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Splunk Enterprise 6 offers operational analytics

The key take aways for Splunk Enterprise 6 are improved performance, new data models and tools to help business users access and visualize operational data.
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

Splunk launched a new version of its Splunk Enterprise. The company says that version 6 will make operational analysis faster and easier for existing customers and will offer a new visual tool to help business users access and analyze operational data.

Here is how Splunk describes Enterprise 6:

Splunk Enterprise 6 introduces three innovations that make Analytics dramatically faster and easier for existing users. These breakthroughs also open up the value of gaining insights from machine dats to an entirely new audience of business users.

  • Pivot opens up the power of analytics to non-technical business users and analysts with a simple drag-and-drop interface to explore, manipulate and visualize data. This includes the ability to click and drag pre-built visualization sand quickly build complex queries and reports withouth learning a query language.

  • Data models provide for a more meaningful representation of underlying machine data and a deeper understanding of relationships in the data, making this data more useful to a broader base of users.

  • High Performance Analytics Store is a patent-pending transparent acceleration technology that delivers analytics performance up to 1,000 times faster than any previous version of Splunk Enterprise.

Snapshot analysis

Faster, more powerful, available to more classes of users, what's not to love? What's not clear to me is Splunk's new focus on the phrase "machine data." 

Splunk, with the help of its partners, can gather, store and analyze networking data, transactional data and security data. Each time I have spoken to one of the company's customers and partners I hear of other innovative uses for Splunk Enterprise. Why doesn't Splunk embrace those use cases as well?

It appears that the company is hoping to ride the next wave of computing, the internet of things, to a greater penetration in the market. That being said, it is still strange that the company isn't mentioning current use cases for its product in this announcement. 

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