Take

Splunk’s business is applying performance management to IT departments and their systems. Its product combines the power of search with analytics on data generated by IT systems – machine data – to provide insights that constitute a new generation of operational intelligence. This OI helps everyone in IT, all the way up to the CIO, to determine the efficiency of the systems that support business. The company has built a platform that can index big data for rapid analysis and search. Through Splunk’s analytics, IT users can perform visual data discovery, which can reduce the time it takes to identify issues in existing IT systems. Splunk also addresses the need of the more than half of IT organizations (52%) in our benchmark research to be able to assess and run analytics on their data.

Splunk’s latest release, version 4.3, supports access from tablets such as Apple’s iPad, data in cloud-based applications and the ability to operate in VMware environments. This makes it easier to deploy Splunk in the cloud. Version 4.3 expands the enterprise scale of the platform, supporting more concurrent users and faster search. Users can preview machine data, then start indexing against it for further discovery and analytics. Splunk also continues its support of new machine data environments, including Hadoop. It can run MapReduce queries against data in Hadoop and then bring the data into Splunk for analysis. A challenge for organizations using Hadoop is staffing and training; Splunk addresses those obstacles by offering a tool that is easier to use than creating custom programs, and it provides real-time and integration features. IT organizations that need performance management tools for internal use should look closely at Spunk’s capabilities.