Sumo Logic Mobile

Minimizing time to effectively troubleshoot big data problems

Role

Product designer responsible for designing the alerting mechanism, chart legends, defining micro-interactions and behavior, information architecture and end-to-end interactive prototyping

Skills

Prototyping User Flows Interaction Design

Information Architecture Vision Work Mobile Design

It is time to move faster

Today, the world is navigating towards mobile phones. We are a mobile society. We are expected to be available 24/7 irrespective of time or place. For this to happen, we need tools that enable us to do this.

When you are a DevOps person, any alert is major if notified at unusual hours. While alerting priorities and mechanisms can be preconfigured, there are times when entire stakeholders must be notified when systems break down.

Currently, Sumo customers get a PagerDuty alert when something is wrong and they have to get to their systems to understand the details of the issue. To achieve faster, convenient mobile troubleshooting and efficient incident response coordination, we envisioned Sumo Mobile.

Typically, for SREs, it is of utmost importance to be available 24/7. While our current product can be configured to send out alerts in the form of emails, Slack messages among other forms of communication, Sumo Logic does not have a mobile application. What would a mobile application for a big-data analytics solutions entail?

Scenario: Andre has to look at a problem at 2 AM

Scenario

As a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) on the Infrastructure Team, Andre's usecase involves making sure that the systems are up and running as soon as possible whenever the airline's check-in infrastructure goes down. He uses Sumo to monitor the health of the server infrastructure, to get notified of system failures, and to troublshoot the root cause of problems and fix them quickly.

It is 2 AM on a Saturday morning and Andre gets an email alert that a critical service, say check-in service of a major airlines carrier, is down. This is unacceptable as it could result in widespread panic and cause inconvenience to the passengers flying to their destinations. This could also potentially have disastrous effects on the company as a whole.

Sumo Logic Mobile

Introducing Sumo Logic Mobile

Sumo Logic at your fingertips!

It all began with a hackathon. We wanted to dissect our product and figure out what can be made available for our users on their smartphones and what all should it have. This meant looking at each of the product features, understanding technical feasibility, mobile interaction design, implementation contraints, while continuing to understand and acknowledge user needs.

These screens show the login and home screens of the Sumo Logic Mobile app. The Home screen has a list of dashboards that users can access from their library.

Sumo Logic Mobile aims to reduce the amount of time it takes for users to access critical data on Sumo Logic and resolve their own customer outages faster

Alert notification on phone

Receive mobile alerts

Andre wants to gather more details about this alert before running to his system. When he opens the Sumo Logic app, he sees a list of alerts that he and his team have set. He is able to pinpoint which one of those have triggered red alerts.

Inspect alert received

Inspect alerts

Andre is trying to figure out what triggered that alert and why. He clicks on the chart and gets the associated values in the legends. During the inspect stage, a user typically skims through information.

Investigate alert received further

Investigate alerts

In order to inspect the alert further, Andre filters down variables that concern him the most. He then goes ahead and digs deeper to understand if he can find something in the logs.

Investigate alert received further

Investigate further: Timerange

Apart from filtering, Andre can even go ahead and change the time range to investigate the issue further. He finds something that isn’t quite right at this stage. During the investigate stage, a user typically scans through information to examine the root cause. Investigation is a step futher compared to inspection.

Notify respective stakeholders

Notify stakeholders

Andre goes ahead to share this alert and associated information with respective stakeholders.

Mute/unmute alerts

Mute/Unmute alerts

Andre can mute/unmute alerts he is not too keen to be notified about (especially in the middle of the night).

Some damaging statistics - Why Sumo Mobile?

Impact

Nearly 50% of customers avoid a retailer or a brand in the future if they have to wait for more than 5 minutes.

On average, every minute of POS downtime costs a retailer 4700$. Let’s do some math here. That means,

  • 1 millisecond = $1.30
  • 1 second = $78.33
  • 15 min = $70.5k
  • 30 min = $141k
  • 1 hour = $282k

This shows that businesses lose money by the millisecond. In order to cut losses, downtime should be minimized.

Sumo Mobile aims to empower users to pinpoint their issue as soon as possible and avoid devastating situations. No more delayed flights or systems that are down!