“We are in the midst of the data revolution, and these product updates ensure the Splunk platform evolves as our world does to deliver business outcomes no matter the organization, team or dataset,” said Doug Merritt, President and CEO, Splunk. “There are two kinds of companies today: those who only record events with data, and those who make things happen with data. These advancements in machine learning, performance and investigation to the Splunk Platform help our customers take fast action, and our product roadmap will shift mindsets about what is possible to achieve.”
“We need technology that helps us always exceed the expectations of our guests and Splunk helps us become more proactive and less reactive,” said Sean Kenny, SVP and CIO of Carnival Cruise Line. “The travel industry has been entirely reshaped by digitization. Splunk lets us collect data once and leverage it in a number of ways. From planning a cruise online to enjoying the services we provide onboard, Splunk empowers our teams to provide the absolute best experience.”
Splunk Next Expands Access to all Data, Empowering More People to Deliver Limitless Insights
In addition to updates to Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud, nearly 10,000 registered Splunk customers and partners at .conf18 saw Merritt and Tim Tully, chief technology officer unveil Splunk Next, a continually evolving series of visionary technologies that brings the power of Splunk to more data sources and more people no matter where, when or how they access that data to deliver limitless insights. These innovations, which are made available through ongoing Beta programs, will enable customers to:
- Evaluate, transform and perform analytics on data in motion through Splunk Data Stream Processor.
- Achieve search at massive-scale, analyzing trillions of events at millisecond speeds with federated search across multiple Splunk deployments through Splunk Data Fabric Search.
- Interact with Splunk products from a mobile experience via Splunk Mobile and Splunk Cloud Gateway.
- Use augmented reality (AR) to interact with and take action from data through features such as QR codes, scanning for dashboards, UPC scanning and near-field communications New Data sources.
- See all business process flows, including the entire customer journey, to enable business users to easily see trends and make smarter decisions with Splunk Business Flow.
- Ask questions of Splunk using voice and text and receive immediate responses with natural language.
- Build next-generation data-rich apps and access a full suite of sample code, cloud-native services and more with Splunk Developer Cloud.
“Splunk is building on our strong heritage to evolve the platform for the future,” said Tully. “Our product vision is aimed at opening the aperture to bring Splunk everywhere, for everyone, and to help our customers pattern match everything with artificial intelligence and machine learning infused across the entire product portfolio. And we’re doing this with streaming data, data at rest, data from any source and on whatever kind of device you want to use to take action.”
Splunk’s Ecosystem Supports Customers’ Technology Investments Today
Given Splunk’s expansive ecosystem of technology partnerships and integrations, Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise amplify the various investments customers make across technologies and data sources. Now, customers can move any data to and from the Splunk Platform regardless of its format, state or location. New capabilities include:
- Guided Data Onboarding, a new graphical user interface helping customers move data into Splunk Cloud or Splunk Enterprise and guiding them through the best onboarding methodology based on their specific architecture.
- Logs to Metrics helps configure and convert log events to metrics, enabling users to take advantage of breakthrough performance when monitoring and alerting on metrics with the Splunk Platform.
- Splunk Community for Machine Learning Toolkit (MLTK) Algorithms on GitHub amplifies MLTK customers’ creations and algorithms by allowing them to share, shape and build on GitHub community contributions.
- Splunk MLTK Container for TensorFlow™ extends the value of Splunk MLTK with additional contributions and functionality provided by TensorFlow, the popular open source library for high-performance numerical computation.
- Splunk MLTK Connector for Apache Spark™ taps into a vast and scalable machine learning library, MLib.
“T-Mobile is always looking for new and better ways to improve the customer experience, and Splunk has played a key part in that,” said Jonathan Silberlicht, senior director, network service management & customer solutions, T-Mobile. “With the improvements in machine learning and performance capabilities in the new Splunk Enterprise, T-Mobile can deliver an even better experience for our customers by helping our care and retail teams have real-time visibility into how their systems and services are performing so they can manage everything from activating new phones to helping pay bills to ensuring a fantastic experience on our network.”
“Utilizing the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit, we created a machine learning model that enabled us to detect unscheduled failures early – a huge cost saving,” said René Ahlgrim, Manager Data Analytics, Zeppelin GmbH. “With machine learning and the machine data we were already generating and collecting from diverse sources, we can identify anomalous activity and then explore, test and validate different models to respond to these insights. Thanks to the machine learning in Splunk Enterprise, we have already shortened repair times, reduced our overall maintenance costs and driven significant business impact.”
Splunk Leads in Performance, Scale and Manageability
Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise can scale to manage trillions of events in near real-time while maintaining performance and controlling costs. New capabilities include:
- Splunk SmartStore: Helps maximize data management flexibility while maintaining search performance and allowing compute and storage tiers to be independently scaled based on business demands. SmartStore automatically evaluates users’ data access patterns to determine which data needs to be accessible for real-time analytics and which data should reside in lower cost, long-term storage.
- Workload Management: Enables users to prioritize the allocation of compute and memory resources used by the Splunk Platform on searches and alerts to ensure users’ most critical analytics are completed first.
- Splunk on Docker: Splunk Support now covers Splunk Enterprise 7.2 deployments in Docker containers, enabling customers to quickly deploy and scale Splunk based on their organizations’ demands.
- Dynamic Data: Active Archive, the latest release in the Dynamic Data service series, helps Splunk Cloud customers to meet regulatory and compliance requirements by retaining less frequently accessed data and searching on this data with Splunk Cloud.
“In a heightened regulatory and compliance environment, the breakthroughs in the new Splunk Cloud enable us to cost-effectively meet new business requirements,” said Steven Hatch, manager, Enterprise Logging, Manheim, Cox Automotive. “The ability to quickly recall data for audits and security investigations saves a huge amount of time gathering data, so we can spend more time investigating and taking action on it.”
Limitless Investigation and Exploration
Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise empower a broader set of roles within an organization to investigate their data, making actionable insights and impactful outcomes more widely available to all areas of the business. New capabilities include:
- Metrics Workspace enables users to monitor and analyze metrics data in an efficient, intuitive user interface.
- Health Report allows Splunk administrators to quickly understand the overall health status of their Splunk environments.
- Dark Mode heightens visual contrast within Splunk dashboards; perfect for SOC and NOC environments.
Splunk maintains a comprehensive privacy and security program designed to protect customers’ data confidentiality. See Splunk Protects for more information. Splunk Cloud is now certified to meet new attestations of compliance: PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) security standards.
For more information on Splunk solutions, visit the Splunk website.
About Splunk Inc.
Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK) helps organizations ask questions, get answers, take actions and achieve business outcomes from their data. Organizations use market-leading Splunk solutions with machine learning to monitor, investigate and act on all forms of business, IT, security, and Internet of Things data. Join millions of passionate users and try Splunk for free today.
Splunk, Splunk>, Listen to Your Data, The Engine for Machine Data, Splunk Cloud, Splunk Light and SPL are trademarks and registered trademarks of Splunk Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective owners. © 2018 Splunk Inc. All rights reserved.
