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Design Your Deployment

To send your data to Sumo Logic you have a few options. We have two types of installed agents and offer a collector fully hosted by us.

  • Installed agents

    • Distribution of OpenTelemetry is the next-generation agent for data collection. It is built entirely on OpenTelemetry Collector.

    • Installed Collectors are lightweight and efficient. You can choose to install a small number of Collectors to minimize maintenance or to keep your topology simple. Alternatively, you can choose to install many Collectors on many machines to distribute the bandwidth impact across your network rather than having it centralized.

  • Hosted Collectors reside in the Cloud allowing for seamless collection from Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and many other Cloud services.

OpenTelemetry​

The Sumo Logic Distro of OpenTelemetry Collector is built with the opentelemetry-collector-builder and provides a single unified agent to send Logs, Metrics, Traces, and Metadata for Observability to Sumo Logic.

See the Deployment Guide in our sumologic-otel-collector GitHub repository for detailed instructions on how to configure and migrate your existing collection.

It's supported on Linux, MacOS, and Kubernetes environments and can use any of the following Sources:

  • Local File
  • Host/Process Metrics
  • HTTP Traces
  • Streaming Metrics
  • Syslog
  • Telegraf Input Plugins

For full details on limitations, what's supported, and what's different see our comparison documentation.

Installed Collectors​

Installed Collectors are deployed in your environment, on a local machine, a machine in your organization, or even an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Installed Collectors require a software download and installation. Upgrades to Collector software are released regularly by Sumo Logic.

Consider having an Installed Collector on a dedicated machine when:

Consider having more than one Installed Collector if:

  • You expect the Collector to ingest from at least 500 separate files.
  • Your hardware has memory or CPU limitations.
  • You expect combined logging traffic for one Collector to be higher than 15,000 events per second.
  • Your network clusters or regions are geographically separated.
  • You prefer to install many Collectors, for example, one per machine to collect local files.

To help design your deployment see how Installed Collectors work and  Best Practices: Local and Centralized Data Collection.

For details on system requirements, see Installed Collector requirements.

Hosted Collectors​

Unlike Installed Collectors, Hosted Collectors don't require installation or activation, nor do Hosted Collectors have physical requirements since they're hosted by Sumo Logic in AWS.

Because there are no performance issues to consider, you can configure as many Sources as you'd like, up to 1,000, for a single Hosted Collector. Consider setting up more than one Hosted Collector if you'd like to tag different data types with different metadata.

See how to configure a Hosted Collector and all of the available Sources supported on Hosted Collectors.

Logging levels​

The more sensitive the logging level settings are for your applications and devices, the more logs will be sent to the Sumo Logic Cloud. In order to maximize the value of your log collection and analysis, set the logging level as high as you can without negatively impacting the CPU utilization of the machine where the Collector is running. The more searchable data you collect, the more information you have for forensic analysis and troubleshooting.

If you have additional questions, a Sumo Logic sales representative can help determine specific recommendations for your installation.