Scalyr launches PowerQueries for advanced log management

NelsonG · March 25, 2019

Log management service Scalyr today announced the beta launch of PowerQueries, its new tools for letting its users create advanced search operations as they manage their log files and troubleshoot potential issues. The new service allows users to perform complex actions to group, transform, filter and sort their large data sets, as well as to create table lookups and joins. The company promises these queries will happen just as fast as Scalyr’s standard queries and that getting started with these more advanced queries is pretty straightforward.

Scalyr founder and chairman Steve Newman argues that the company’s competitors may offer similar tools, but that “their query languages are too complex, hard-to-learn and hard-to-use.” He also stressed that Scalyr made a conscious decision not to use any machine learning tools to power this and its other services to help admins and developers prioritize issues and instead decided to focus on its query language and making it easier for its users to manage their logs that way.

“So we thought about how we could leverage our strengths — real-time performance, ease-of-use and scalability — to provide similar but better functionality,” he said in today’s announcement. “As a result, we came up with a set of simple but powerful queries that address advanced use cases while improving the user experience dramatically. Like the rest of our solution, our PowerQueries are fast, easy-to-learn and easy-to-use.”

Current Scalyr customers cover a wide range of verticals. They include the likes of NBCUniversal, Barracuda Networks, Spiceworks, John Hopkins University, Giphy, OkCupid and Flexport. Currently, Scalyr has more than 300 paying customers. As Newman stressed, more than 3,500 employees from these customers regularly use the service. He attributes this to the fact that it’s relatively easy to use, thanks to Scalyr’s focus on usability.

The company raised its last funding round — a $20 million Series A round — back in 2017. As Scalyr’s newly minted CEO Christine Heckart told me, though, the company is currently seeing rapid growth and has quickly added headcount in recent months to capitalize on this opportunity. Given this, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw Scalyr raise another round in the not-so-distant future, especially considering that the log management market itself is also rapidly growing (and has changed quite a bit since Scalyr launched back in 2011), as more companies start their own digital transformation projects, which often allows them to replace some of their legacy IT tools with more modern systems.