Lumi

Imply Lumi, launched in September 2025 by the original creators of Apache Druid, is marketed as the industry's first Observability Warehouse. It is a high-performance, cost-efficient data layer designed for observability and security teams that need to retain more telemetry data, accelerate investigations, and reduce costs without replacing their existing monitoring tools. The product targets organizations using Splunk, Grafana, Tableau, or AI assistants like Claude and Langchain, offering a way to decouple data storage from visualization and analysis layers. By plugging into current stacks with zero disruption, it appeals to teams burdened by legacy systems, expanding telemetry volumes, and vendor lock-in, enabling them to store years of full-fidelity data and make it instantly searchable across multiple tools.

Imply Lumi ingests data from any source using existing agents and forwarders, such as Splunk Universal Forwarders, Heavy Forwarders, and OpenTelemetry, via S2S or S3 protocols, requiring no custom agents or pipeline rewrites. Its proprietary high-efficiency storage format delivers 2–5x better compression compared to traditional formats, reducing storage costs by over 70% according to Imply's claims. The Druid-powered query engine enables queries that are 10x faster, supporting high concurrency and interactive search speeds. Data remains 'always hot' with no cold storage delays or rehydration needed, and the platform supports schema on persist for flexible indexing. Federated search within Splunk allows teams to run native SPL queries from the Splunk UI or API, preserving existing dashboards, alerts, and workflows. The system also feeds long-term datasets directly into AI, ML, and anomaly detection tools without additional preparation or duplication.

Imply Lumi competes directly with traditional observability platforms like Splunk, Grafana, Tableau, and AI assistants such as Claude and Langchain. Its key differentiator is the decoupling of storage from tooling, allowing organizations to keep their existing interfaces while gaining cost and performance benefits. As a member of the Splunk Partnerverse, Imply positions Lumi as an extension rather than a replacement for Splunk deployments, contrasting with vendors that require full stack migrations. However, it faces competition from open-source alternatives like Elastic and from cloud-native observability suites that offer integrated storage and querying. Imply's backing by investors including a16z, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Thoma Bravo provides financial credibility, but the product is new and lacks extensive third-party validation.

Honest trade-offs include the product's novelty: launched in 2025, it has limited public customer references or independent performance benchmarks, making claims of 70% storage reduction and 10x faster queries unverified outside vendor materials. The dependency on Apache Druid, while performant for time-series data, may not suit all observability workloads, particularly those requiring complex relational joins or unstructured log parsing. Pricing, starting at $100/month for a Starter plan and scaling to $4.20/hour for larger environments, is usage-based but can become unpredictable for high-volume telemetry ingestion. Additionally, while Lumi integrates with Splunk via federated search, it adds a new layer to the stack, potentially increasing operational complexity for teams that prefer a single-vendor solution.

Flexible, usage-based pricing with a Starter plan at $100/month, higher plans from $600/month to $4.20/hour for larger environments.