Humio at Decisiv: An Industrial Internet of Things Company Reduces Log Management Costs by 37%

June 02, 2021

| Humio Staff | Next-Gen SIEM & Log Management

This blog was originally published on

humio.com. Humio is a CrowdStrike Company. Decisiv’s self-hosted log management solution was taking up too much maintenance time and costing too much overhead. By switching to Humio

log management, Decisiv reduced their total cost by 37%, cut six-to-ten hours of monthly maintenance tasks from their backlog, and improved security and retention time.

The administrative overhead of running a logging solution in-house was too expensive given our applications and our small team size. — David Bock, VP of Engineering Operations, Decisiv

A Detailed Look at Decisiv’s Use Case

“Humio’s search functionality makes identifying integration issues very simple.”

Decisiv is an industry-leading producer of a Service Relationship Management (SRM) platform for managing repairs of equipment and commercial vehicles. The product combines previously siloed information in order to increase understanding and improve performance. Decisiv collects maintenance records from all vehicles and tools in a fleet and makes them accessible in one place for equipment and component manufacturers, fleet owners, managers, operators, service provider networks, and other key players, driving down the time it takes to repair. To date, Decisiv SRM has managed more than 17 million service events for 7 million assets throughout North America, reducing the dwell time (downtime) of vehicles and saving their customers time and money. Decisiv’s former log management solution was a drain on resources. It made more sense to purchase a new solution than maintain their current one. When looking for a modern log management solution, they sought these improvements:

flexible, free-form queries
lower total cost of ownership
less maintenance required
improved security
improved retention time
integration with existing tools

The requirements pointed to Humio. Decisiv uses the cloud-based log management platform to aggregate logs and enable developers to find answers to questions across every server and container they are running. That includes:

Identifying problem requests in production.
Finding out answers to customer inquiries related to the interaction between our system and their system.
Processing logs for COTS software into forms which makes it quick to diagnose and troubleshoot issues.

Flexible Queries

“We wanted to find a vendor that supported a more freeform query approach. Humio had the most flexible query syntax out of all of the vendors we looked at.”

In order to speed up vehicle repairs, it is important for Decisiv to be able to customize their queries to identify cases involving pre-authentication requests and a need for more information. Humio can also ingest all types of data both structured and unstructured, giving Decisiv the ability to easily handle all logs from legacy portions of their system.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

“Using the cloud offering has decreased our administrative overhead significantly. We no longer need to maintain and monitor a large set of servers to power an on-premises solution.”

Decisiv was running a self-hosted solution that operated 312 nodes, producing significant overhead costs for hardware, electricity, and repairs. By switching to the Humio cloud, they reduced their infrastructure to 270 servers and were able to take advantage of inexpensive S3 bucket storage and reduce their total costs by 37%, including hosting and licence costs.

Less Maintenance Required

“Moving to Humio has cut six-to-ten hours of monthly maintenance tasks out of our backlog”

One of the primary inciting issues that the engineers at Decisiv noticed was their team was spending too much time maintaining their open-source log management when they could just purchase a better solution that requires less maintenance. Because of Humio’s

index-free

architecture, it is affordable for users to log everything without having to spend time deciding and configuring what data to index.

Improved Security and Retention Time

“We wanted to find a vendor that had security and retention policies that were in line with what we required.”

Humio enables Decisiv to control access to data using role-based access control (RBAC). Humio provides records for compliance by keeping audit logs for security-relevant behaviors such as the assigning of a role to a group, deleting data sources, and similar actions. In addition to reducing storage costs by compressing data by 5-20 times and enabling Decisiv to export logs to S3, Humio supports

retention

settings that control how much storage it uses. Data can be scheduled for deletion based on the storage consumption or age of the data.

Integration With Existing Tools

“Humio integrated with tools we already used including Filebeat and Instana.”

Humio is platform agnostic and works with all industry-standard file shippers. This made switching easier for Decisiv because they were able to continue using Filebeat. To start bringing data into Humio, they just needed to reconfigure their existing tool. By combining

Humio Log Management with Instana’s APM, Decisiv unified two best-of-breed tools connecting unlimited log collection with real-time metrics and traces.