as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service solution (SaaS), Loggly is simple, scalable and fast. Growing online businesses rely on Loggly to simplify log management and investigate brewing issues and trends. Loggly collects and analyzes machine data from any application source including cloud-based, on-premise, and mobile.

SUB: Who are your target users?

Oppenheimer: Loggly’s target users are developers, operations people and support engineers. Developers rely on Loggly to debug applications and identify the root cause of problems. DevOps, operations and support engineers rely on Loggly to simplify log management and investigate brewing issues and trends.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Oppenheimer: Loggly competes against Splunk.

SUB: What differentiates Loggly from the competition?

Oppenheimer: Unlike on-premise log management systems, Loggly is simple to deploy, easy to use and inexpensive to scale. These are some of the reasons why Loggly is the most popular online log management service.

SUB: When was the company founded and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Oppenheimer: The company was founded in 2009. Members of the founding team came from Splunk and saw that on-premises log management was complicated, time consuming and expensive—often involving the purchase of additional hardware. We saw an opportunity to simplify and improve the entire experience by moving it to the cloud, and deliver huge cost savings to customers at the same time.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind the idea for Loggly? Was there an ‘aha’ moment, or was the idea more gradual in developing?

Oppenheimer: We saw more and more companies migrating traditional applications to the cloud. We witnessed operations people embracing Amazon’s AWS. We thought this was a leading indicator of things to come. As companies increasingly relied upon cloud services, it became apparent to us that most of the elements of the software stack would be moving out to the cloud. With the founding team’s deep expertise in log management—the rest is history.

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building the company?

Oppenheimer: With our tremendous growth, our focus has been on rapidly scaling our infrastructure and operations.

SUB: You just raised $5.7 million in new funding. How do you plan to use the new funds?

Oppenheimer: The funds will be used to scale operations, increase our staff and increase our market presence.

SUB: Do you plan to raise additional funds in the near future?

Oppenheimer: Not in the near future but there are many interested investors when we are ready.

SUB: How does the company generate revenue or plan to generate revenue?

Oppenheimer: Loggly is a subscription service. Our service is free to try and we charge a monthly fee based on the amount of data that a customer wants analyzed and the length of time they want it stored.

SUB: What are your goals for Loggly over the next year or so?

Oppenheimer: We are looking to rapidly scale our operations, sales and marketing over the next year.

Loggly – www.loggly.com