Rocket DevOps (formerly Rocket Aldon) enables true end-to-end (CI/CD) for IBM i+ environments. Businesses can extend holistic DevSecOps best practices to the IBM i, pursue innovative experimentation, easily respond to compliance audits, and adapt to the ever-changing expectations of process, technology, or experience.
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Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Sumo Logic is a log management offering from the San Francisco based company of the same name.
Rocket Aldon is perfect for simple changes to traditional IBM i development using RPGLE, CL, and DDS. It is great for finding related objects that are referenced in many locations and helping recompile all of these objects. However, Aldon has a particularly hard time with SQL views. For some reason, it is determined to lock every table related to a view even though this is not required by the operating system. Whenever one view references another view, you are always in danger of losing a view permanently if you didn't check it out and promote it. To clarify, imagine you created a view CUSTOMER_INFO. Then you make another view called CUSTOMER_SHIPMENTS that joins the CUSTOMER_INFO to a shipping table. If you ever change CUSTOMER_INFO and then promote it, there is a good chance that Aldon will delete the CUSTOMER_SHIPMENTS view and you will not get a single warning. It doesn't happen every time but when it does you are going to have a real mess on your hands.
SumoLogic is a fantastic log aggregator and analysis tool, a fine alternative to Splunk. Searching is powerful and mostly intuitive and results come fast. If you have application logs in clusters or Kubernetes pods that lose their logs every time they're restarted, Sumo is the solution for you
Log Aggregation and uploading. The architecture for Sumo Logic makes a great deal of sense and works very well.
Automated analysis. It still impresses me how well a newly uploaded log can be broken into intelligent parts, then searched and sorted using their tools.
Dashboards. It might not be what YOU will need as an IT admin, but you can give access to these dashboards easily to business users who love that kind of stuff. Most other types of (monitoring / alerting) tools, for no apparent reason, lack this feature.
Reporting, monitoring, and graphing. Given, you need to have useful log generation for an application or service as a prerequisite for sumo logic to be able to gain use, once it has it is an amazingly powerful tool.
Sumo Logic is very powerful but definitely requires some configuration work to get the most out of it. You can get a certification related to this, but it is definitely not something you can just throw together.
Support is hit and miss. Sometimes they give some great assistance and sometimes they are no help at all. It always seems like they can't replicate the problem but then they never try to get on our system to do deeper research. It's kind of frustrating dealing with them. Also, the website isn't that helpful.
I would give this rating because I attended a free Sumo Logic training at a WeWork in Chicago. I found the training very useful, and I learned a lot of features that I was not aware of before I went to the training. I like the idea that SumoLogic provides free training seminars. I am certified in level1, and I plan on certifying to level2.
I was satisfied with the implementation, as at the time, it was the best way to implement the product with the available feature sets in Sumo Logic. User creation and management became more of an issue during continued use, instead of it being an issue related to deploying the product in our environment.
There are not a lot of CMS solutions for the IBM i server. Midrange Dynamics MDCMS is definitely one to consider. It seems very similar to Aldon Rocket and has a lot more functionality. I haven't used it but I have been to a demo and it looks promising. It seems a lot more intuitive and the promotions seem easier. However, that was a demo environment and even then it crashed so there's that to consider....
We had used Splunk previously. Sumo Logic defeats them when it comes to cost, including the costs that would normally come with supporting/managing/patching/upgrading your own infrastructure and storage. Those were wins, but especially the real-time CDN integrations due to Sumo Logic's collaborations with other vendors. We had spoken to Logentries and discovered that many of the cons we found with Sumo Logic seemed to have been resolved in their product. Their pitfall was that, at the time, Logentries did not have the ability to get real-time log ingestion from our CDN. They said they had a solution, which was scripted, but we had not evaluated/tested. Logentries also did not have a User / RBAC REST API, and are nowhere near the level of compliance that Sumo Logic had (https://www.sumologic.com/press/2015-02-19/sumo-logic-successfully-completes-pci-data-security-stand...). In the end, I believe Logentries and Sumo Logic would be two good vendors to get involved in a bake-off
