This blog was originally published Nov. 22, 2021 on humio.com. Humio is a CrowdStrike Company.

Whether you’re diagnosing a system outage, mitigating a malicious attack or trying to get to the bottom of an application-response-time issue, speed is critical. Pinpointing and resolving issues quickly and easily can mean the difference between success and crisis for any business, regardless of size or industry. Network and system administrators, security professionals and developers all depend on detailed log data to investigate issues, troubleshoot problems and optimize performance.

DevOps needs logs to:

• Identify performance bottlenecks to empower associates and pinpoint application issues
• Optimize user experience to drive accessibility and productivity
• Gather insights to make strategic business decisions

ITOps needs logs to:

• Identify infrastructure issues to prioritize and strategize resolution
• Understand anomalies to take actions as needed to protect the organization
• Improve service quality and availability of the IT infrastructure

SecOps needs logs to:

• Isolate breaches to contain and mitigate attacks
• Remediate threats to protect organizational infrastructure and information
• Support audits to ensure accuracy and compliance

Yet for many organizations, searching log data is a tedious task that squanders time and resources. Administrators are often forced to manually sift through large volumes of raw log data. And when it comes to queries, conventional SIEM platforms and log management solutions are notoriously slow: It can take hours to search a simple query from a massive log repository using a traditional solution. That can seem like an eternity when you’re trying to respond to a critical incident with senior management breathing down your neck.

David Graff, a Network Security Engineer for Michigan State University, summed up the situation in a recent podcast: “We were finding ourselves on the previous platform just losing a lot of time on our analysts, especially for our incident response team, because they needed to go back through months and months of logs and do very general searches, just looking for that needle in the haystack. And you’d have queries that would run all day. And that was just wasting people’s time, which was our most valuable resource and most limited supply.”

Humio’s index-free design delivers blazing-fast search performance

Humio is a streaming log management platform, built from the ground up for speed and efficiency. Our index-free architecture eliminates the performance and scalability constraints of traditional SIEM and log management solutions. With Humio, you can search data the moment it’s ingested. Humio’s proprietary algorithms deliver instantaneous results, making it fast and easy for DevOps, ITOps and SecOps professionals to perform queries, answer questions and get to the root cause of issues.

Watch this video presented by John Smith at Extrahop to see how Humio’s speed and performance helps capture data from unmanaged systems within an organization.

Our flexible query language lets you perform complex searches across multiple data sources and various data types to efficiently correlate issues and isolate problems. The combination of an extensible query language and fast search is a powerful one-two punch. You can execute advanced queries, searching months or even years of data, and get results instantly. In fact, with Humio, you can search 1 PB of log data in under a second. We also update alerts, dashboards and reports upon data ingestion, providing real-time visibility into health and performance issues, indicators of compromise and system utilization information.

Start logging everything today

Humio’s fast and efficient search capabilities can help you improve responsiveness and increase insights by accelerating troubleshooting, streamlining forensics and providing live observability for DevOps, ITOps and SecOps. To learn more about how Humio’s index-free design provides blazing-fast search results, check out this blog from Humio CTO Kresten Thorup.

Additional resources

• Get a detailed look at how real-time search works in Humio and why it saves you money
• See how cloud-computing company Netlify uses Humio to fully leverage and search all their log data
• Experience the power of streaming observability at no cost with Humio Community Edition