Splunk is expanding its enterprise and cloud capabilities in a series of new updates, and will debut on May 1 Splunk Insights for Infrastructure.
The updates include new versions of Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise, as well as Splunk IT Service Intelligence, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit (MLTK). Among the new capabilities across the Splunk platform are machine learning enhancements that aim to enable organizations to gain actionable insights from data.
“For example, Splunk IT Service Intelligence 3.1 (ITSI) features embedded AI [artificial intelligence] to predict imminent outages, and how organizations’ service health could be impacted by these outages before they occur so the end-customer experience and revenue are not impacted,” Jon Rooney, vice president of product marketing at Spunk, told eWEEK.
In addition, the Splunk MLTK update includes the new Experiment Management Framework (EMF), which is a unified user interface that aims to improve an organization’s ability to view, control, share and monitor their machine learning experiments, Rooney said. Splunk MLTK is a free download for Splunk customers that helps organizations build custom AI models.
Among the improvements in the Splunk Cloud 7.1 update is a new self-storage capability for dynamic data. Rooney explained that the new storage feature enables users to continuously move data to their own AWS S3 storage environment as it ages and is no longer needed for real-time access.
“Prior to this release, data export from Splunk Cloud was managed by Splunk on an as-needed basis,” he said.
Kafka
An increasingly common way for organizations to stream data is with the open-source Apache Kafka project. To help support that workflow, there is now the new Splunk Connect for Kafka capability.
“Compared to the past, users now have a Splunk-built and Splunk-supported connection with Kafka for high reliability and scalability—making it easier and more manageable than before to onboard new data streams,” Rooney said. “Prior to this, Splunk users were creating their own connections between data streams coming from Apache Kafka and Splunk. “
For Amazon cloud users, the AWS Kinesis service provides a similar approach to Kafka for data streaming. Rooney said Splunk currently has open-source integrations, including Splunk Add-on for Amazon Kinesis Firehose.
Containers
Splunk has also added new a connector for Docker and Kubernetes to help provide visibility into container and microservices applications. Splunk Connect for Docker is a Docker logging plugin, while Splunk Connect for Kubernetes has multiple components associated with it, according to Rooney.
Rooney explained that for the Kubernetes connector there is a daemonset used to collect logs for Kubernetes system components and applications running in the cluster. In addition, there is a container sidecar that runs alongside other containers in a cluster that is used to collect details of Kubernetes objects including namespaces, nodes and pods. There is also an optional Splunk technical add-on to provide health and insights into the Kubernetes cluster, he said.
Splunk Insights for Infrastructure
Up next, on May 1, Spunk is set to announce the general availability of its new Splunk Insights for Infrastructure offering. Rooney said that Splunk Insights for Infrastructure is an infrastructure monitoring product that enables systems administrators and DevOps teams to automatically correlate metrics and logs to monitor IT.
“We are redefining what customers should expect from monitoring and enabling them to provide their own customers with a positive digital experience,” he said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
