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Splunk, a provider of a software platform for real-time operational intelligence, announced its release of the Splunk App for Stream–a new app that provides a software approach for capturing real-time streaming wire data.
The Splunk App for Stream, which comes out of Splunk’s acquisition of Cloudmeter, captures wire data for additional insights when using Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud for security, fraud detection, compliance, application management, IT operations and business analytics.
Wire data is a kind of machine data transmitted between applications over networks, which can provide information about business activity, application performance, security and IT infrastructure issues, without needing code instrumentation.
The Splunk App for Stream is free for Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud customers. Users can download the Splunk App for Stream and the Stream Examples App, which include prebuilt searches and user tutorials.
“The Splunk App for Stream, the first product delivered from our acquisition of Cloudmeter last year, is a new approach that further enhances the value that customers can realize with Splunk software,” said Leena Joshi, senior director of solutions marketing at Splunk, in a statement. “Unlike traditional and appliance-based solutions, which are difficult to deploy, especially in public cloud infrastructures, the Splunk App for Stream enables customers to gain immediate wire data access on-premises or in public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructures. It opens up for our customers a whole new class of data sets to provide continuous IT, security and business insights.”
Key use cases for the Splunk App for Stream include application management, IT operations, security and business analytics. For application management, Splunk App for Stream provides granular data on transaction response times, transaction traces, transaction paths, network performance and database queries without requiring any instrumentation of the application.
For IT operations, the new Splunk app enables administrators to pinpoint root causes of issues faster, map dependencies of critical infrastructure services and ensure the delivery of services at the levels required by the business. For security, it enables in-depth monitoring and real-time correlation to drive analytics on breaches, threat detection, intelligence gathering and threat prevention. The Splunk App for Stream also can be deployed in the midst of a breach or incident investigation to provide insight into network traffic from any system of interest not previously monitored.
And for business analytics, the new Splunk app captures Web interactions and key metrics such as time spent on page, bounce rates, navigation paths and product performance, without the need to tag individual pages. This can help organizations improve customer satisfaction and conversions, prevent drop-offs and can also boost online revenues. It also enables real time end-to-end insights into business processes such as order management, provisioning, trade execution span and others, without requiring specific instrumentation.
“The Splunk App for Stream is a valuable new extension to the Splunk software platform,” said Peter Christy, research director at 451 Research, in a statement. “The in-depth analysis of wire data given Splunk’s proven scalability and powerful analytics could be a game changer for the IT industry.”
The Splunk App for Stream can be rapidly deployed to collect, aggregate and filter wire data from both network endpoints, such as virtual machines in public clouds or virtual desktops, and the network perimeter, such as routers, switches and firewalls. With fine-grained filters and aggregation rules defined through the app interface, customers can control data volumes and capture only the wire data that is relevant for the needs of their specific analysis.
By correlating wire data with other machine data, such as logs, events and metrics, customers can gain new valuable insights into application and infrastructure performance, operational issues, transaction paths, system downtime, infrastructure relationships, security vulnerabilities, compliance and customer behavior, Splunk officials said.
“The Splunk App for Stream is a huge win for our customers using Splunk Enterprise,” said Mika Borner, data analytics management consultant at LC Systems, a European reseller of Splunk software and data analytics consulting company, in a statement. “Our customers from telecommunications, IT, retail, finance and other industries can now use streaming wire data to get more granular insights into security incidents, compliance, application and infrastructure issues, and operational efficiencies, without having to instrument code. As a software solution, the Splunk App for Stream gives these customers a new pair of eyes into wire data from public clouds, which has been previously inaccessible.”