Splunk 4.2 Operational Intelligence

Steve Sommer, CMO of Splunk, and Sanjay Mehta, senior director of product marketing, stopped by to introduce me to the improvements and enhancements that Splunk 4.2 is offering. As usual, the company is taking a different approach to gathering data, analyzing that data and then teasing out operational intelligence. Splunk's approach is both clever and interesting.

What Splunk has to say about Splunk 4.2

Splunk 4.2 new features include:

• Real-time alerting. Provides immediate notification and response for events, patterns, incidents and attacks as they occur.
• Universal Forwarder. New dedicated lightweight forwarder delivers secure, distributed, real-time data collection from thousands of endpoints with a significantly reduced footprint.
• Easier and faster. New ways to visualize data, quick start guides for new users, integrated workflows for common tasks and up to 10 times faster search experience in large-scale distributed deployments.
• Easier management of Splunk. New centralized deployment monitoring and license management facilitate the management of multiple Splunk instances from a single location.

Snapshot analysis

I've watched this company since a time before they publically launched their first product. I've find their approach to a difficult problem, the problem of keeping ahead of what is going on in a complex system environment, refreshing and quite interesting.

It is increasingly difficult to know what's going on in a complex, multi-tier, distributed computing environment both with enough detail to discover problems and quickly enough to prevent those problems. Splunk is a supplier that has approached that problem from a different direction with positive results. Their approach is to use Google-like searching technology to make sense of application, applicaiton framework database engine, operating system and virtualization tool logs.

Over time, the company has offered clever tools to manage systems, virtual systems and cloud-based systems.  It would be worth your time to visit their site and view their demonstration videos.