Hey everyone! I’ve been lurking for a bit but this is my first real post, so go easy on me 😅. I’m coming from a project management background, so my team’s move into more technical tooling has been… an adventure. We just finished rolling out Sumo Logic to our whole company of about 300 users, mostly non-technical folks in marketing, sales, and customer ops, with our devs and IT folks being the main power users.
The goal was to get everyone looking at dashboards for their respective areas and to centralize our logs and alerts, moving away from the patchwork of different tools we had. We spent months planning the migration, building custom dashboards, and doing training sessions. I was super optimistic!
But wow, the first week was… not smooth. I’m curious if anyone else has hit these same walls, especially at this scale. I keep wondering how this compares to other platforms like Splunk or Datadog in terms of the "day one" experience for a mixed crowd.
First, the sheer volume of "I can't find my dashboard" tickets was overwhelming. The folder structure and permissions we set up seemed logical to us, but for a new user, navigating Sumo Logic’s UI to find *their specific* dashboard was apparently like finding a needle in a haystack. We thought the shared dashboards feature would be enough, but we didn’t anticipate how confusing the main search interface can be for someone who just needs to see their pre-built widget.
Second, and this was a big one, our alerting setup had a major hiccup. We configured some budget alerts for our AWS costs and a few critical error alerts. Turns out, one of our queries had a tiny flaw that, under real load, triggered an alert *every minute*. Our Slack channels and email inboxes were completely flooded. It took us half a day to pinpoint which alert it was and pause it because the alert management list doesn't really surface "noisiest alert" in an obvious way. I'm now wondering if there's a no-code friendly way to test alert logic before going live that we totally missed.
Finally, the biggest surprise was the performance hit on some of our pre-built dashboards when 50+ people opened them simultaneously around our morning stand-ups. Some would time out or load incredibly slowly, which defeated the whole purpose of having real-time visibility. Our devs are now talking about reworking the queries and maybe using more scheduled searches, but that feels like a step backwards. Is this a common scaling issue with Sumo Logic, or did we just design our dashboards poorly from a performance perspective?
I’m still hopeful about the platform, especially for our technical teams, but the onboarding for the broader company has been rougher than expected. Would love to hear if anyone else has gone through a similar rollout and what you did to smooth things out. Specifically, any tips on user onboarding for non-techies and managing alert noise would be amazing.