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Splunk, which provides an analytics platform for machine data, today announced updates to several products including Splunk MINT, Splunk Light and Hunk.
Hunk 6.3 is an integrated analytics platform used to explore, analyze and visualize big data in Hadoop and Amazon S3. Splunk Light is a lighter weight version of the Splunk platform made for smaller IT shops, and MINT is an operational intelligence application that runs on top of Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud. The company announced these updates at .conf2015, this year’s version of Splunk’s annual user event.
“At .conf2015, we are showcasing innovations across our entire portfolio of software and cloud solutions, and Hunk, Splunk Light and Splunk MINT are important pillars of our customers’ overall data strategy,” said Shay Mowlem, vice president product management and product marketing at Splunk, in a statement. “Splunk MINT and Hunk help organizations gain value from two of the fastest-growing sources of data, mobile data and historical data in Hadoop. Small IT teams can also now utilize Splunk Light as a cloud service.”
Mowlem said Splunk Light is now available as a cloud service, starting at $90 per month, and delivers the power of Splunk to small IT environments. This log search and analysis solution enables small IT shops to wrangle machine access without having to bother with the time and expense of server purchasing, setup and maintenance. With the lower price point, it is targeted at smaller IT environments, particularly those that also seek access to global support and a passionate community of users.
Moreover, the technology enables organizations to easily upgrade to the full Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud. In addition, users get real-time log search and analysis for troubleshooting by collecting, indexing, monitoring, searching, alerting and analyzing any log data in real time from one place.
The upgraded Hunk 6.3 integrated analytics platform helps to drive down total cost of ownership for Splunk users who can archive historical data from Splunk Enterprise to Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Amazon S3 on commodity hardware for low-cost long-term storage and use Hunk to perform analytics on the historical data transferred to Hadoop. This will enable Splunk users to apply the advanced analytics and visualization capabilities they know in Splunk Enterprise on the data stored in Hadoop without needing to learn a new solution. They also can analyze data transferred from Splunk Enterprise to Hadoop using third-party Hadoop tools such as Hive and Pig without needing to transform or replicate data.
Meanwhile, Splunk MINT provides operational data for developers, operations and product management to help improve the mobile app user experience. Updates to MINT include additional developer insight with Stacktrace graphs and screen tracking that offers real-time insight into how users are engaging an app and how many users are affected by performance problems. There also are new detailed user analytics including events, screen tracking and user flows that provide feedback to Splunk MINT users. And Splunk added mobile app support for hybrid mobile applications that integrate HTML5 web browsers with native mobile OS capabilities.
Splunk Adds New MINT, Hunk, IoT Support to Platform
In other .conf2015 news from Splunk, the company announced accelerated momentum in industrial data and Internet of things (IoT). This trend is driven by Splunk’s continued investment in its products and partner ecosystem as well as the creativity of customers and the flexibility to deploy Splunk IoT solutions as software, cloud services or in a hybrid environment, the company said.
As evidenced at the conference, customers are using Splunk solutions to collect and correlate data from control systems, sensors, mobile devices and IT systems for a variety of industrial data and IoT use cases. These use cases include operational efficiency, predictive maintenance, industrial cyber-security and asset analytics.
For instance, the large retailer, Target, is using Splunk Enterprise to analyze and gain insights from machine data generated by robotic and automated systems. Orion Labs is using Splunk Cloud to ensure performance and gain analytics from Internet-connected accessories. Zebra Technologies is using Splunk to gain new insights into its manufacturing environment by collecting and analyzing machine data taken from the manufacturing floor. Information security consultant INFIGO is using Splunk solutions to analyze and visualize data generated by Koncar’s wind farms and alert teams to issues with wind turbines. All of these cases are being highlighted in sessions at the Splunk conference this week.
“It has been great to see the success our manufacturing teams are achieving with Splunk solutions,” said Saul Llamas, manufacturing test engineering manager at Zebra Technologies, in a statement. “Our teams have been able to bring value to their own operations by using Splunk Enterprise and its powerful data collection, analytics and visualization capabilities to improve manufacturing quality, customer experience and ultimately our products.”
New features in Splunk Enterprise 6.3 help expand the applicability of Splunk solutions for industrial and IoT use cases, including a new HTTP event collector to collect IoT data at scale, new customer alert actions to trigger custom data-driven actions in third-party applications and the preview of the Machine Learning Toolkit and Showcase for advanced analytics. Splunk also has a broad ecosystem of partners in the IoT space including Bluvision, Carvoyant, Citrix Octoblu, CQCloud, DGLogik, Falkonry, Kepware, N3N, Wizcore and Xively by LogMeIn, all of which are demonstrating technology or solutions at .conf2015.
“From trains, planes and automobiles to manufacturing floors, our customers are leading the way with their innovative use of Splunk solutions for Industrial Data and Internet of Things,” said Snehal Antani, chief technology officer at Splunk, in a statement. “The Internet of Things transforms the way organizations leverage machine data and gain insights from it. The product investments that we have made along with our growing IoT ecosystem will further expand Splunk’s role in these use cases and accelerate the value realized from Splunk solutions.”