Paglo, the IT management software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, recently announced a new low-cost service that allows companies to tackle the Herculean task of trying to winnow out a rapidly growing mountain of log data.

With log data piling up in terabyte leaps and increasing regulatory pressure to maintain that data for several years, companies now find themselves in danger of being swamped with information about operational events and the daunting challenge of making sense of it. [Disclosure: Paglo is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Paglo, Menlo Park, Calif., has upgraded its SaaS log management application, Paglo Logs, for IT professionals to automatically capture and store their logs and instantly search and analyze them. The expanded service provides a powerful Google-like search capability to enable rapid discovery of key operational events, a platform for meeting compliance requirements, and a way to accelerate the investigation of security incidents.

I was impressed with Paglo when they first came out, and the additional services -- now extending to capture and search of expansive sets of IT assets and other metadata on their performance -- makes it a powerful tool for the cloud era.

How can you be responsible for performance on systems that cross company or provider boundaries? With SaaS offerings like Paglo, you can set up log gathering and search across all the systems that support a business process, regardless of their sourcing. Very cool.

As on-demand and with a "zero footprint" architecture, the Paglo Logs service collects rich systems data from all networked devices and requires no additional software or appliances to use. Paglo Logs allows users to:

• Accelerate problem resolution by going directly from the logged events to the underlying infrastructure, to view health and performance data or to access a particular machine.
• Meet the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) by tracking all devices, software and configurations, monitoring wireless access, and securing central log collection.
• Provide both developers and operations the ability to troubleshoot application issues and understand user behavior without logging into the production servers.
• Improve their security profile and incident response by immediately receiving alerts and using saved searches and dashboards.

To maintain security, each business using Paglo has its own search index that keeps the log and network information separate and private from other subscribers. Setting up requires no appliances, on-site dedicated servers

As I said in the Paglo release on the news, "Companies need to harness and analyze the information explosion coming from all of their computer, server, network and log data. It's a very productive way to improve operating efficiencies, gain a clear understanding of true IT costs, and to meet compliance requirements. As an on-demand service, Paglo helps drop the complexity barriers to quick and effective log search and analytics."

The services come in three flavors, Paglo IT, a more complete offering; Paglo MSP, targeted at managed services providers, and Paglo Logs, for the full search and visualization services (and with a free introductory offer). The services are designed to appeal to security professionals, IT administrators, and developers of on-demand applications and services.

The new Log Management service is available immediately and accounts can be created directly online. A free trial is available at https://app.paglo.com/signup?product=logs. Paid plans start at an aggressive $99 per month.